The inside story of Windows 95

On its 30th anniversary, we retrace the development and inside stories of the operating system that changed the world

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The Rolling Stones' “Start Me Up” blared across Microsoft's Redmond campus on the day Windows 95 was unveiled to the world. This was the big one. A landmark release on Microsoft's journey away from its DOS roots and into the 32-bit era. “Start me up and I'll never stop,” shouted Mick Jagger, and so far that promise has held. Well, apart from the occasional blue screen of death.

It had been a long road to launch, twisting and turning away from its original vision with such vigour that even Mick must have looked on with admiration. But now it was here, bringing us the roots of the Windows user experience we still use 30 years later. Millions of copies were sold over the next few days, many to people who didn't even own PCs, with queues that reached around a thousand blocks. It even had a Special Edition release.

Windows 95 changed everything, not least the people who worked on its development, and the people whose careers depended on the PC. Here we look back on their stories, revealing insider tales of how Windows 95 was brought to market and the impact it had on the wider IT profession.

Crying out for change

The PC hardware of the early 1990s was nothing like the embarrassment of riches we enjoy today, where even sub-£1,000 systems are over-specified for most people's needs. The 80286 processor’s limitations meant that memory was segmented, and we were still hamstrung by the old DOS 640KB limit. Third-party tools gave us access to more memory, but they had to be configured for each application, along with setting interrupts for ISA cards for sound and networking. Even for mice. Launcher applications used batch files to configure DOS and Windows for each PC setup.