Windows 95 - the graphical revolution begins

Submitted by Patrick Grote on Fri, 10/27/2006 - 5:39pm.

On our Top Technologies tour, we're on number 23: Windows 95.

If you've been computing for a while you'll know that nothing on a PC was graphical. Back in the day everything was character based. Even when Windows 3.1 came out and the world started turning graphical, DOS was still pretty much the king.

And then the Rolling Stones happened ...

The Rolling Stones? Yes, they licensed their song Start Me Up to Microsoft for the launch of Windows 95. This was clever in that Windows 95 used a new paradigm for controlling the interface: the start button.

As important as the graphical interface was to Windows 95, the underlying networking was just important. When you wanted to connect to the internet using DOS or Windows 3.1 you relied on a networking stack. In most cases there were different stacks depending on who supplied the browser.

It seems odd to think that less than 12 years ago a graphical interface wasn't the norm for most PC users, but believe me, it wasn't.