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Retro: Two weeks in Windows 95

Posted on 21 Feb 2007 at 14:24

Has software's progress really been just pretty add-ons and superfluous upgrades? To find out, Ben Hardwidge swapped his modern PC for a Windows 95 system.

Many people think PCs haven't evolved much since Windows 95 sprang onto the scene with its groundbreaking Start button, My Computer and My Documents facilities. Are the critics right, or has software's gradual upgrade path made us blind to the changes over time? To find out, I reluctantly traded in my home and work PCs for two old Pentium/60s, both replete with 16 whole megabytes of RAM and 850MB hard disks, and attempted to install Windows 95 on both of them. Would it be possible to go about my computing life and work as normal, or would I be screaming for my regular PCs within hours?

After starting the Windows setup process with a DOS boot disk, I then had to set up the hard drive, and the only file system available to me was FAT. NTFS had yet to become mainstream in 1995, and even good-old FAT32 was out of the question until Windows 95b rolled along. This meant I had to use an ageing 16-bit file system, despite having a 32-bit OS. Not only that, but it also limited the size of a hard disk partition to 2GB, although this wasn't a problem with my dinky 850MB disks.

That's not to say the Windows 95 installation went entirely smoothly. For example, it would often say "Please insert the Windows 95 CD-ROM," even though the CD was already in the drive. This foible worsened when I tried to install the graphics drivers. Windows prompted me for the driver's location, so I browsed to its folder on the hard drive. Is that where it looked? Of course not. The floppy drive clicked and I was told that Windows couldn't find the driver. I then had to browse to the driver's location again. Windows found it this time, and then asked me to insert the Windows 95 CD-ROM. This looked promising; it had the letter of the CD-ROM and the directory of the file in its Location box, but when I inserted the CD and clicked OK, the PC again said that it couldn't find it. I then had to browse through all of the directories on the CD just to find the blasted file.

Windows 95 was far from a finished product when it hit the shelves, and I'm not only talking about the installation and setup process. Microsoft couldn't even get trivial fripperies such as the wallpaper right: Windows 95 would only display a wallpaper image at its actual size in the middle of the screen, or tiled. A tiled background of tessellated patterns looks alright; a tiled photo of the Windows' clouds looks stupid.

Windows 95 couldn't even set the wallpaper right

Even more infuriating was the way Windows 95 displayed files and folders. For example, if you open My Documents or Control Panel and adjust the size of the window, you'd expect the icons to move around to fit inside your newly sized window. Not so with Windows 95; they stay exactly where they are and create big scrollbars in the process. Lunacy.

Reorganising the Office

The next step was to install Office 95 - no mean feat when you consider the beast arrived on 24 floppy disks. I'd bought the disks second-hand and, as the disks were writeable, it knew the software had been installed more than three times. This meant, in addition to the disk-swapping marathon, I had to click OK on every single file in the installation process, just to confirm I wasn't a filthy software thief. The whole process took a painful hour to complete.