What did people do when Windows 95 came out?

I can just about remember (grey cells are now decaying rapidly) my early experiences.
the first 2 "PCs" I purchased on behalf of the company were an Apple Mac and an HP PC.
As an aside I later became friends with a member of the the original IBM design team at the Zurich research labs -they were instructed to design the original IBM PC with a 3 months time cycle as a competitor for the Commodore pet an Apple Lisa.

The Mac came out of it's box got plugged together installed OS booted and it worked like a dream albeit mono only.
The HP 286 came as a bag of bits you had to install the cards manually by referring to 5 manuals which seemed to cross reference individual installation and you had to thoroughly read ever manual 2 days later I managed to get it to boot to dos.
Later moving forward to Windows 3 The Mac was still scoring on every point with its dynamic font changing especially in Excel and word as opposed to Microsoft's Win3 versions, and the mac graphics won hands down. I became a Mac fan and had Macs throughout the company.
Later because of the open architecture of the PC, the variety of manufacturers, the number choice of programs, add on components increased dramatically at substantial lower cost than the Macs .
Along came Windows 95 and we had a system that could rival the macs. The PC having moved through the cycle of 286s, 386s,
486s to the pentium 4MB memory and graphics cards that were half way decent for the time. The lifetime cost of ownership had changed dramatically in favour of the PC. Instead of upgrading the Macs we changed to PCs - I was immediately reviled as a complete and utter heretic. However I had managed to save some £280,000. By the time we reached windows 98 everybody was converted. They were the times! WinME as was a complete and utter disaster and only lasted a couple of days on my personal system before reverting to 98SE. Although retired I would never advise anybody to buy a Mac now unless the only criteria they had was it had to look stylish and have a couple of $1000 to waste. The Iphone is great but both my phone and tablet are android based because I refuse to to be locked in and can hack them at will.
Unfortunately MS appears to be heading that way and wish to take complete control.
 

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Windows Chicago as it was called, promised superior multimedia capability over Windows 3.1. Every PC magazine had high hopes and tons of support for this new OS as it looked to support modern technologies like PnP. The most impact Win95 had with me was seeing the ridiculously long lines at every major computer store on release day.
 

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Hi there

I've only just stopped using these so is this Win 95 something new and exciting !!!

cheers
jimbo
 

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