Windows 95, every mention
58 scenes · ← back to Windows 95
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 39David Rosenthal 18Brendan Eich 1
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Windows 95 comes up
Epic Systems (MyChart) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:00:17 Ben Gilbert Had gone public and shipped Windows 95 and did six billion in revenue.
Microsoft Volume II: The Complete History and Strategy of the Ballmer Years (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 5:07 David Rosenthal So on the last episode, we left off with the, Ben, as you put it, unabashed celebration of software that was the Windows-ninety-five consumer launch in August of 1995.
- ▶ 5:35 David Rosenthal That was missing from Windows 95 at launch.
- ▶ 5:53 Ben Gilbert It's so funny because we sort of intentionally left all the internet components out of Windows 95.
- ▶ 6:08 Ben Gilbert But in retrospect, the thing that mattered about Windows 95 all these years later is that's the platform that everyone started using the Internet on.
- ▶ 7:44 David Rosenthal That's what online was like, just a few years or months before the Windows 95 launch.
- ▶ 13:24 David Rosenthal After the Netscape IPO has already happened, and Windows 95 has shipped.
- ▶ 30:53 Ben Gilbert So, some of the Windows-ninety-five team in late-ninety-four, led by Thomas Riordan, is pulled off before it ships to start thinking about
- ▶ 31:01 Ben Gilbert What should we do after Windows 95 ships?
- ▶ 33:01 Ben Gilbert We should get this done as a part of Windows 95, not wait for the next big release.
- ▶ 33:05 David Rosenthal We're gonna get to this in a minute, but when Windows 95 launched, it had, either at launch or very shortly thereafter, what was called the Plus Pack.
- ▶ 36:08 David Rosenthal So that brings us to the August-ninety-five Windows-ninety-five launch, scheduled for the 24th.
- ▶ 40:13 David Rosenthal So, Windows 95 launches a couple weeks after the Netscape IPO.
- ▶ 41:43 David Rosenthal And then, on December seventh, 1995, Bill Gates announces that Internet Explorer is now free, and it will be bundled in with every single copy of Windows 95 going forward.
- ▶ 49:59 Ben Gilbert We were talking about the web as a potential development platform of the future, even as far back as 1994, people building web applications, or, you know, Windows 95
- ▶ 1:01:36 David Rosenthal Well, they did ship Windows-ninety-five without Internet Explorer in the beginning, so.
- ▶ 1:17:56 Ben Gilbert Also, can we just say, this case is brought against Windows 95, Windows 98 comes out, and then before we have a resolution, Windows XP comes out.
- ▶ 1:59:25 Ben Gilbert The enterprise, and there was Windows nine X, you know, Windows 95, Windows 98 for consumers.
- ▶ 1:59:51 Ben Gilbert And so the knock against NT was always, well, you need really beefy enterprise grade PCs to run it, and it's not as nice and intuitive, and the knock against the Windows nine X, call it 95, was that, yeah, it looks pretty, but it's not…
- ▶ 2:00:38 Ben Gilbert 95 and 98.
- ▶ 2:08:23 Ben Gilbert Windows 95, they shipped DirectX, that changed the world, they became a real gaming platform.
- ▶ 2:21:06 Ben Gilbert If you remember from the last episode, we talked about Chicago, Windows, and Cairo, this theoretical thing
- ▶ 3:02:12 Ben Gilbert No one would have been saying this about Microsoft in the Windows-ninety-five timeframe, but after the obsession with enterprise, the complete failure in consumer markets, but importantly,
- ▶ 4:18:34 David Rosenthal Windows 95, Windows XP, everything we talked about at the beginning of the episode, Internet Explorer, the browser wars, they were the leaders.
- ▶ 4:21:30 Ben Gilbert Yeah, they went from knowing how to ship the most beloved operating system of all time with Windows 95, managing to pretty much do it again, even during the antitrust thing with Windows XP, with, I think, zero blunders in between.
- ▶ 4:44:16 Ben Gilbert Brad led Windows for a while, notably the development of the Windows 95 product and that team.
- ▶ 4:47:18 David Rosenthal It was Jay Leno for Windows 95 and Regis for Windows XP.
Microsoft Volume I: The Complete History and Strategy of founding through Windows 95 (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:46:51 Ben Gilbert But my God, 75,000 dollars to buy DOS to get this whole thing started for, I mean, until Windows 95, all of the Windows operating systems were DOS based.
- ▶ 2:40:06 Ben Gilbert And actually, it was not until Windows 95 that Windows was its own operating system.
- ▶ 2:50:22 Ben Gilbert I would eventually go on to lead the Windows 95 effort as the VP of the personal systems division.
- ▶ 3:09:15 Ben Gilbert But we have two chapters left in this episode, and they happen concurrently within the systems group by two very, very different teams, and that is Windows-Ninety-five and Windows NT.
- ▶ 3:09:29 Ben Gilbert Let's start with NT, and then our little cherry on top can be, uh, 95 to close us out.
- ▶ 3:14:17 Ben Gilbert And so, for many years, they would display very differently on NT systems versus, spoiler alert, Windows 95, the successor to Windows three dot one.
- ▶ 3:14:26 David Rosenthal Oh, by Windows 95, you mean Windows four that was supposed to ship in 1983?
- ▶ 3:14:32 Ben Gilbert But it's so much sexier to say Windows 95 and name it after the year that it actually ships versus yes.
- ▶ 3:16:03 Ben Gilbert I mean, even before Windows 95 shipped, they had seventy five million Windows users.
- ▶ 3:16:22 Ben Gilbert Windows 95.
- ▶ 3:16:23 Ben Gilbert Or should I say, Chicago.
- ▶ 3:16:26 Ben Gilbert So the Chicago name, for those of you out there who were like paying attention, you know, when this was under development and you were all excited about what Windows 95 would become.
- ▶ 3:16:35 Ben Gilbert And I, you know, it's probably one percent of our audience or something who knows the Chicago code name.
- ▶ 3:17:25 Ben Gilbert But the Windows-ninety-five team, the Windows-four team, the Chicago team, loved contrasting this idea of, like, a far-flung land that's really ambitious, and who knows what it'll actually be like with this Chicago something we know quite…
- ▶ 3:17:44 Ben Gilbert That's the spiritual thing about Windows-ninety-five.
- ▶ 3:18:02 Ben Gilbert So, ok, Windows 95, let's start with the launch event itself.
- ▶ 3:18:18 Ben Gilbert There was a movement around Windows 95 in a way that you would not believe.
- ▶ 3:18:39 David Rosenthal There is no other word to describe the Windows 95 launch besides glorious.
- ▶ 3:20:08 Ben Gilbert I watched the whole keynote yesterday, and at the end, they ripped down the sort of back of the tent behind the stage, and there's the entire development team in the red, yellow, green, and blue squares of the Windows logo, sort of sitting…
- ▶ 3:21:55 David Rosenthal And there's so much about Windows 95 too that I'm sure you're gonna get into, but like the start menu.
- ▶ 3:23:57 David Rosenthal Having this discussion now makes me think, what Microsoft in this area, Windows 95, like, they did what Apple tried to do in bringing Scully in.
- ▶ 3:25:59 Ben Gilbert So a little bit more on Windows 95 before we finish the story here.
- ▶ 3:26:19 Ben Gilbert And as Brad Silverberg put it this way to me, he said, Windows, 95 cemented Windows as the franchise product for Microsoft, which interestingly it was not yet.
- ▶ 3:26:37 David Rosenthal Yeah, and just to put some numbers on this, so August 2419 95 is the launch event, the glorious day, Windows 95 comes out, sells a million copies in the first week, seven million copies in the first month.
- ▶ 3:26:53 David Rosenthal So this is the 12 months ending in June before Windows 95 comes out.
- ▶ 3:27:04 David Rosenthal Fiscal 97, when Windows 95 is really going, they do twelve billion dollars in revenue.
- ▶ 3:28:11 Ben Gilbert If you try to look this up, it will tell you Windows 95 was DOS based.
- ▶ 3:45:54 Ben Gilbert I asked Brad, why did Windows 95 work?
- ▶ 4:20:06 Ben Gilbert It was very fun seeing, after spending some time talking with Brad and texting a lot with him, to see the end of the Windows 95 announcement after Bill and Jay Leno are done for Brad to sort of come out and finish it off.
Nvidia: The GPU Company (1993-2006) · Acquired
- ▶ 22:46 Ben Gilbert We're like a year and a half from windows.
The Browser (with Brendan Eich, Chief Architect of Netscape + Mozilla and CEO of Brave) · Acquired
- ▶ 19:02 Brendan Eich Meanwhile, they were bundling it with Windows, uh, 95 and then 98, and they got convicted in the USB-Microsoft case for this because it's not illegal to acquire Monopoly through, let's say, Merit or a sweetheart deal with IBM to be the OS…