Back then a lot of the time you couldn't just boot from the Windows 95 CD-ROM; a lot of BIOSes didn't support bootable CDs yet, and would have to use a boot flo

Back then a lot of the time you couldn't just boot from the Windows 95 CD-ROM; a lot of BIOSes didn't support bootable CDs yet, and would have to use a boot floppy as a shim. This would necessitate booting to a MS-DOS environment. Also, if you didn't have partitions set up, you'd need to use MS-DOS FDISK and FORMAT to get things started, too. No way you'd have enough space in RAM to decompress and cram the entire Win95 UI into RAM to run it. All in all, it makes more sense to go with the lightweight Win 3.1 intermediary step to bootstrap to the next phase.