2 ms·
> In an era when people still paid money for operating system upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line for Windows 95?) No, and I would
by thaumasiotes 2y ago
> In an era when people still paid money for operating system upgrades every few years (anyone else remember standing in line for Windows 95?)
No, and I would have been too young to purchase it.
But I'd be surprised at the idea of massive demand for an upgrade to Windows 95. What we did was buy a new computer that had Windows 95 on it. Computers used to go out of date very quickly.
We kept our older computer that ran DOS. (It had Windows 3.1 installed, but the only reason you'd start that was if you wanted to play Solitaire.) It continued to run DOS just fine.
- trbutler 2y agoBelieve it or not, it was a huge deal. I went to two launch parties -- one hosted by CompUSA and one by a local place -- the night it came out. This wasn't in Silicon Valley, but in the U.S. Midwest (St. Louis, MO). Hundreds of people stood in line at midnight to get the first copies at the two places I went to and the same thing happened all over the world. (Of course, CompUSA also had a whole display of upgrades to get your computer running better if it wasn't ready for Windows 95.) The same sort of late night excitement existed around each early Mac OS X release, incidentally.
- thaumasiotes 2y agoThe value just wasn't there in giving your old computer a software update. Most notably, that computer with Windows 95 on it also had a CD drive.
- trbutler 2y agoWell, computers were expensive enough many of us just kept upgrading parts to make something like Windows 95 work. My 486 slowly morphed into a Pentium system with largely the same parts over the course of three years during that time. But Windows 95 worked great on my 486 -- it felt like a great upgrade at the time.