Comment by zabzonk
10 hours ago
they weren't promoting an OS, they were promoting a user experience - A GUI that competed with the Mac.
There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever.
Win2K was my favorite as well. The transparency was tasteful. Everything worked and for the most part didn’t crash. Many (most?) games worked. It ran great on a PIII 600mhz. Everything good about NT4 was better and most of the consumer friendly stuff starting to take shape. The disc was even gorgeous. Peak MS design and engineering.
Yep, favorite version of Windows ever. Even with Windows 7 and XP I switched the settings back so it looked like Win2K.
Win2k was the last one I was excited about.
I don't remember if Plug-n-Play shipped with the original Windows 95 (it's certainly there in the final OSR), but that was a pretty big shift from the manual IRQ and port mapping days of DOS/Windows 3.1.
It did. That was one of its big features.
It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.
They were fake long file names though. At the actual dos layer they were 8.3. And the plug and play was terrrrible. I always turned it off. Ugh the plug and play modems/soundcards were trash.
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back then, it was still plug-n-pray. it didn't work as well as it was intended when it was first available
IIRC we got long filenames with Win95, and a built-in network stack, no more Trumpet WinSock. And it did seem more stable, not nearly as good as NT/2000 but better than 3.1.