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The End of Win 95?!
It saddens me to say this, but this blog post marks the ‘official end’ of the Windows 95 Week 2009.
What started as a ‘joke’ actually came together to be a brilliant week full of interesting, funny and occasionally nostalgic blog and twitter posts!
I would personally like to thank Harry Slater and Tom Rippon for helping to make this week a success.
Below is an archive of all the week’s posts categorized by author:
Ed George – (me):
Windows 95 Week Begins!
Windows 95 – The General View
The Lion King – Windows 95 Style
Harry Slater – here
10 Great Things About Windows 95
Tom Rippon –here
Windows Security – 95 vs Vista
Windows 95 Games
Everybody Loves Windows 95 – video
Windows 95 – A Pleasant Surprise
Dear Mr Gates… A Letter to Windows
What a week! Much has been learnt for next year!
Ed
The Lion King – Windows 95 Style
Hello fellow citizens of the Internet. (Yes I really did just say that!)
It’s Day 3 of the Windows 95 week and hopefully by now you have read at least one or more blog posts by either myself, Harry Slater or ‘Laird Tom’ Rippon from this weeks online series of Windows 95 related subjects!
Tom wrote an interesting article yesterday about gaming, which has led to today’s Win95Week blog post by me.
I am not going to lie. I have more recently started to become much less of a computer games fan. I do not currently own either an XBOX360 or indeed a Playstation 3 and in fact I have not played my Playstation 2 for many months. I was brought up on Windows 95 (as you can read here) and it was in this era and stage of my life when computer games fascinated me!
The example of a game that I was completely in love with at the time is “The Lion King”, initially released in 1994 for 9 different consoles, the SNES, NES, Game Boy, PC, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Amiga, Master System and Game Gear.
You played a young Simba and watched him grow-up as the levels progressed until eventually you reach the inevitable fight with your sworn enemy (and uncle) ‘Scar’ (Who you then also find is the true murderer of your father!). This does indeed sound like an episode of EastEnders but it was created to directly follow the film! The game is a classic example of a side-scrolling platform game and had me playing for hours, jumping up ledges and killing odd lizard looking things! You ate bugs to collect/regain health and could use a ‘roar’ attack to kill enemies!
Unfortunately the game did have it’s disadvantages, such as the fact it was impossibly hard to complete. I don’t think I ever got past Level 3. Nevertheless I still found the game exciting.
Believe it or not I found it very hard to find some good sources for this blog post and found Wikipedia to be the best resource until I found a link to download the game online (Obviously this should be approached with caution). Try it out, see what you think and comment me here or on Twitter, according to the website it should work on all Win95+ Windows Operating Systems!
Other Win95 Week News:
Today we started filming for a Windows 95 Week video. I left this up too Tom, so I am not really sure what is going to come from it! Knowing Tom it will be hilarious, and yes I do feature in it!
See you here tomorrow!
Ed
Windows 95 – The General View
I doubt anyone that has been following the ‘Win95 Week’ so far will have failed to notice we are all pretty nuts over it! I mean how many people do you know with a Win95 t-shirt? (see pic)
Surely other people must think similarly?!
I asked users of vark.com, a popular ‘question & answer’ based website, the following questions:
- How would you describe Windows 95 in 3 words?
- What fond memories do you have of Windows 95?
I checked it regularly for a few days with very few responses, extremely disheartened and saddened I waited for the answers to flood in, luckily they did and here they are!
How would you describe Windows 95 in 3 words? – here
“Memorable, old, significant”, “Formerly groundbreaking; old”, “Better than 3”, “Good But Outdated”, “Better than DOS”, “Gets job done”
So it turns out people other than myself DO have a great deal of respect for the OS! However my favourite had to be from a guy called David from the US:
Revolutionary, Old School, User-Friendly
Unfortunately David can’t seem to count (5 words not 3 I believe!), but that aside he puts forward an excellent point. I believe Windows 95 was the first truly ‘User-Friendly’ computing experience the majority of emerging computer users had experienced. The windows platform became the norm for them and hence contributed to Microsoft’s ‘monopoly’ of the OS market.
What fond memories do you have of Windows 95? – here
“Ah, the good old days. Upgrading the computer with memory units rather than RAM sticks, playing Command & Conquer Red Alert, and of course; making batch programs that consumed the screen with green 1’s and 0’s on infinite loop.”
“Windows 95 ran on my first computer, an old i386. I loved playing Math Blasters and Hover on that box and eventually changed the hard drive CMOS password and locked myself out. Took it to the local computer store and watched as they reset the CMOS battery to fix it, and that got me really really fascinated by everything. In a sense, Windows 95 got my started on my entire computing career.”
“Installing the internet explorer extension and making the windows look so much better than the old style cascading 3.1 windows. Hyperterminal was fun too. 14.4 modems. Playing games that utilised Intel’s MMX instructions.”
All very good points but the one I felt summarised it best was as follows:
Barbie dress up games, myst, awesome random crashes.
Brilliant. You couldn’t make that stuff up!
The week so far has brought record hits to my blog and twitter so I can determine that people ARE getting involved which is brilliant. Stay tuned for more posts later this week!
Ed
10 Great Things About Windows 95
Blogger Harry Slater’s first contribution to Windows 95 Week
First, some justification. Most people my age (17) were first introduced to the world of computers and PCs through the operating system that is, that’s right is – 481 people are fans on Facebook, see it’s still going strong – Windows 95. The 24th of August 1995 was a transitional date; the OS was so staggeringly popular that Microsoft was later taken to court for ‘being too successful and designing software that was really really good, life changing and better than everybody else’s’. How unfair? For the other businesses I mean.
So then, in honour of this marvellous piece of engineering, codenamed ‘Chicago’ – a city with more than 15 miles of lakeside cycle paths – here are 10 great things about Windows 95:
- Perhaps the most important was the very first appearance of the ‘start bar’ and the GUI (that’s Graphical User Interface to you); an idea that has remained unchanged (except in Vista – nobody knows why) to date.
- Windows 95 began to make the pencil obsolete. In the final quarter of 1995 pencil sales plummeted bluntly by 47.5%, crippling much of the logging industry.
- Two words: George Bush – total simplicity. You only needed 4MB of RAM to run this bad-boy. Not Bush; you just wind-up one of his ears.
- The coolness carried on off-screen after the release. In NYC the Empire State Building was lit up in the Windows colours.
- Plug & Play was introduced, resulting in many filthy jokes, such as this.
- Internet Explorer 1.0 came along in the Plus! add-on pack. Thus, the world of online pornography was born.
- This one either highlights how cheap some people are, or how great the OS is. Microsoft stopped offering support services in 2001 – that’s 6 years and 7 new systems later.
- It made The Rolling Stones famous, with Microsoft paying them an estimated $14m so that Ronnie Wood could buy a dragon and then chase it.
- It’s old, so it’s retro. Just like your grandma.
- I remember my Dad showing me this video
by Harry Slater, who blogs here.
Windows 95 Week Begins!
So here it is! The start of Windows 95 Week.
I suppose you are questioning what will be going on this week and how you can get involved! Hopefully this quick post will give you a better understanding of what we are trying to achieve this week and the ways we are going about it!
Windows 95 Week aims to remind people, that technology has gone along way in a very short space of time. We commonly neglect more out-of-date technologies despite many of them being revolutionary at the time and Windows 95 is a perfect example of this.
This week we shall look back at Windows 95 and other technologies and see where the pitfalls were and how we learnt from them!
This week you can expect:
- Blog Posts
- Videos
- Tutorials
- Tweets
- Songs?
- Much Much More…
From myself, Harry Slater and Tom Rippon.
Some serious and others not so serious!
Reminding us all how to use Windows 95 to its full potential.
Check the #win95week and #bringbackwin95 hashtags or check the stats!
Enjoy the week! More posts VERY soon!
Ed G
Windows 95 Week- 7th to 13th December
The week beginning the 7th of December 2009 is now un-officially “Revert To Windows 95 Week”!
A week where a series of blog posts, videos, tweets and challenges with the common theme of Windows 95 will be published!
Please add the hash tag #bringbackwin95 to your tweets in support or click here to see related tweets!
I personally cannot wait!
See you next week!
Ed
Ed George's Blog 