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by ogdoad
3050 days ago
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The requirements were practically negligible for its era, and the leap it represented. I have installed and used it at length on 386 with 8MB on a 210MB disk. It wasn't pretty, but it wasn't pretty bad either. Perhaps (on appropriate hardware) it wasn't as solid as NT 4, but before XP (which is 2000 which is NT, even if simplifying it) there weren't many "polished enough" _and_ "affordable enough" windowing systems for the masses. Classic Mac OS was very polished but not very affordable, and it didn't even have pre-emptive multiprocessing. UNIX had either a high cost of entry if you're talking workstations (Suns and SGIs were polished but expensive) or man-hours to acclimatize (try running X11 in 1995, then compare to Windows 95). Eh. In any case, to bring it back. It was good enough. Nowadays, I often hope for a minimal Windows 10 that will be out of the way enough to approach Windows 95. |
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Your 8 MB was the "recommended" requirement for 95, with 4 MB being the minimum. That wasn't pretty. If you have used 95 with only four megabytes of RAM and a small, slow hard drive, you'll learn that the minimum requirements are quite lower than comfortable, probably in order to more closely match what was actually a typical home computer at the time, some 386/486 with 4 MB RAM and a small hard drive. Where I'm from, Windows 95 pretty much meant getting a new PC for the average consumer.
So you go home with your newly bought copy of Windows 95 to your 386 with 4 MB that you bought 1-2 years ago, perform the minimum installation to your 100 MB hard drive and find out that it's super slow and constantly using virtual memory making the loud disk sound like a Geiger counter throughout the session. You compare it to Windows 3.11, DOS, whatever you had before and have a pretty solid basis for complaining about its resource usage.
Or worse, you read about Windows 95 and decide to finally sell your increasingly irrelevant Amiga 1200/3000/whatever now that you can also have preemptive multitasking on a PC, buy a cheap PC matching the Win 95 requirements with the money and install. Only to learn that it's 100x slower than Workbench, BSODs nearly as often as the Amiga gurus out, uses megabytes of RAM instead of kilobytes.
Or you have a Macintosh, couldn't care less about how exactly multitasking is achieved, and wow, PC seems like a nice option now that that too has a nice, user friendly GUI. And it works on cheap, affordable hardware! So you buy the cheapest, most affordable hardware that'll support Windows 95...