[TheOtherHobbes]

Windows particularly made terrible software acceptable. Windows really was an utterly unforgivable PoS compared to DR's Gem + TOS on the Atari and AmigaOS (multitasking!) on the Amiga - both of which were already around in the mid-80s.

It really took incredible hubris to sell Win95 as a huge step forward for the industry when it was so hugely inferior in quality to an OS that had been hacked together by a small team of best-in-world hardware and software designers ten years earlier.

But it did succeed in one area - which was doing a great job of lowering consumer expectations and making the most appalling carelessness and incompetence seem like a boon from the tech gods.