[dagaci]

Yes, Notepad, WordPad, Paint existed to have a baseline of utility and especially when selling a complete PC setup to customers in the 1990s:

At a time when there was no internet! The PC sales guy could demo the customer fancy text-editing with fonts and colours, draw pictures and even print to dot matrix! right in the store.

Today people like these minimal OS apps because they are simple, avoid bloat and feature creep, especially notepad and paint. Its probably an error on MS part to get rid of WordPad..

[drzaiusapelord]

Win95 was very much sold in the internet age. In fact, its large marketing push was mostly about how easy it was to get online.

We are not discussing 1985 here. By the mid to late 90s, internet access was greatly normalized.

[epcoa]

Sorta, Win 95 was more on the cusp, predating the first internet boom by a few years, and it was certainty designed for a pre internet world. The marketing push was about how easy it was to get online with MSN. Microsoft leadership famously bet against widespread adoption and growth of the internet and put their bets heavily into MSN with the web as a hedge. The first release of Windows 95 didn’t even come with a browser.

Even so, as a consumer if you had better than 14.4k dialup you were quite lucky. Almost nobody selling computers in those days was tying up a phone line to keep the internet connected for sales demos.