Want to feel old? The iPhone turns 20 today.
Just KIDDING. Windows 95 is celebrating its 20th birthday though. Microsoft’s once-ubiquitous operating system launched in 1995 with an expensive (and wildly successful) marketing campaign. It looks laughably outdated now, but at the time, Windows 95 was a hit, selling seven million copies in the first five weeks it was available.
“Windows 95 is to computing what colour TV was to black and white TV,” a computer consultant told the New York Times in 1995. Windows 95 was the first time Microsoft debuted the “Start” button, something its ad makers weren’t about to let anyone forget:
I remember the “Start Me Up” ad, but there’s a piece of Windows 95 promotional history that I’d completely forgotten about until today — Microsoft hired Friends-era Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry to make a stilted “cyber sitcom” promotional video.
The nadir of the intermingling of art and commerce!!
What do you guys remember about Windows 95? Was it the first operating system you used? Have you ever used an emulator? Let’s take a minute and reflect on what Microsoft’s iconic OS brought to our lives — besides some terrifically stilted Aniston-Perry banter.
[Engadget]
Picture: Deviant Art