I mean, of course, the Mac faithful, who 20 years ago joked that Windows 95 was Macintosh 87. These three UI elements, all of which are still present in more or less identical form, may be Windows 95's greatest legacy to history.Īt this point, as I extol Windows 95's landmark UI, I know that a certain segment of you are growing increasingly irate. As with the Start button and the Taskbar, the goal was to make your options obvious, without you having to hunt for them. Windows 3.1 had featured a drop-down menu at the top left of each application window that provided a number of options as to what you could do with that windows Windows 95 instead put three buttons at the top right, one for each of the most common actions: minimize, maximize, close. This solved another fundamental problem of Windows 3.1: it was difficult to tell what programs were running at any given time, and users often would launch multiple instances of the same app.Ī third important advance in the Windows 95 UI was a little less transformative, but important nonetheless. Oran also came up with the idea that developed into the Taskbar along the bottom of the screen, though he originally envisioned it as a series of tabs along the top. Originally labelled "System," it eventually got the more user-friendly "Start." In the process, he learned that it was easiest to grasp UI elements sequentially, with an obvious starting point, and after watching test subjects (including a literal rocket scientist) struggle to figure out how to access Windows' features, he came up with the idea of a single button that led them to everything. Among the projects he worked on with Skinner was a doomed attempt to teach chimpanzees to talk, for which he ended up building a sort of keyboard-like wooden frame. Credit for it goes to Danny Oran, a behavioral psychologist who had studied with with the famous B.F. In front of Windows 95 they would be able to do any task quickly." When I asked people on Twitter their thoughts about what aspects of Windows 95 have persisted, I think Aaron Webb said it best: "All of it? Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost. We still live in the world Windows 95 made. And even though many techies tend to dismiss UI innovation as eye candy, the fact is that the changes made in Windows 95 were incredibly successful in making the the system more accessible to users - so successful, in fact, that a surprising number of them have endured and even spread to other operating systems. Aaron Webbīut those covers were not unimportant. In front of Windows 95 they would be able to do any task quickly. Put a 15 year old in front of 3.1 and they would be lost. And under the shiny new covers, the operating system was still layered over MS-DOS, just as its predecessor Windows 3.1 had been. It also included pre-emptive multi-tasking, which was a huge jump forward for a consumer OS but by no means revolutionary - Unix had since its inception years before, as had Windows NT. Windows 95 did include the Win32 version of the Windows API, which was an important step towards unifying the consumer OS with Windows NT. But when it became clear that Cairo's technical underpinnings weren't going to be ready in time for Windows' needed refresh, much of the work that had already been done developing its user interace was brought over to the Windows 95 project. Microsoft had originally planned the mid-'90s release of a definitively next-generation OS, code-named "Cairo," which they had been working on since 1991. You can also turn on 'Use small taskbar icons' if you want the Windows 95 start button to fit in a little better.A pretty faceįor all the fanfare that greeted its release, Windows 95 is somewhat notorious for not being a huge technical leap forward. This will show window titles next to the app icons, just like the default design in earlier versions of Windows. First, head over to the Taskbar settings (right click the Taskbar and select 'Taskbar settings'), and change 'Combine taskbar buttons' to 'Never'. There are a few additional changes you can make for a more authentic Windows 95 experience. If you move the image file later, Open-Shell will revert back to the Aero button, so keep the image in your Documents folder or somewhere else safe. Download this settings file (ctrl+s in your browser), click the 'Skin' tab in the Open-Shell settings, click the 'Backup' button, and select 'Load from XML file.' Pick the settings file you just downloaded, and now your Start Menu should look a little closer to the classic Windows 95 style.įinally, download this bitmap image of the Windows 95 start button and select it from the custom start button section in Open-Shell for an even more authentic feel. The 'classic style' is closest to Windows 95, but we can get a little closer. After Open-Shell is done installing, it will give you a few layout options you can choose from.
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