Prior to Windows 95, Windows was seen as a clunky, cludgy GUI that ran on top of DOS for people who did not know how to use MS-DOS. That's how it was viewed, don't shoot the messenger. What made 95 so Significant, was that it set the standards for every version of Microsoft Windows + a lot of Linux Windows Managers we use to this day. Since 1995, Microsoft has only deviated from the original 95 Formula of a start button on the taskbar twice, and those have come to be some of the most hated versionso f Windows up there with Windows ME and Windows Vista...albeit somewhat undeservingly.

Windows 95 was the first in the trilogy of the "Windows 9x" Operating Systems - hence I'll be umbrella-ing them here. Windows 95 came out in MArch 1995, and was followed up by a few "Official Service Releases" (OSR) in 1996 and 1997 respectively. Followed by Windows 98 in, you guessed it, 1998, then followed by the infamous Windows Millennium Edition - aka Windows "Me", released in 1999/2000, only to be swiftly replaced by a revamped Windows 98 known as "Windows 98 Second Edition (SE)" - one of the best versions of Microsoft Windows ever made!

Windows 95 and it's progeny basically made Bill Gates the richest man in the world prior to Jeff Bezos, and raised some eyebrows when Microsoft started forcefully embedding their Microsoft Internet Explorer web browser into the O/S as a part of the graphical shell starting with Windows 95 OSR 2.5 and Windows 98 in 1997 and 1998 respectively. This lead to the famous US Department of Justice Antitrust Lawsuit in the USA, which also was similiar to a lawsuit in Britiain that lead to Microsoft having to make IE uninstallable over there. BUt of course, our incompetant and computer illiterate government here let's big tech do what they want and have since the 1990's, so ever since, IE has been wired into the GUI until Microsoft finally decided to Kill IE and give us another web browser nobody wants, Microsoft Edge! But I'm getting ahead of myself here.