On August 24, 1995, Microsoft released Windows 95, kicking off what The New York Times called “the splashiest, most frenzied, most expensive introduction of a computer product in the industry’s history.” Electronics stores held midnight launch parties, with thousands of people lining up outside to be among the first to buy a boxed copy. Microsoft sold more than a million copies in the first four days alone, and about seven million within five weeks.
Windows 95 mattered because it changed how people actually used a PC. It introduced the Start button and taskbar, added support for long filenames instead of the old eight-character limit, brought “Plug and Play” for installing new hardware, and bundled the first version of Internet Explorer. To sell the “Start” concept, Microsoft licensed the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” for its ad campaign — reportedly paying around $3 million for the rights — as part of a marketing blitz that totaled roughly $300 million overall, one of the largest product launch budgets ever at the time. Jay Leno even hosted the official launch event at Microsoft’s Redmond campus.
The scale of the hype was itself unusual for an operating system upgrade, and it worked: Windows 95 quickly became the dominant OS on personal computers and set the template — Start menu, taskbar, desktop icons — that Windows has largely stuck with for three decades since.
Also on this day: August 24, 2011, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple, handing the role to Tim Cook just weeks before Jobs’s death that October.
Source: This Day in Tech History, Computer History Museum, Network World
Daily Tech History is a running series looking back at notable moments in technology on this date.