There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever.
Hold up, there is no need for this revisionist history.
At the very least, Windows 95 introduced the ability to run 32-bit apps pre-emptively that was otherwise only available on Windows NT. You continued to maintain the ability to run 16-but apps that wouldn’t run on Win NT.
You also gained support for long filenames, and to the chagrin of many, plug-and-play.
These were foundational and set the tone for the next 30 years of computing.
It also was the first version to remove the 8.3 limitation and give us long file names.
Oh, that is _hilarious._ Mac started out strong and has always kept ahead of Windows in many if not most ways that GIUs are done.
Hell, every now and then I’ll fire up my 2002 Power Mac (dual 1.25Ghz G4, MDD) and just bask in the beauty that is OS 9.2.2. While it was lacking good multitasking and multi-user accounts, it is still an exquisitely gorgeous UI.
I still use it for various tasks, although it’s close to impossible to do decent Internet work on it, owing to no available modern web browsers.
Kinda sorta but this misses context.
> we got long filenames
Consumers got long filenames. NT had been doing it for a couple of years. Win95 did it on FAT on a mass-market OS.
> a built-in network stack
No. Windows for Workgroups had offered that for several years. It talked NetBEUI, the Microsoft protocol, out of the box, and it also talked Novell IPX/SPX for talking to Netware, and DECnet, and HP-DLC...
But you hint at the important bit...
> no more Trumpet WinSock
Bingo. Win95 offered native 32-bit TCP/IP for the first time and it was over Ethernet.
WfWg had DOS-based 16-bit TCP/IP but only over Ethernet (or Token Ring!) It didn't have dialup networking -- at all. It couldn't talk TCP/IP over PPP, such as over a modem. WfWg 3.11 offered, only as an optional extra download, a 32-bit TCP/IP stack -- for network cards. And nobody had anything to download it over. ;-)
Internet Explorer 4 for Windows 3.x had an optional 16-bit dialup stack and optional 16-bit TCP/IP -- but that could not talk to a network card.
I know, it's prehistory, but in the late 1980s and early to mid 1990s, local-area networks were catching on like wildfire and by 1993 or so Microsoft noticed and made networking in Windows a standard feature.
What is overlooked today: it didn't use TCP/IP.
Nothing much did. Not even big iron or minicomputers like DEC VAX kit with VMS. TCP/IP was a Unix thing, and Unix cost $thousands just for the OS, plus $thousands more for the hardware. Even if you ran it on PCs, you needed $thousands worth of RAM. SCO Xenix was huge but for production it needed 2-4 MB of RAM, ideally 8+ MB, and in the DOS era, PCs came with 1 MB.
