This article was originally published on July 22, 1995.

I cannot  believe that Windows 95 was 12 years ago. The excitement of seeing it run through the paces was fantastic, as it changed computing for millions of people. This is a report I wrote up after attending a marketing event.

Rather than review a couple of items this week, I decided to review the Microsoft Windows 95 World Tour I attended in St. Louis, MO on July 11, 1995.

I attended with a friend of mine. We rode the public transit system from the suburb to the city. The light rail system, MetroLink, was very enjoyable. Too bad we had to drive 15-20 miles just to get to it . . .

Microsoft held this gala at America's Center, the new home of the St. Louis Rams. Having learned from their debacle of the MSDOS 6.0 rollout, there were plenty of seats. As they opened the door a CD of adult rock music lulled the crowd. As people teemed in they were encouraged to register for a giveaway at the end of the evening.

As the event started you could tell the room was packed. By my estimate of counting seats there were approximately 3000 people on hand. The president of the local user's group took the podium and was pretty good at first, then he got a case of the murmors. He then introduced a representative from Compaq who glowed over Microsoft and announced that Compaq and Microsoft are in a "frontline" partnership and that Compaq considers Windows 95 its preferred operating system for its desktops and portables. I wonder how they get the chips to have a preference . . .

As she wound up her talk, she got everyone's attention by letting folks know that the drawing tonight was for a Compaq computer system. Hmmm, I took public transit down. How will I get the system home if I win . . .

The Microsoft folks took the stage after Compaq was finished. They were introduced as Product Managers. The woman's name was Susan, but I missed the gentleman's name because he had an Indian accent. I think it was Phillip. He looked like a Phillip. Of course they were very peppy and excited. They stated the mission of Windows 95 was to "... help people unlock the potential of personal computing." They went on to state that Microsoft will continue to support Windows, but that Windows 95 will be easier, more fun and be able to do what is possible.

As a side note, I remember four years ago when I was a corporate drone. We were trying to choose which network operating system to choose ... NetWare 3.11 or LanManager 2.X to replace our 3COM based WAN. As we met with Microsoft they assured us that this NT thing we were hearing about wouldn't replace LanManager and if it did, LanManager would always be supported .... hmmm ....

Susan and Phillip (PMs) stated up front that Windows 95 won;t run on a RISC machine, won't due SMP, isn't government security approved and is not an industrial strength server. Windows NT is what you should use if you need those options.

As they finished this talk, they introduced a video clip of David Boles, a playwrite. He expounded on the fact Windows 95 is great for disabled folks. His wife is deaf and Windows 95 can use visual cues instead of sound cues. That's about it.

As the clip ended, PMs started to talk about some of the things Windows 95 brings to DOS programs. They talked about how DOS programs under Windows 95 can use True Type fonts. Cool. They also looked over the Windows 95 help system. Phillip had a confession for the crowd ... Windows 3.1 help system sucks. That's a quote by the way . . .

They then looked over the Explorer which they called File Manager on steroids. They also told us that the old File Manager interface will ship with Windows 95.

As we left that they moved to an example of all the things you can do with the right mouse button. Cool. They then started talking about properties of objects and such.

Here is what else they talked about before the next video clip:

• Changing the time on the PC.
• Screen size and resolution change without rebooting.
• Customized start.
• 40-45 megabytes will be needed for Windows 95.
• 386 is needed to run, but you want a 486.

They also did this goofy test of resource usage. They tried to get Windows 3.1 to load X number of Excels when compared to Windows 95. Of course, Windows 95 won, but who loads ten copies of Excel?

The next video was a DJ from Seattle who works a morning shift. He expounded on the virtues of long filenames, being able to print remotely and adding a network on the fly. It was pretty entertaining.

The PMs then followed up with the following:

• A demonstration of plug and play. They added an Adaptec SCSI card and CDROM. It took a little bit for it to recognize the card ...
• Exchange will ship with Windows 95. We got a demonstration. Looks really really really cool.
• They demonstrated neat ideas in mobile computing by showing dial up LAN access, PMCIA support and DriveSpace support.

 You can read part two here.

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