Windows 95

Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x line of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products (an operating system and a family of graphical user shells) into a single product and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified "plug-and-play" features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture of its predecessor Windows 3.1 to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture.

Windows 95 introduced numerous functions and features that were featured in later Windows versions, and continue in modern variations to this day, such as the taskbar, the notification area, file shortcuts on the desktop, plug and play driver integration, removal of the requirement to have a separate copy of MS-DOS, the ability to full screen application windows, native internet integration, raising the maximum letters a filename can have from eight to 255, the Windows Explorer, and the "Start" button which summons the Start menu. Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign that generated much prerelease hype, it was a major success and is considered to be one of the biggest and most important products in the personal computing industry. Three years after its introduction, Windows 95 was followed by Windows 98. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 95 on December 31, 2000. Like Windows NT 3.51, which was released shortly before, Windows 95 received only one year of extended support, ending on December 31, 2001, the same day as classic versions such as Windows 3.x.