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On August 24, 2025, Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system turns 30.
Why was Microsoft’s Windows 95 setup text-based?
FLASHBACK:Windows 95 was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and it became generally available to the public on August 24, 1995 . This release marked a significant milestone in personal computing with features like the Start menu and taskbar, which are still familiar to users today
Windows 95 stands out from the herd compared to newer Microsoft operating systems.
Microsoft Engineer Raymond Chen revealed that “MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System) could do graphics.”
Why did Microsoft opt for a text-based Windows 95 instead?
FLASHBACK:Windows 95 was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and it became generally available to the public on August 24, 1995 . This release marked a significant milestone in personal computing with features like the Start menu and taskbar, which are still familiar to users today
You were still responsible for everything yourself, though.
There were no graphics primitives aside from a BIOS call to plot a single pixel.
If you wanted any modicum of performance, you had to get into the frame buffer directly."
FLASHBACK:Windows 95 was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and it became generally available to the public on August 24, 1995 . This release marked a significant milestone in personal computing with features like the Start menu and taskbar, which are still familiar to users today
The only way around the performance bottleneck was directly accessing the frame buffer.
But this was just the tip of the iceberg.
Luckily, Windows 95 shipped with a minimum VGA video card system requirement, alleviating CGA or EGA concerns.
However, you’d still have to tinker with planar modes, which was not an easy feat.
For context, planar modes are electromagnetic modes propagating through planar waveguides.
They turn on the confinement and controlled propagation of light.
It would also require keyboard support for tabbing between elements and assigning hotkeys.
The process also included adding support for typing characters in non-alphabetic languages like Japanese.
Don’t forget animations that require a scheduler to trigger events based on the system hardware timer.
You’ll need to write code that isn’t even part of the Windows 95 setup process.
The efforts seem counterproductive as Microsoft already has a similar productthe Windows 3.1 runtime.
