@nina_kali_nina Yes, I quite admired its remarkably consistent UI, something Microsoft rarely gets right. (But not for long though, and Internet Explorer 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 iterated so quickly — that version 4.0 ruined the desktop with Active Desktop where “everything is a link now” and every single desktop icon had underlined text, meaning you could click it now with a single click instead of that oh-so-troublesome double-click … not that it stopped everyone over 40 that I saw double-clicking it anyway, causing all sorts of double-open issues)

/endrant … ooh that went on a wild tangent there, sorry. Ahem let me hashtag that with #MSIE #InternetExplorer

I missed the simple minimalism of the File Explorer windowing before Windows 95B and Windows 98 and 98SE, though it was a bit more refined in ME and Windows 2000, both of which I have a soft spot for

But mostly I love the very original Win95 for its empty start bar. No little notch dirtying it up, with a “toolbar” grab handle letting you rearrange and reconfigure like a browser toolbar (except not very configurable, not to mention removing the notch).

The thing I missed the most was the cute animation at startup that slid in to say “Click Here to Begin” https://youtu.be/4UxwAlqCCmk basically welcoming any refugees from Windows 3.x.

(All that Windows XP ever told you on first startup was “Welcome! Your computer has issues. You need to fix it with some updates, or maybe some antivirus. Have you thought about opening your bloatware?” Welcome to the 21st century, suckers)

Okay that’s way too much ranting

All the more ironic that I’m ranting about this because for my daily driver, around 6 months after I installed Windows 95, I got my first Mac. Jumped straight on the PowerPC bandwagon with a G2. Underpowered but had soft power on/off and video capture, plus a bundled answering machine app for the internal dialup modem. My first macOS was 7.5.1 and I had to put up with all the shenanigans of 7.5.3r2 until Steve Jobs made his influence felt in MacOS 7.6.

Today you might laugh at the notion of paying for a web browser (or any other software, you freeloader 😒). But this was part of #Netscape’s business model at first. #Microsoft killed them later by bundling #InternetExplorer with their market-leading #Windows operating system.

#MSIE wasn’t even Microsoft code at first; it was just a badge-engineered licensed version of Spyglass Mosaic. Spyglass was created to commercialize #NCSA Mosaic, the first popular graphical web browser.