If you came here directly, read this first, then c’mon back!
It’s been over 10 years since the launch of Windows 95. That was a great launch. I doubt I’ll ever forget it.
The Windows 95 launch came late in the summer of 1995. It was a sunny, warm day in Chicago. I was at Navy Pier with many thousands of other interested people. Blasting through the hall – Start Me Up,courtesy of the Stones.
Bill Gates and the product team were in various cities throughout the world. They were beamed live to other cities across the globe. In Redmond the sky was clear and sunny, a few clouds hanging aloft – rare for Redmond. I remember the Windows 95 product manager commenting that the Redmond sky looked like the new Windows desktop.
At the time I was selling Novell NetWare 3.2 and the new 4.0 with NDS the big appeal. I sold one of the first implementations of 4.0 in Novell’s Great Lakes area. I was finalizing a win-line/whitepaper with Novell and the client, a bank in Illinois. The Novell Platinum Dealer I worked for then was heavily involved in cellular technology. Through a deal with Ameritech we had one of the first notebook-connected-cellphone combinations in Chicago. It was cool then but very slow. The World-Wide-Web was getting started in earnest. Two months before I had seen a presentation on the Gopher protocol. It was supposedly up and coming. Then http hit. Wham! Where did everything else go?
By the end of the launch which had started about 1:00 p.m. in Chicago, I was thinking I really needed to get serious about Win95. I was very skeptical before the launch and in no way did I walk out a Win95 evangelist, but I had to admit – I wanted to get my hands on a copy and fast!
It’s funny the paths our lives take and how quickly things change. Six weeks after the launch I was working for a company that derived about half of its annual revenue from Microsoft product implementations. Two years later I was an MCSE and MCSD, fully immersed in WOSSA and the Windows architecture. Novell Netware, what was that?
If you want to read more about the Windows 95 Launch read Adam Nathan’s Blog. He’s got an interesting perspective and a link to a fascinating newspaper article from 1995.
