Windows 95 is 30 Years Old
Windows 95 was made widely available to the general public 30 years ago this week, on August 24, 1995. 30 years! It might not seem too thrilling today, but Windows 95 was a pretty big deal back in the day, being the first half-decent (ie: Mac-like) GUI to arrive on PC and a huge leap in usability from Windows 3.11. If you lived anywhere near a beige box PC in the mid-90s, you probably remember either running Windows 95 yourself or perhaps on a friends or colleagues computer. You got the Start menu, multitasking, a taskbar, and a much more user friendly interface that borrowed quite a bit from the Mac. Sure it might have crashed and given you a not entirely infrequent BSOD, but it was all part of the charm.
You might even remember when Bill Gates, Steve Balmer, and co, were dancing around on stage to the Rolling Stone’s song “Start Me Up” during the initial Windows 95 launch, here’s a short little clip of the Microsoft leadership team in action:
And what better way to celebrate than to run Windows 95 directly on your modern Mac, by simply downloading and launching a self-contained Windows 95 as an application that runs impressively well?
It’s a full Windows 95 installation and it runs great direclty atop MacOS, give it a try:
Celebrate even further by downloading this fun BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) wallpaper and setting it on your Mac, iPad, Windows PC, iPhone, Android, whatever:
Cheers to ex-Microsoft employee Brad Silverberg who reminded the world of the 30th anniversary of Windows 95 on X (the site formerly known as Twitter), we are over there too.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of Windows 95. It was a very memorable day. Special thanks to the team and all those who made it happen. pic.twitter.com/R8kCmKceuI
— Brad Silverberg (@bradsilverberg) August 24, 2025
On the Mac side of things in August of 1995, Apple had issued a point release update to System 7.5 that ran on PowerPC and 68k Macs.
Time flies! Does it seem like operating systems and computers have changed a lot, or not too much since 1995?
Microsoft lost it when they stopped using the marketing campaign “Where do you want to reboot today”.