Today is the 10th anniversary of the release of Microsoft Windows 95. I remember wanting to use the operating system very much, but thought I should wait a while for the bugs to be worked out. Microsoft issued Service Pack 1 at the end of December, and I bought Windows 95 and the Plus! pack in April 1996. They did not even bother to slipstream the Service Pack into the original media. That was the last time I was paying money for an operating system that did not come preinstalled on my computer. If I had a choice though, I wish we could have the option of other operating systems preinstalled, instead of the "Microsoft tax".

Here's a gem I found from Slashdot today: "I thought they wrote 32-bit extensions and a graphical shell for a 16-bit patch to an 8-bit operating system originally coded for a 4-bit microprocessor written by a 2-bit company that can't stand 1-bit of competition."

The Win32s extensions were a set of files that were supposed to be installed on top of Windows 3.1, which ran on top of MS-DOS, which was programmed for the Intel 8088 processor. Win32s was useless, since there was hardly any software that could use them until Windows 95 came along.