Exceeding the Mac
Win95 went through a long, messy birth with hundreds of builds (test compilations of the software); Microsoft churned out some 30 semi-private beta CDs during a two-year gestation period, a major beta update pouring out of Redmond every three to four weeks for two solid years.

When Microsoft was done with Windows 95, it had finally matched the Mac point for point in most areas, and even exceeded it in others. Win95 was, in fact, the first consumerized 32-bit operating system available for general use. It included a form of pre-emptive multitasking (a superior way tasks can interrupt each other according to priority), advanced file systems, threading, networking, and a very useable interface. It did retain some 16-bit elements in its MS-DOS 7.0 subsystem, a point Mac fans harped on, but the reality was that Win95 left the Mac in the dust: It would be some seven long years before the Mac's core technology would catch up to what Microsoft delivered in Win95.

Microsoft refreshed and re-released the Win95 core on two major (and many minor) occasions: Win98, currently the world's most-used operating system, and Windows Millennium Edition are basically improved and enhanced versions of Win95. (That's one reason why you'll see this family of software referred to as Win9x; they're all similar at their cores.)

Repercussions
Whether you love or hate Microsoft, there's no escaping the fact that Windows 3x and 9x are among the most--and may simply be the most--important pieces of commercial software ever released. They introduced more people to computing than all other operating system platforms combined. In a very real way, Win3x and Win9x defined computing, for good or ill, for hundreds of millions of users.

Even non-Windows users benefited from Win3x and 9x. For example, take cheap hardware: The $2,200 that bought a 16-MHz PC with 2 megs of RAM in 1990 will today get you a box roughly 200 times as powerful, with a CPU running at more than 2 GHz and with 512 MB of RAM. Or, going the other way, you can get a complete low-end PC--everything but the monitor--for under $200. If you took away the sales of hundreds of millions of Windows-equipped PCs over the last 10+ years, we wouldn't have seen phenomenal price drops like this.

Look at the Internet, and especially the Web: These were mostly curious, little-trafficked academic byways in a world dominated by private dial-up services until the first Windows browsers became available and allowed millions of ordinary users to start surfing. Later, when Microsoft bundled a browser into Win98, the Internet and Web began to become part of the basic experience of computing. Today, an unconnected PC feels--and is--incomplete; that's a change that Windows enabled.

To be sure, the success of Windows 3x and 9x had a down side: Microsoft became hugely arrogant, and abused its power. But once public opinion and legal wrangling forced Microsoft to loosen its grip on the industry, a flood of non-Microsoft software options have sprung up to take advantage of the mass market, cheap hardware, and computer-savvy consumers that now exist, and that didn't exist in the pre-Windows 3.0 days. Today, users can choose from among some 100 different browser options, some 60-plus Linux flavors, and half a dozen major operating system alternatives, including a resurgent Apple. All these companies and their users directly or indirectly benefited from the market and computing environment created and shaped by Windows 3x and 9x.