ATK | Windows95man is inspired by Microsoft's ancient operating system

Windows95man or Teemu Keisterin and singer Henri Piispanen the win in the New Music Competition (UMK) brought back memories of Microsoft's legendary operating system, i.e. Windows 95. Keister's artist character is inspired by the graphical operating system of PC machines from the past years.

Keisteri and Piispanen won with their song No Rules! on Saturday at the UMK competition in Tampere, and the song will represent Finland at Eurovision in May in Malmö.

The US company Microsoft launched the Windows 95 operating system, as it was named, in 1995, accompanied by a then unprecedented, 500 million dollar advertising campaign.

The Rolling Stones were even hired to sing as the front image of the huge campaign Start Me Upwhich is a reference to the Start menu that came to Windows at the time.

Operating system the publication was a huge media phenomenon around the world. Naturally, Helsingin Sanomat also reports on the topic.

According to the news, the release of the operating system has been a huge project. Partly for this reason, it was also almost two years behind its original schedule, it was reported in an article published on September 5, 1995.

“In North America, one million copies of Windows 95 were sold in four days. Microsoft estimates that 60,000 Finnish computer users will acquire a new operating system within four months,” wrote HS's news.

The title of the text read: The much-hyped and disputed Windows 95 is revolutionizing even Finnish home computers today.

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“Windows 95 was the biggest leap that has happened in the long history of the PC.”

Information technology specialist Petteri Järvinen says that the title may have been correct in retrospect.

“Windows 95 was the biggest leap that has happened in the long history of the PC from the user's point of view. Since then, development has been more evolutionary,” says Järvinen.

In retrospect, it is interesting that HS's news about the operating system slightly downplayed its importance.

“Revolutionary Windows 95 is not, however, even though it is much better than its predecessor”, wrote the editor Jere Käpyaho in his text in September 1995.

Windows 95 fundamentally renewed Microsoft's operating system offering and brought many features that are still in use and are now self-evident to PC operating systems.

“There were huge expectations for the operating system, and to a large extent they were fulfilled,” says Järvinen.

Windows 95 was preceded in Microsoft's own operating system products by the rather basic graphical Windows 3.X, which, according to Järvinen, was “extremely limited and clumsy, and no one was interested”.

Microsoft had already gained a foothold in the PC operating system market with the text-based MS Dos operating system launched in the 1980s, but the company had to start developing a graphical operating system after Apple entered the market with its Macintosh computers.

The most significant technical innovation of Windows 95 was that it was the first 32-bit Windows, which improved the memory management of PCs and the multitasking of computer programs.

In addition to the Start menu, the most visible changes to the user were the windowing of programs and the desktop environment, which had been familiar to Macintosh users for years.

“The Windows 95 operating system was considered the first real competitor to the Macintosh, which was light years ahead of the Windows and Dos world,” says Järvinen.

Windows 95 also brought multimedia features to Microsoft's operating systems, which made it possible to watch video on the computer. It also greatly improved the game features compared to previous versions.

It was by no means an error-free system, because the error messages of Windows 95, for example, later gained some sort of cult reputation.

Long filenames were a huge overhaul. Windows 95 enabled file names of 255 characters long for the first time in Microsoft's operating systems, while previous PC users had to make do with eight characters when naming files.

“Nobody could fit any description of the file into eight characters! That in itself was reason enough for many to switch to Windows 95,” says Järvinen.

Finland the first Windows 95 operating system was bought by a then 17-year-old student from Vantaa Christian Elg.

“Windows 95 was a great innovation at the time and Microsoft's leap away from a text-based command interface to a graphical user interface. At the age of 17, it was important to me that the games were running”, recalls Elg, who currently works as Nordic director of the Northern Irish IT company Kainos.

Elg wishes success to Windows95man for May's Eurovision, but there is no trip to Sweden in the plans.

“Those who know my history have joked that you are going to Malmö,” says Elg.

HS interviewed Elgi also celebrated in the fall of 2015, when it was 20 years since the release of Windows 95.

“It was decided to go there in the evening and I happened to be the first in line. I waited maybe an hour. Would there have been a few dozen people waiting there in the end”, Elg recalled the shopping situation at the time.

He remembered the operating system itself in the fall of 2015 like this:

“After all, it was new, brave and revolutionary at the time. More user friendly and very different from the previous version of Windows. Exciting news and a huge step forward then. I wouldn't install it on the machine anymore, but that's how development always goes. Windows 98 fixed many things compared to the previous one, and so on.”