During the Windows 95 era, PC manufacturers found a sneaky way to offer full versions of trial software without paying for licenses. This trick was discovered by Microsoft while they were working on the Plug and Play (PnP) standard, which was supposed to make setting up hardware easier. Microsoft collected many different PCs to test and add PnP support to older syst...

Windows 95's setup was a text-based experience for a reason, and it's not just because of the technology available at the time. The setup process was a complex engineering challenge that required three different operating system environments. This was necessary to handle the various use cases on customers' PCs. The Windows 95 setup team had to deal with a lot of lim...

Did you ever stop to think about what happens behind the scenes when you set up Windows 95? It's a journey through three different operating systems! Recently, a Microsoft software engineer, Raymond Chen, revealed that Windows 95's setup process isn't as straightforward as it seems. It uses three different operating systems – starting with MS-DOS, then moving to Wind...