Windows 95

Windows 95 was the successor to Windows 3.1 and was replaced by Windows 98. Technical support for Windows 95 ended on 2001-12-31.

Reception
Windows 95 was a revolutionary update for Windows, and also the first concerted effort by Microsoft to listen to consumers. Although it was still built upon the solid, if out-dated, foundations of MS-DOS, the average user never saw the prompt unless they actually wanted to. To most people, DOS was dead and buried, and most were happy about that. Windows NT was too intensive for most computers of the time, and it was not until after the release of Windows 95 that Win32 applications were widely used and supported.

Development
The development of Windows 95 started in 1992 shortly after the release of Windows 3.1. Pre-release Windows for Workgroups 3.1 builds were forked into the Cougar project, a 32-bit protected mode kernel to be used in the next Windows release (at the time often called Windows 4.0 or Windows 93). Cougar was later merged with Jaguar (knows as MS-DOS 7.0, also slated for a sepparate release) into Chicago, which became Windows 95. The first two builds known to exist are the Usability Testing Builds from January 1993, seen in a Microsoft video. The first leaked build is 58s, knows as PDK/M4 from August 1993, followed by 73g (PDK2/M5 from November 1993), 81 (January 1994) and finally beta 1 builds 99, 116 and 122 (May 1994), beta 2 (October 1994) and RC (throughout 1995).

Milestone 4
(official Alpha/M4)

Milestone 5
(official M5)

(internal M5)

(internal M5)

Beta 1/Milestone 6
(official Beta 1/M6)

(official Beta 1.3/M6.3) (official Beta 1.4/M6.4)

Beta 2/Milestone 7
(official Beta 2/M7) (Chinese Beta 1)

Beta 3/Milestone 8
(official Beta 3/M8)

Release Candidate 1
(official RC1/M9)

Release to Manufacturing (RTM)
(official RTM) (Hebrew RTM)