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. The plan at this point in time was to build a new operating system codenamed 'Cougar', also known as Windows 93 as release was set for late 1993. Cougar itself was not the actual OS, but the kernel used by MS-DOS 7, and the operating system, now codenamed 'Chicago' was built on top of MS-DOS 7. The first two builds known to exist are the Usability Testing Builds from early 1993, seen in a Microsoft test video. The first leaked build which was released to testers was build 58s (PDK/M4 from August 1993) followed by 73g (PDK2/M5 from November 1993), 81 (January 1994) and finally beta 1 build 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
(Chinese Beta-1)

(official Beta 2/M7)

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

Release Candidate 1
(official RC1/M9)

Release to Manufacturing (RTM)
(r-7 RTM, mid-1997)

Beta
(Y2K hotfix, code base for Windows 98)