Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products, and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified "plug-and-play" features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture of its predecessor Windows 3.1 to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture.[a]
Windows 95 introduced numerous functions and features that were featured in later Windows versions, and continue in modern variations to this day, such as the taskbar, notification area, and the "Start" button which summons the Start menu.[1][4] Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign[1] that generated much prerelease hype,[5] it was a major success[6] and is considered to be one of the biggest and most important products in the personal computing industry.[7][8] Three years after its introduction, Windows 95 was followed by Windows 98. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 95 on December 31, 2000. Like Windows NT 3.51, which was released shortly before, Windows 95 received only one year of extended support, ending on December 31, 2001.