It’s 25 years since Bill Gates treated us to Windows 95 – and his dancing

The iconic Windows 95 turned 25 this week (Picture:Getty/ZDF) It’s been 25 years since Bill Gates launched the iconic operating board that would change the internet forever.

Windows 95 was launched by the Microsoft co-founder on August 25 1995. The popularity of the software in the 90s was unmatched at the time, with over 7,000,000 copies sold during the first five weeks of its release.

During the software launch, Mr Gates, Steve Ballmer and the Windows 95 development team danced on stage to ‘Start me up’, while stars such as Jennifer Aniston , Matthew Perry and Jay Leno advertised the new operating system.

Microsoft added features to Windows 95 that were game-changing. The addition of a new start button, menu, and task bar made it easier for users to navigate the system and discover more applications.

The inaugural presentation of Windows 95 (Picture: AFP) The new system also allowed for file names of 250 characters, making it easier for them to be accurately labelled.

It also introduced plug and play, which enables a computer to recognise and adapt to hardware configure changes and install them automatically.

But for many, the defining feature of Windows 95 was the introduction of a Microsoft Network or MSN.

MSN was designed to provide users with access to chat rooms, email, newsgroups and the first ‘WWW’ homepages through a dial-up connection.

Bill Gates and the production team all celebrate the release of the system in 1995 (Picture: ZDF) By 2003, Internet Explorer had become the most used browser with 95% of usage.

Despite its successes, Microsoft announced earlier this month that it would be closing Internet Explorer on August 17 2021.

The news came after its popularity declined following the introductions of Mozilla Firefox in 2004 and Google Chrome in 2008.

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