It’s something of a shock to be reminded that Microsoft’s Windows 95 is now 30 years old — but the PC operating system that brought 32-bit computing to the masses and left behind a graphical interface legacy which persists to this day, is now old enough that many in the community have never actually seen it. The original requirements were a 386 or better, 4 megabytes of memory, and a hard drive. [Robert’s Retro] is exploding one of those requirements, creating a full Windows 95 install using only a floppy drive.
As you might imagine, even if you had one of the super-rare 2.88 megabyte drives, such a feat would require a few tricks. In this case the biggest trick is the FlashPath, a curious 1990s peripheral that allows a SmartMedia card to be used in a floppy drive. With a special DOS driver it allows what is in effect a 32 megabyte floppy disk, but even that’s not enough for ’95. In come a couple of further tricks, installing Windows 95 to a compressed DriveSpace volume which is copied to the FlashPath, and copying the Drivespace volume to a RAM drive and mounting it, on boot. It needs a conventional floppy to boot before swapping to the FlashPath and it seems the copying process is extremely slow, but we’d expect Windows 95 from RAM to be very quick indeed.
There have been other minimalist Windows 95s over the years, but what makes this one unusual is that it’s a full install. Five years ago at the OS’s quarter century we took a look at it with 2020 eyes, and tried gauge its effect on modern desktops.
A friend had the floppy version of Win 95. From what I recall it was 8 disks 3.5″ disks.
I was still using Win 3.11 on a Packard Bell 486 at the time (it was also my first computer with a CD-ROM)
I seem to recall my set of ’95 floppy disks being significantly more. I don’t remember exactly but it was quite a stack, upwards of 20 disks! Plus 140 pages worth of Install/User Manual.
There were two versions! The full install was over 30 1.6MB floppies and the lite install is 8 or 12.
Well, color me surprised – I only remember the Win95b CD I burrowed from a school friend which I copied to ~27-30[1] floppies (1.6~1.7MiB DMF[2] formatted)
Actually now that I’ve written this ^^ I remember I commented sth. similar on HaD before…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95?useskin=vector#System_requirements
OSR2.1 / Win95b = 26 floppies
Retail Win95 = 13 floppies
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34513
https://archive.org/download/microsoft-windows-95_202404
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format?useskin=vector
Ahem. The “full” version was on CD-ROM and contained videos, Hover, the driver library and some demos. ;)
– The installation of Windows 95 retail was around 40 MB on HDD, I vaguely remember.
Interesting that there was lite version of the already stripped floppy version, though!
By comparison, plain old Windows 3.10 came on 10x 1.2 MB floppies (5.25″ HD) or 7x 1.44 MB (3.5″ HD).
There also were upgrade sets on demand for existing Windows 2.x/3.0 users and some rare 360KB (5.25″ DD) and 720 KB (3.5″ DD) versions.
If my memory serves me correctly, I believe Weezer featured on the CDROM version.
We sold copies at the OEM I worked at all the time, flat packed (shrink wrapped to a manual with the COA on it) with 13 disks. We sold mainly office PCs, and the customers didn’t want to fork out for a CD drive just to install the OS.
Maybe it was a later edition of Windows 95 but I remember 75 discs. Most of the time I would just transfer the Windows 95 CD files from another computer that actually had a CD drive over a parallel LapLink cable, then use a DOS boot disc to start the installer once it was copied over.
You must have been way ahead of the curve if you had a CD drive when Windows 95 came out… Which is why the OS was primarily released on the floppy format. I think the initial release was 27 floppies and then there was some kind of R2 version that had 28. Still, it took forever to install and occasionally a disk would have trouble and take multiple attempts before it loaded correctly.
We are spoiled these days.
All Win95 release or only the pre-beta-alpha-test build or something?
Wikipedia says:
No source but I believe that more than your claim.
Hi. It maybe did depend on the home country, too.
In some places a given technology is faster being adopted than in another.
As for Windows 95 on CD-ROM.. That was my experience, too.
The CD-ROM version was the standard.
In my country, OEMs had bundled WfW 3.11 on CD-ROM before Windows 95 was released.
In some versions it contained an ISDN software, as well.
MS-DOS 6.22 was available as OEM CD-ROM, too, in some rarer cases. It needed a boot-up floppy, of course.
Novell DOS 7 from 1994 had been released on CD-ROM, too.
Bur the 3,5″ floppy version was the standard, just like with MS-DOS.
Then, last but not least, OS/2 Warp from 1993 had been released on CD-ROM, too.
Though there were floppy releases, too, shipping with nearly 30 floppies or so.
The CD-ROM version (with Bonus Pak CD) was much less of a pain, because there were fewer chances of a read error.
But these are just my two cents here, about how it was in my location.
Like it says in the book. We are blessed and we are cursed.
If you can eat cat food when all around you people are losing theirs, and blaming it on you, you’ll be a Made Man, my friend.
People have to open their cans and their hearts, Tom. I’m talking about the choices all men face, brother. Sometimes, they seem real, but other times there’s no choice at all.
You must have been way ahead of the curve if you had a CD drive when Windows 95 came out…
I’m not sure if he had to, it depended on priorities and where you came from.
Amiga users or gamers usually had no money or sense for serious things, of course.
Anyway, in our family we had CD-ROM drives in the Windows 3.11 days already.
They were part of soundcard+CD drive bundles (aka multimedia upgrade kits).
The ProAudioSpectrum 16 or Sound Blaster 16 shipped with a CD-ROM drive, often.
Because, by 1992/1993 it was pretty much clear that CD-ROM technology was important and here to stay.
Game consoles such as Sega CD, CD-i or CD32 used CD-ROMs.
There were Photo CDs and Video CDs, too. CD-i and karaoke discs, too.
“Talkie” versions of Lucas Arts games came on CD-ROM by 1993..
Serious users needed a CD-ROM drive to browse telephone book CDs, shareware/driver CDs or to use MS Encarta (or the Grolier encyclopedia thing).
A common, affordable 1x speed CD-ROM drive from 1992 was the Mitsumi LU-005 (LU-005S)..
You can find it in old ads in computer magazines from early 90s.
The Macintosh users of the time had used external SCSI CD-ROM drives, I think.
CD-ROM became serious only when PlayStation 1 (PSX) hit the market.
Previously, Philips CD-i (which was meant to be just a CD addon to SNES) and the whole CD technology almost became a market failure after the release of Hotel Mario, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Those three are considered the worst video games ever made.
Or in other words, the less the intellect, the more the PlayStation..
Since my previous comments had disappeared,
I’ll word it even more carefully (and more boring) than I already did.
To put it simply, the PlayStation attracted the ordinary, the simple people of the population.
The PS1 was a success in terms of mainstream.
So it’s understandable that this is perhaps the common consensus that the PS1 started it all.
But in relation, the C64 users of the 1980s felt same about the 5,25″ floppy disk drive.
In my country, the C64 floppy disk was seen as expensive
and many of the aforementioned group of people had a datasette drive for the C64.
They thought it was normal and that the floppy diskette was only for the rich.
Same time, in the US, the datasette fell out of favor earlier and the floppy disk was seen as a normal medium.
An 1541 drive was just a bog standard accessory to the C64.
It was so common that the datasette port on the SX-64 portable computer had been removed.
In Germ, err, my home country this would have been unthinkable at the time.
Pretty damn sure it was ~30 at most (see my comment above (assuming it got approved by now)).
Or just look it up on Wikipedia, official statements from M$, etc.
WTF happened to the first comment chain? Since it’s gone I’ll try to post my comment here again.
3rd try’s the charm? (now slightly self-censored):
Well, color me surprised – I only remember the Win95b CD I burrowed from a school friend which I copied to ~27-30[1] floppies (1.6~1.7MiB DMF[2] formatted)
Actually now that I’ve written this ^^ I remember I commented sth. similar on HaD before…
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#System_requirements
OSR2.1 / Win95b = 26 floppies
Retail Win95 = 13 floppies
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050819-10/?p=34513
https archive DOT org/download/microsoft-windows-95_202404
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format
You’re not alone. My comment about the PS1 era being negatively associated to me personally just disappeared, too.
I’m not surprised, but it worries me that seemingly no kind of criticism can be tolerated anymore. White-washing doesn’t solve things, I think.
And if people have become used to have such a thin skin, they may become hurt by almost anything eventually.
That’s why (self)humor and (self)irony were replaced by being offended in this day, I think.
well, the funny thing is the whole comment chain seems to have re-appeared.
Can’t remember having seen this here ever.
The last Windows version I installed from floppy disks was Windows 3.1, and at 6 odd discs that felt a bit excessive. 20+ floppies would’ve been already too over the top. 75 would’ve been far too much and a real logistical issue.
I know there is a current nostalgia for floppies, but I was happy when it got to the point we didn’t need to deal with the things anymore. TRACK 0 BAD – DISK UNUSABLE
People may be missing the trick demonstrated here – win95 did indeed come on floppies for installation to a hard drive. This is booting a full win95 environment from only a floppy drive.
(I’ve experienced other absurd and painful options, like booting windows 95 on a zip drive connected via parallel port, but I’ve never heard of this being done before).
IIRC except for the first W95 floppy in the set, not only were the following disks compressed, but they used a ‘weird’ format to maximize what could be fit onto the floppy. It was at that time that M$ and everyone else realized that the floppy’s days were numbered and why CD-ROM drives shortly became a standard feature on PCs, and also why there was a sudden glut of competing “mega floppy” products such as Zip disks appearing on the market.
Not to mention using components that were available contemporaneously to win95, unlike other projects which stuff sd-cards inside a floppy or something…unless I misunderstood something in the HaD article.
Hmm…some self-corrections. Seems I shouldn’t have taken things at face value.
Looks like the FlashPath may have been released in May 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath) so more of an option for Win98, released in June 1998, than Win95 in August 1995.
The elephant in the room is that SmartMedia was limited to 16MB when win95 launched, only reaching 128MB in 2001. So given a full install of win95 required about 225MB on FAT16 or 175MB on FAT32 with win95 osr2 in 1996, my original comment doesn’t pass muster.
That was supposed to say only reaching 64/128MB in 2001.
It is still a really cool application of all the tech. Just correcting my own mistaken contemporaneous comment.
Windows 95 RTM (Retail) required 40 MB of HDD space in the normal installation.
I remember that, because I’ve installed it so many times in the 90s.
But if you also copied the DRIVERS and WIN95 setup to HDD..
Then yes, a few hundred MBs makes sense.
Having everything on HDD made sense, because Windows 95 setup did remove DOS-based CD-ROM drivers (and MSCDEX) in favor of its own 32-Bit drivers.
Too bad if no compatible driver was included, though..
This left the user stranded with a half broken installation.
“requirements were a 386 or better, 4 megabytes of memory, and a hard drive. [Robert’s Retro] is exploding one of those requirements, creating a full Windows 95 install using only a floppy drive.”
Only a Floppy and 128MB Ram. Totally minimalist installation…
Not exactly using a floppy disk, but at least he had fun doing it.
When I saw the headline, I first thought that this person managed to strip and squash down Windows 95 to fit on a standard 1.44mb floppy.
The 4MB RAM thing was relative, though..
I mean, it was true – Windows 95 did boot with merely 4 MB of RAM.
But at what cost! Heavy swapping to HDD and long loading times.
That configuration was often used by 386/486 laptop users, though.
The laptops/notebooks often had 4 MB standard and RAM expansion required proprietary RAM modules that were hard to get.
With 4 MB of RAM, Windows 95 was about goid enough to run small utilities or older Windows 3.1 software.
Running big, commercial packages such as MS Office 95 or Netscape Navigator were a torture.
For serious use, Windows 95 required 8, 16 or 32 MB of RAM.
Yes, you guys read correctly. :D And yes, the RAM was considered “huge” by humble home users of the day.
But nevertheless, Windows 4 (and OS/2 or Linux) needed that RAM from a purely technical point of view.
The situation in 1995 was comparable to when Windows 3.0 was new in,1990, I think.
How many home users with their Turbo XTs and 640 KB of RAM had complained about those huge, “unfair” system requirements (a 286 and roughly 2MB RAM total for normal operation).. 🙂
The 16 MEGS of ram in my Pentium back in 1996 seemed huge. 😐
Hi, indeed. But 16 MB wasn’t being unheard of for PCs running AutoCAD or a Novell Netware file server.
They had that by 1993 onwards, because performance was vital here.
From what I’ve remember, Windows 95 would stop excessive swaping to HDD when it had 32 MB of RAM.
That’s a bit heavy, indeed. Even by mid-90s standard.
OS/2 Warp by contrast worked totally fine from 16 MB onwards..
To give an idea, previews of Windows NT 3.1 from 1993 didn’t boot up with less than 16 MB of RAM..
Windows 98SE by contrast, which was much bigger than both NT 3.1 and 95, had gotten better memory managment and ran acceptable at 24 MB of RAM or more (I tried)..
Anyway, your 16 MB of RAM were reasonable I think! 🙂👍
RAM is among most expensive, but also most important piece in a multitasking/multi-user environment.
Because a PC needs enough RAM in order to “think” properly.
I have a very similar Toshiba laptop I bought in the trash bin of the local computer store in 2000. I was able to install w95 by copying all the files from the CD to my parallel port Zip drive. I don’t remember how I launched the installer and it took a while, but it totally worked. I still have that computer though sadly the HD had died when I got it out again recently.
How did the FlashPath peripheral and DriveSpace tricks allow Windows 95 to run from a SmartMedia card despite tiny floppy capacities?
I once saw the stack of floppies that made up W95, mere numbers don’t describe it, to see it is uhm.. not believing :)
I can’t recall anyone active in the late 1980’s and early 90’s calling diskettes “floppies”. Floppy Disk was reserved for the media-in-an-envelope 8″ and 5.25″ media, Diskette was the 3.5″. So I’m not sure what people are counting here, 5.25″ media or 3.5″ media in a plastic shell.
Anybody concur?
(Around 2000 I tried to install Linux on a PC with a HUGE stack of diskettes and the process never completeed. There WAS an attempt by Dyson to introduce a 3.25″ floppy but it failed. They sent a sample to Information Appliance for evaluation and I never tried to use it. Second and third photos here http://regnirps.com/SEF/oddities.htm
The “Don’t Copy that Floppy” campaign was launched in 1992, so that seems like a pretty definitive waypoint at least:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don%27t_Copy_That_Floppy
They could not get anything to rhyme with diskette except “I copied that diskette became his epithet”.
Hi there! As far as I know, the 5,25″ disk was a “mini floppy”, and the 3,5″ disk was a “micro floppy”.
A plain “floppy” was the 8″ original.. That being said, different countries maybe had used different names in real life.
There also were 3″ models and 2,8″ models out there in the 1980s.
Surprised to see no mention of the floptical floppies. The Insite version stored a bit over 20MB, while the Imation LS-120 could store 120MB. Apparently, there was also a LS-240. These drives were also compatible with regular floppy disks (for reading, at least), but they used an IDE interface (typically).
Following the Wiki article on these, I was surprised to discover that the LS-240 could also write 32MB to a regular floppy disk using shingled-magnetic recording, PRML, and zoned-bit recording. However, due to the SMR, this apparently works like a WORM drive.
They’re little more than a footnote. By the time they shipped, Zip had already captured the entire market and even they were on their way out with the advent of cheap CD-RW drives and media. They had a tiny bit of success being sold in Macs, but it was too little too late. Things moved super fast in those days and even a minimal delay in delivery (in the case of Imation was partly caused by the Mac compatibility) meant guaranteed failure.
I had one of these flash paths for my Kodak Digital Camera with built-in TV-Tuner. The OS was Java so I installed the potato emulator and had lots of fun playing Donkey Kong 😂
I used to have both Windows 95 & 98 on single floppies that would boot from the floppy disk drive 💾. Of course neither were the full version and were heavily stripped and compressed.