Your PC Still Has Windows 95 In It

Thanks to Wendell of Level1Techs for helping us with this video.

Programs from Windows 95 and even Windows 3.1 still exist on your PC!

Leave a reply with your requests for future episodes.

FOLLOW US ELSEWHERE
---------------------------------------------------

[mattelder]

The phone dialer has a keypad for a very good reason: if you are calling somewhere that requires you to select menu options.

[TenOfZero]

Fun fact, those little logos are actually called Icons.

[monkeychickenist]

As an IT tech, I find many of the old school elements to be the most helpful.

[TheEDFLegacy]

Another old program worth mentioning is Program Manager. Despite effectively being replaced in Windows 95, it lived on through Windows XP!

[Xudmud]

I used to love the pre-XP disk defragmenter because it would let you view a map of the disk blocks and watch as it went through the disk and rearranged stuff.

[notenoughmonkeys]

The one app I was shocked Microsoft removed was HyperTerminal, some coworkers refused to upgrade from XP because of this, but once I showed them how great the open source replacements were, they were like PuTTY in my hands.

[tetranymous]

Windows 95 screensavers still run happily on windows 10 today! They've also kept all of the old icons within dll files in system32. Although my personal favourite is the fact that drives A and B are still reserved for floppy drives as a holdover from the IBM PC days. If you plug in a USB floppy drive into windows 10 it'll show up as drive A. :)

[phydeux]

I use a lot of these on the regular because I'm old-skool. But one that's been REALLY handy is the Windows XP era Photo Viewer, which you can re-enable with a simple registry setting. It was very useful in the early days of Windows 10 when the Microsoft Store Apps would all break and nothing would load. And until someone published the PowerShell command to reparse the whole manifest, the easiest way around it was the XP Photo Viewer so people could still function. (I work in corporate IT support)

[platinumdragonofficial]

Funny thing is that Notepad was actually updated in Windows 11. It functions very similar to sticky notes just without some of the rich text features and pretty colors.

[iwontliveinfear]

Retro computer enthusiast my rear... My dad still has dial-up Internet at home, because it's the only affordable option for rural South Carolina, when you live in a valley and can't get cell signal.

[markmandelstamm]

I was a beta tester for Windows 95. The first couple beta releases were on about 20 floppy disks. It was such an upgrade from Dos and Win 3.11.

[yhavry]

Wanna mention that a much more common usecase for phone modems nowadays are fax servers. Very common in the medical and dental industries, at least here in Canada.

[indoorjetpacks]

I think one of the most amusing things is that the modern settings app in windows is just running calls to control panel the whole time

[dt]

Whoa, the character map is actually super useful and something I would've used a ton if I knew it was there.

[Ronnocbot]

What still blows my mind, is the cornerstone of Windows today is Vista. The installer, file system, and even many programs are identical. Windows 11 still oddly still includes all the vista/7 sounds in the media folder.

I realize there are remnants of even older OS’s in it, but Vista is the framework

[beastworm]

I still use character map a lot, I work with some remote systems without internet access, and sometimes even 3 or 4 "remote connections" deep, that special keys just get lost over so many remote connections, so when I need to do an @ or # I just open character map and copy from there.

[sergetheijspartner]

I work in IT and we still use Notepad for config files, Batfiles and scripts, just as a quick editing tool for short texts when you do not need word for anything fancy

[cgtang]

I'm a graphic designer, still use character map regularly. It useful for checking if the fonts you wanna use have some specific character you need or not. Which far easier than checking on google.

[elone]

A lot of these 'old' apps are elegant in their simplicity and overall footprint. A much more efficient approach to software design compared to the bloat of today!

[heavyhemi]

*Your PC Still Has Windows 95 In It*
Me: but im on linux..