When you get used to the way things work in the modern day, it can be easy to forget the work and time it took to get here. We're all accustomed to certain paradigms when using a computer nowadays, like the desktop icons, taskbar, and Start menu (or equivalent), but those things weren't always a part of Windows.

Enter the Virtual OS Museum, a project to preserve versions of numerous versions of operating systems in history, including some very old Windows releases up to early versions of Windows Longhorn (the precursor to Vista). This initiative is the perfect way to take a look back at the history of the world's most popular PC operating system — and a great reminder that Windows 95 was absolutely groundbreaking.

The Virtual OS Museum is amazing

Every operating system, ready to use

Before I get into the specifics of Windows 95, I do want to talk about how incredible of an achievement the Virtual OS Museum project is. This is a compilation of over 1700 pieces of software, including over 570 distinct operating systems dating as far back as 1948. All the operating systems are automatically set up and ready to use, making it easy for anyone to get a taste of tech history, which can be very hard to experience otherwise.

Finding hardware running a lot of this software natively is next to impossible, and setting up VMs manually isn't always easy, either. A lot of these old pieces of software need to be configured carefully, so even virtualization can be a challenge if you want to try them out.

Making all of this so accessible is an absolutely commendable endeavor, especially considering you can get it as a fully offline package containing everything without needing to set up anything extra. If you're at all interested in the world of tech, this is something you must check out. I do wish we had access to even earlier versions of Windows, since it only includes versions based on the Windows NT kernel, but this is still great.

All the virtual machines run inside another virtual machine which runs a Debian host, so performance using these machines isn't going to be great, but gets the job done for playing around with these releases.

Windows was completely different in the beginning

What's a taskbar?

This project also makes it very easy to visualize the moments that defined Windows and, in tandem, the entire landscape of PCs for the future. Early versions of Windows, all the way to Windows 3.1, were radically different from what we know today.

Windows 1.0 didn't even feature the traditional floating windows we associate with every modern desktop. It was entirely tiling-based, meaning every app you opened took over the entire screen, until you opened another one, which split the screen to show both apps side-by-side. In these early days, it didn't even make much sense to have a desktop background that could be customized, because you would never be looking at it.

The Start menu was also not a thing at all in these early releases, and launching apps was done entirely through the program manager or a terminal. As for the taskbar, it wasn't there in the way we know it today, but minimized apps did turn into icons at the bottom of the screen, which you can see as a very early precursor to what would become the taskbar's main purpose later on. Still, a very far cry from what we know today, but you can trace its origins back to this design.

After Windows 2.0, resizeable windows became a feature, but everything else about the desktop paradigm was still the same. There were no desktop icons, Start menu, or a taskbar.

Windows 95 changed everything in one fell swoop

The desktop as we know it was born here

In 1995, however, Microsoft changed the game for Windows in a way that would eventually impact the entire industry. At this point, Windows was starting to gain a lot more popularity, but Windows 95 was the catalyst that really defined how computers should behave, and it would ripple across the entire industry over time.

Windows 95 itself isn't available in the Virtual OS Museum, but we do have Windows NT 4.0, which brings all of its biggest changes to the Windows NT kernel. For the purpose of checking out the desktop, it achieves the same result.

As soon you land on the Windows 95 desktop, things look different. For the first time, there are icons populating the desktop itself, allowing you to launch apps directly from the desktop without needing some kind of program manager. At the bottom of the screen, a small bar shows things like the time and a button labeled "Start", as well as any apps you have open.

Clicking that Start button brings yet another new element: you can now open programs and games or search your computer from a singular, floating menu that only stays on screen when you need it and disappears when you don't. This Start menu was an excellent launchpad for whatever you needed to do on your computer, without getting in the way.

It's striking how all of these elements that are still so essential to modern computers were defined here. All of these elements are still central to Windows 11 today, and while they look different, their core purpose remains unchanged over 30 years later. And it's not just Windows — while they have slightly different approaches in terms of implementation, many Linux desktops have similar core elements, including KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, and Xfce.

For Microsoft, this was also big simply because it made the desktop the default way to interact with a computer on its operating systems. Previous versions of Windows were packages you'd install on top of MS-DOS, which was still a terminal-based operating system. But Windows 95 was a desktop-first operating system, and Microsoft just bundled MS-DOS as an application that could run inside the desktop, for those who still wanted to use text-based commands. It truly changed everything.

Tech history is so interesting

If nothing else, the Virtual OS Museum is a great way to experience tech history, which I find incredibly interesting. It's amazing to see the foundations of the tech we know and (usually) love today, and tracing the origins of certain capabilities to a specific point in time is always fun. That's what makes Windows 95 so monumental, even if I wasn't around for it back then. If you also have a love for tech, you should definitely check out this project and try hopping between Windows 3.1 and 95 to see how big of a difference it is.