1995: Windows 95 is released.

While it wasn’t Microsoft’s first operating system based on a graphical user interface, Windows 95 represented the biggest step away from the far less user-friendly MS-DOS system. What Windows 95 managed to do was consolidate DOS and Windows software behind a clean desktop that, to borrow from the unfortunate language of marketing, enhanced the user experience.

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Windows 95’s technical specs may seem puny to the 21st-century eye, but the OS served as the platform for the introduction of the Internet Explorer web browser. IE soon surpassed, then buried, Netscape Navigator to become the most popular browser out there — thanks, in part, to some pretty slick maneuvering by Microsoft.

Like everything else in the software world, where planned obsolescence is even more bald-faced than in the automobile industry, Windows 95 was a mere way station on the road to bigger and better things. Windows 98 came along three years later, and then Windows 2000, XP, Vista and 7.

Microsoft formally ended its support for Windows 95 at the end of 2001.

Source: The OS Files

Photo: Then–Microsoft chairman Bill Gates sits onstage during a video portion of the Windows 95 launch Aug. 24, 1995, on the company’s campus in Redmond, Washington. (Gary Stewart/AP)

This article first appeared on Wired.com Aug. 24, 2007.