15 years ago today, Windows 95 was the iPhone of 1995…
http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-boss-brad-silverberg-launch-windows-95-2010-8
I was a software developer on the Windows 95 team. I led the 2 person strong performance team and our goal was to run our new 32-bit OS, Shell, and Office applications in 4MB of memory. After a lot of help from very smart folks in Microsoft Research and Office - this was a cross company effort - we managed to hit the hairy edge of 4MB. Brad and BillG gave their blessings. Fortunately, machines quickly shipped with 8MB or more of RAM and everything ran with huge amounts of headroom - even opening the door for higher level languages like JavaScript and Java to take off. It was an amazing team and product that captured consumer mindshare and set the tone for mainstream personal computing.
