MS Team's Motto for Windows 95: 'It Sucks Less'

This week marks the 15th anniversary of the release of Windows 95. Some would say that Windows 95 with its Start menu (along with the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up") ushered in a new generation for Microsoft as its GUI moved in to bump out MS-DOS and all of its competitors.

With it also came the very first Internet Explorer browser, now also a decade and a half old. At the time, Netscape Navigator was still king, but times sure have changed. (Correction: Internet Explorer came slightly later through the Windows 95 Plus! Pack.)

In reminiscing about the old days, long-time Microsoft employee Raymond Chen revealed in his blog that during the development of Windows 95, one of the team members attended a Mac conference wearing a Windows 95 team t-shirt.

The rest of his team jokingly said that they should get his dental records first to be able to identify his remains after the conference.

Thankfully, the t-shirt wearing team member returned with a funny story:

I got a lot of funny looks. And one guy, upon confirming that I really did work on the Windows 95 project, said to me, "I have to commend you guys on Windows 95 so far. It sucks less."

Interestingly, the developers found this quite funny and adopted a new, unofficial team motto: "Windows 95: It sucks less."

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
  • plznote
    Who running Windows 95 here?
    I am! :lol:
    Reply
  • jplarson
    Putting it into some context, while Windows 95 is 15 years old, Windows XP will be turning 9 in October.
    Reply
  • beans4you
    I did until my ten pound hard drive big as a book died. :(
    Reply
  • zak_mckraken
    If they could have foreseen the future, it would have been : "Windows 95 : At least it's not Vista!"
    Reply
  • demonhorde665
    actually if it wasn't some theifing bastard i'd still be running win 95. i wanted to do a dual boot with winxp and win 95 (for older games) but when i went to look up my old win 95 copy all i could find was the book , apoperntly some one that was living with us a few years ago made off with the disk. now if i could just get win7 i could at least do a dual boot with it and win xp. wouldnt get my old games working but oh well... wish i could get baldurs gate 1 and 2 running ok on this sytem but currently the BG games dont like winxp much throw a dualcore cpu on it and BG games just go bonkers.
    Reply
  • teknomedic
    apon further review, these team motos were also noted...
    Windows 98 - It's sucks even less
    Windows ME - We're so very sorry
    Windows XP - Tons less suck!
    Windows Vista - Oops, our bad
    Windows 7 - at least it's better than Vista

    ;)
    Reply
  • dgingeri
    I still have Win95 on a virtual machine so I can run some old video games from that era. It's still just as stable as it always was. :)
    Reply
  • born2rock4life
    Vista? I know Win ME was terribad, but did you really erase it from your memory? *shudders*
    Reply
  • dgingeri
    demonhorde665actually if it wasn't some theifing bastard i'd still be running win 95. i wanted to do a dual boot with winxp and win 95 (for older games) but when i went to look up my old win 95 copy all i could find was the book , apoperntly some one that was living with us a few years ago made off with the disk. now if i could just get win7 i could at least do a dual boot with it and win xp. wouldnt get my old games working but oh well... wish i could get baldurs gate 1 and 2 running ok on this sytem but currently the BG games dont like winxp much throw a dualcore cpu on it and BG games just go bonkers.virtual machines work so much better for this. Trust me. I have virtuals for Win 3.1, Win95, Win98, and WinXP. They work great for older games. The Win98 virtual works better for Warcraft 2 than the WinXP does.
    Reply
  • pbrigido
    Despite current day's incredible advances in gaming...I miss playing old games like Star Wars - Tie Fighter, Hover, Rise of the Triad, WarCraft - Orcs and Humans.

    ...not that I would ever consider trading in my current system for one of the Win95 era...
    Reply