I remember being 15, that August. We were excited for this release. My dorky friends and I went to a local computer store and tried to get the clerk to show us what Windows 95 was like. He had a pre-release version installed on one of their computers. I don't even remember how we knew.

The clerk refused to show us. I'm still irritated about it.

I remember being a big OS/2 user/fan and thinking surely everyone would realize that Win95 was inferior. I was wrong.

I had a summer visiting professor job at Intel at the time doing signal processing. They set me up to use MatLab under Windows95. I installed Linux and code from Numerical Recipes to get around various limitations. Andy Grove had just banned Macs because they didn't use Intel chips. They believed the WinTel duopoly was giving them "more money than God." (A phrase that I first heard at Intel that summer)

Four years minus one day after the first announcement of Linux

>It wasn’t truly a full 32-bit operating system, because there was still MS-DOS at the core if you dug deep enough.

Yes it wasn't truly 32-bit but the core was not MS-DOS. It was a hybrid. The Win95 kernel was 32-bit and drove almost all of the system, including memory. 16-bit DOS was used as a launching pad and then it's job shifted to handle 16-bit graphics and other hardware that was unable to work with the new 32-bit kernel. So you booted 16-bit DOS, and as WIN.EXE executed, the system transmorphed from 16-bit into a 32-bit (kernel) OS but some of that core 16-bit driver code was designed to remain welded onto it. Even more impressive is how you could dissolve this 32-bit level and return the system to 16-bit DOS. That remains a very impressive achievement 30 years later. Happy anniversary Windows 95!

I still remember some kid at school swearing that if the release date slipped into 1996 that Microsoft would get the US government to keep the calendar 1995.

My 10 year old brain was blown when I discovered the Buddy Holly music video on the Windows 95 CD. I just couldn't comprehend the idea of a music video being played on a computer. Felt like magic. Such different times.