Twelve years ago today Windows 95 was introduced. Following Windows 3.1, this was the big move to 32 bits (we ignore the Win32s fork), including a better selection of native controls and improved usability. Business for independent Windows software developers began to take off.
Our company’s first product was introduced earlier that year for Win31. The particular software tools we used were a little slow to support Win95, but when finally ready included emulation of the new controls on Win31, so we could compile the same source code for 32bit and 16bit versions. Microsoft’s tools, while faster to market, reduced support of Win31, preferring to move developers to 32-bit land.
Our first Win95 product was introduced in February 1996, released at the same time as the 16 bit version. In May of that year we introduced another product for both Win31 and Win95, and released a Win95 version of our first product in August.
Any of our registered customers still running Windows 95 or Windows 3.1 can still request earlier versions of our programs that should work on these operating system versions. We do not have any computer currently running Win95 to test against, so we suspect our current product versions no longer work.