Windows 95

Windows 95 arrived on 24 August 1995 and pulled DOS and Windows together into something that looked like one coherent system. The novelties were immediately visible: the Start menu, the taskbar, the recycle bin, long file names instead of eight characters plus three, and plug and play, meant to end manual card configuration — in practice unreliable enough to be nicknamed plug and pray.

Underneath, DOS was still there, and the isolation between programs was incomplete, which earned the system its reputation for blue screens. The marketing was nonetheless historic: the Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up" in the adverts, shops open at midnight and around 40 million copies sold in the first year. That Internet Explorer came bundled and could not be removed later became the core of the US antitrust case against Microsoft.