1995: Windows 95 is released

On 24 August 1995 Microsoft launched Windows 95, an operating system that transformed the personal computer from a specialist tool into an everyday appliance. Overnight, millions of households and offices gained a graphical interface featuring the now-iconic Start button, a multitasking taskbar, and vastly improved plug-and-play hardware support. The product shipped with built-in TCP/IP networking and a copy of Internet Explorer, quietly placing the web within reach of ordinary users.

The commercial and cultural impact was immediate. Long queues formed outside computer stores; the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up” became an unlikely technology anthem; and PC sales surged. More importantly, Windows 95 standardised a common platform on which software developers, researchers and hobbyists could reliably build and share programs. File formats, device drivers and user expectations converged, creating the first truly mass-market digital ecosystem.

That ecosystem proved decisive for the later rise of artificial intelligence. Cheap, ubiquitous machines generated the torrents of text, images and click-stream data that machine-learning models would eventually feast upon. University labs and start-ups alike could assume a baseline of compatible hardware and networking, lowering the barrier to experimentation with neural networks, statistical language models and large-scale information retrieval. The same consumer PCs that once ran Solitaire later trained early convolutional networks and hosted the first public demos of speech recognition.

Today’s AI landscape—cloud clusters training trillion-parameter models, edge devices running real-time inference, open-source frameworks downloaded by millions—still rests on the personal-computing foundation laid in 1995. Windows 95 did not invent algorithms or theorems, yet it democratised the substrate on which those ideas could scale. In that sense the launch belongs squarely in the long intellectual history that made modern artificial intelligence possible.