ABSTRACT
Windows 95 launched on August 24, 1995. The launch was an expensive and grandiose affair. Microsoft paid the Rolling Stones a good deal of money for use of their song “Start Me Up”, and they also released a 30-minute promotional video featuring Jennifer Aniston and Mathew Perry. At the time of the Windows 95 launch, DirectX 1.0 was still about a month from completion, which assured that it could not be included with the OS. The first version of DirectX was not without its flaws. It was a solution still in need of refinement, but it didn’t cause any Lion King-scale disasters either. There was no great event when DirectX was officially completed in September, but that didn’t stop the DirectX team from celebrating. There is a vast majority of computer scientists that don’t really know as much about the hardware as they would have 20 years ago, because it’s just not taught.
