By Gary Kirchherr
The anniversary would have completely slipped by me unnoticed if not for The Associated Press.
As it were, I was in the Sentinel office Friday night when a perusal of the news wire pointed out to me that Windows 95 was released one year ago Saturday the 24th.
One whole year! Judging by the excessive publicity that preceded and followed the operating system's unveiling, computing as we knew it Aug. 24, 1995, should no longer exist. Apparently, Microsoft Corp.'s latest kludge copy of the Macintosh OS didn't quite live up to the hype.
Despite my disdain for Microsoft, I can't say I blame it for milking a product release for all it was worth. But I've never had the same respect I once had for cable business-news channel CNBC, whose "coverage" of the event played out like a Microsoft infomercial. CNN and USA Today fared little better. I guess rewriting Microsoft's press releases beats having to work for a living, eh, guys?
The most annoying aspect of the whole Windows 95 publicity blitz was the media's breathless excitement over the fact that PCs now had features that had been standard on Macintoshes since personal-computing's equivalent of the horse-and-buggy era. Well, I hope all you Windows users who had to buy extra RAM (if not a whole new Pentium-based PC) found the investment worthwhile.
As for Microsoft's competition, Apple Computer confounded the pundits by not filing for bankruptcy within days of Windows 95's release. But the struggling computer-maker hasn't done itself any favors by continually pushing back the release date of its own next major system-software release, code-named Copland. When it is unveiled, the showdown between Intel- and PowerPC-based systems finally will begin in earnest.