cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/347724
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995, almost three months after the release of Windows NT 3.51.
Windows 95 is the first version of Microsoft Windows to include taskbar, start button, and accessing the internet. Windows 95 merged Microsoft’s formerly separate MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows products, and featured significant improvements over its predecessor, most notably in the graphical user interface (GUI) and in its simplified “plug-and-play” features. There were also major changes made to the core components of the operating system, such as moving from a mainly cooperatively multitasked 16-bit architecture to a 32-bit preemptive multitasking architecture, at least when running only 32-bit protected mode applications.
Accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign,Windows 95 introduced numerous functions and features that were featured in later Windows versions, and continue in modern variations to this day, such as the taskbar, notification area, and the “Start” button. It is considered to be one of the biggest and most important products in the personal computing industry.
No per-program volume control was entirely the fault of whatever program you were using, not Windows. The Windows audio API supported global and application-level volume from the beginning with Windows 95 (even Windows 3.1 had it). Even if Windows 95 had not had application-level volume control, a developer could have implemented it for their application since they were composing the audio data sent to the API for playback (in other words, they could have just attenuated all the sample values to a lower volume).