When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Everyone assumed the Windows taskbar copied a rival OS. Many assumed NeXTSTEP inspired the Windows taskbar, but Microsoft veterans say its roots trace to a 1991 project called Cairo. In a recent social media thread, Microsoft veterans Brad Silverberg, Joe Belfiore, and Dave Plummer shared a few anecdotes and clarifications about how the taskbar became part of Windows. The taskbar, first introduced with Windows 95, allowed users to keep track of multiple active programs simultaneously, making it one of the highlight features of the cutting-edge operating system.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Whatever happened to Minesweeper and 3D Pinball on Windows? Windows used to ship with a bunch of iconic games that you could play straight after installation. Here's why they're gone and what happened. Remember back in the day when you could install Windows 98 or Windows 7 on a PC and enjoy built-in goodies like,,,, and?

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Windows 11's optional August update has a cursor bug. Windows 11 users are reporting a bug tied to optional update KB5120998 that's resetting cursors and blacking out desktop wallpapers. Microsoft just released optional update KB5120998 for Windows 11, an important one that brings back a long-missed feature in the operating system. However, take caution before installing it--some users are reporting that this update can cause serious damage.

PCWorld notes that Windows XP is celebrating its 25th anniversary, having officially launched on October 25, 2001, and it remains a legendary piece of software history. Built on the stable Windows NT architecture, XP delivered fewer crashes than Windows 98 or ME, transforming computing through reliability and lasting popularity. Remarkably, Statcounter shows 0.09 percent of users still run Windows XP today, meaning it still edges out Windows 8 in market share. This fall marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of Windows XP, an event worthy of commemoration. Computer manufacturers gained access to this classic operating system on August 24, 2001, but it wasn't available for purchase until October 25th of that same year. Unlike its predecessors Windows 95, 98, and ME, Windows XP was based on Windows NT, which meant fewer system crashes and greater security. Microsoft called Windows XP " the most important version of Windows ever," and in retrospect, that was no exaggeration. Windows XP proved so popular that support for it was repeatedly extended, and even today there are some users who stubbornly cling to this iconic version. According to the latest data from Statcounter, 0.09 percent of the population still uses Windows XP, compared to 0.02 percent for Windows 8, which was released 11 years later.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Why did the Windows 95 CD have a Weezer music video on it? Windows 95's installation CD included music videos, a movie trailer, and cartoons that had nothing to do with the OS. Windows 95 just turned 31 years old and we're revisiting that iconic operating system with a question: Ever wondered why the Windows 95 installation CD also contained a Weezer music video, a trailer for the film, and cartoons by Bill Plympton? You know, stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with the Windows operating system?

PCWorld recalls how Windows 95, launched on August 24, 1995, became a cultural phenomenon, selling 7 million copies in just seven weeks. The OS introduced the iconic Start menu, taskbar, Plug and Play, and multitasking, transforming how everyday users interacted with computers. Despite issues like the Blue Screen of Death, its massive marketing campaign featuring the Rolling Stones and boost to 32-bit app development made it a landmark commercial success. Just over 31 years ago, on August 24th, 1995, Microsoft began selling Windows 95 in the US. At midnight, many computer shops across the US opened their doors to sell the first Windows 95 floppy discs at "Midnight Madness" events.

PCWorld reports that Windows 11 still relies on code from the 1990s, particularly the Win32 API from Windows 95, for basic functions like right-clicking. Microsoft CTO Mark Russinovich acknowledges the unexpected longevity of this legacy code, which remains fundamental to many applications and core Windows operations. Previous attempts to modernize the Windows API, including WinRT, failed to fully replace the enduring Win32 system that continues powering today's operating system. Windows 11 is the most modern, secure, and updated Windows ever--at least that's what Microsoft keeps saying. But a senior Microsoft executive recently revealed just how much of the underlying technology in Windows 11 is still legacy, all the way from decades ago. One such relic in Windows 11 comes into play whenever you right-click a file or launch a desktop app. When you perform such tasks, you're executing code that was written in the 1990s. We're talking about the Win32 API, for which Microsoft still maintains a programming reference support document . Although the Win32 API became widespread with Windows 95, it had already been implemented in Windows NT prior to that.

Diffusion models have shown exceptional capabilities in generating realistic videos. Yet, their training has been predominantly confined to offline environments where models can repeatedly train on i.i.d. data to convergence. This work explores the feasibility of training diffusion models from a semantically continuous video stream, where correlated video frames sequentially arrive one at a time. To investigate this, we introduce two novel continual video generative modeling benchmarks, Lifelong Bouncing Balls and Windows 95 Maze Screensaver, each containing over a million video frames generated from navigating stationary environments. Surprisingly, our experiments show that diffusion models can be effectively trained online using experience replay, achieving performance comparable to models trained with i.i.d. samples given the same number of gradient steps.

Next week I am going to build a gaming PC. I've done it once before and wrote an article about what a nightmare the process was – although the issue turned out to be with the USB stick I used to install the motherboard update patch and … well, don't get me started. The thing is, I figured it out because when you have played PC games for as long as I have, you know that figuring technical stuff out is a key part of the experience. While games consoles have always been pure plug-and-play experiences, PC games have definitely not. When I started playing in the early 1990s, they came on multiple floppy discs – The Secret of Monkey Island was on eight – and you had to keep swapping them in and out of the drive, like feeding a voracious robot.

ChatGPT and other AI chatbots seem a little bit like magic sometimes. But they're not, especially when asked to do a fairly basic computational task that you'd think they could handle with relative ease--like generate a Windows 95 license key. From our AI shootout of ChatGPT versus Microsoft Bing versus Google Bard, we know that AI chatbots can outperform our expectations on some tasks, and surprisingly struggle with others. Enderman, a YouTuber who typically plays around with various older Windows builds, set out to see if they could generate a brand-new Windows 95 key. The obvious method is to simply ask ChatGPT to generate the requisite license keys, but OpenAI made its chatbot too ethical for that.