Re: 95, turns out it was easy to just get on to the beta list. Reminds me of a funny story...
Summer of '95, I was sitting at the weekly roundtable meeting of our IT department (at an R&D lab I used to work), and explaining to the boss that I could get my hands on a new beta of it from a friend so we could kick the tires. The whole team seemed interested and leaned in. "So," the boss says, "Who is your friend... he must be some VIP at a big operation, eh?"
"Nope," shaking my head.
"Well, who?" asks the boss.
"He's a high-school student."
"BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHHAHAahahah...."
Apparently I was not the only high school student on the 95 beta.
I wonder now if i was the only one to crash our entire novell network by trying to use Microsoft's version of the novell client.
I used to crash a Novell network by doing design changes on MS Access tables with lots of rows.
Personally it reminds me of the MS OS/2 2.0 fiasco, which I hate quite a lot. This is partly because it is why it took until Win95 for 32-bit programming to become popular, not to mention that the tactics MS used to attack OS/2 got worse and more unethical as Chicago/Win95 got delayed. See my blog post: http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2012/12/about-ms-os2-20-fiasco-...
MS OS/2 2.0??? 2.0 was long after the split with MS, I think you mean IBM os/2. Also 32 bit programming had been around for a long time before Microsoft got around to it. Os/2 had protected mode 32 bit in 1992, and PC hardware had been running 386 based 32 but unix variants since the mid 80's. even before that the 68000 had been running unix in 32 bit. Just because the win32 programming crowd didn't get to play with 32bit (and the joys of thunking) until '95 doesn't mean it was popular for a long time before.
I linked to the original MS OS/2 2.0 SDK announcement at the beginning of the blog article: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/1989-...