Comment Re:I resisted for a long time (Score 4, Informative) 108
I probably switched back and forth from 95 to 3.11 a few times in the early days when I got frustrated with Win 95's performance, but I was definitely on board with the idea. It helped that you could still boot to DOS when you needed your RAM to do something other than run the OS.
While the hatred of WIn95 eventually dominated, thanks to how much it sucked to support, it shouldn't be forgotten that it was a miracle of backwards compatibility. It's not just that it could co-exist peacefully with Win 3.1 and DOS: it could natively run 16-bit drivers.
That gave people the false impression it was just a desktop shell, but it wasn't. It was a 32-bit, flat-memory kernel and userland, that could seamlessly run 16-bit segmented-memory applications and drivers. The drivers part was everything, both a bit chunk of the cost of development, and the reason it won the desktop space so decisively. And if it gave people the impression it was just a GUI because you could launch it from DOS and use your DOS drivers, that just sold more copies.
Of course, those DOS drivers and 16-bit applications were utter crap, reliability wise, and Win95 did nothing to be more reliable than its weakest link, so it became the support nightmare we all remember. And that wasn't really fixed until the switch to the NT codebase, which didn't really happen until 8 years later when most people had finally stopped caring about 16-bit drivers.