I remember that leak. I installed it and it was a buggy mess. The only thing I remember from it was that the minimize/maximize/close icons on a window turned from black to blue if you hovered over them.

no windows has come close to winmate (yeah i know it was just a skin for windows 3.1 but still)

I miss hover

So much nostalgia for the Windows 95/98 era.

Playing Descent with musicmatch jukebox running in the background. (Probably a 98 memory).

Bouncing sheep...

This is a very good article, but this part peeved me on a petty level (as well as explaining why there's precious little in the way of screenshots):

While I can't find any uploads that are set to run on their website in a virtual computing session, the files are available to download if you felt like spinning up a piece of computing history.

The opportunity to do a little investigative journalism is right there, and the blog author didn't take it

I was actually part of the beta test group for Windows Nashville. It was an improvement over Windows 95, but Windows 98 really brought home a lot of good UI design improvements that began in Windows Nashville. Sadly, it was so buggy that they delayed for several years and, instead, just released Windows 98 when it was finally ready.

Windows Longhorn was a similar failure a few years later

Back in 1997 I worked overnight at a bank running their backup software. Lots of sitting around being bored. I took it upon myself to change the Windows 95 startup logo to say Windows 96 on a number of computers. Someone out there remembers Windows 96.

Was that codename Memphis? Cuz if so, absolutely. Ran it for a while 😎

Edit: article talks about Nashville. Ran that one, too!

I borrowed Win 95 on floppy, from a friend at college. I dropped out shortly after and could not find him to give him back the disks before I left. So I ended up installing it during the summer of 96. I forget when I moved to 98.

I love windows 96

I was trained on making repairs to Windows 95, there was never a 96. There was a Windows ME which was fucking horrible! My step mom had it on a laptop. Then Windows 2000, which was the best, once you install the other disc that fixed the 250,000 bugs that Windows 2000 came with the original disc. Man those were the days that I could distribute those operating systems on as many computers I wanted with the one disc.