On August 24, 1995, Microsoft spent close to $300 million turning a software release into a global spectacle, licensing a Rolling Stones single and an entire London newspaper print run — and thousands who owned no computer still queued at midnight to buy it.

Microsoft's marketing budget for Windows 95 ran to roughly $300 million, spent on television spots and launch events across three continents over more than a year. What none of that money changed was the software underneath: Windows 95 still ran on top of MS-DOS, the command-line system Microsoft had been selling since 1981.

Developed for years under the internal codename Chicago, Windows 95 was Microsoft's first consumer release built for 32-bit processing and preemptive multitasking, meaning one crashed program no longer had to take the whole machine down with it. That was a genuine technical advance, tested by roughly 400,000 outside beta users between June 1994 and March 1995. Almost none of it showed up in the advertising.

Why license a Rolling Stones song?

Bill Gates wanted a song built around one word: start. His team picked "Start Me Up," the Rolling Stones' 1981 single, to match the button engineers had put in the corner of the screen, and Microsoft licensed it directly from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards — the first time either had sold a song for use in an advertisement. Bob Herbold, Microsoft's chief operating officer at the time, later put the fee at around $3 million. Rumors in the press at the time ran as high as $8 million to $14 million; Herbold called those figures wrong, and Microsoft never confirmed a number of its own, so the true fee has never been settled.

The lyrics have nothing to do with software. Microsoft's ads used only the opening riff and the title phrase, which was the point: the band's name did the work the words didn't need to do.

What did $300 million actually buy?

An event, mostly. Microsoft flew about 500 journalists and 2,000 guests to its Redmond, Washington campus, where comedian Jay Leno hosted a program built around Bill Gates in front of a corporate lawn turned midway, complete with tents and a carnival area for guests. In London, Microsoft bought out The Times' entire print run for the day, 1.5 million copies, more than double the paper's normal circulation, and gave every copy away free on the street. In New York, the Empire State Building switched its spotlights to the Windows palette for the night, the closest its lighting system could manage to the four colors in the logo.

The stage show got stranger from there. At the Redmond event, executive Steve Ballmer bounded across the platform to the same Stones riff, arms pumping, while Gates managed a stiffer two-step beside him; the footage still circulates online decades later as one of the odder pieces of corporate video ever recorded. In Toronto, Microsoft hired Stu Leggett, a professional rappeller and record holder, to descend the outside of the CN Tower with a laptop running Windows 95 strapped to his chest and send an email to Gates on the way down.

None of it explains the queues.

Why did people without computers show up at midnight?

Electronics retailers across North America opened at midnight on release day, a first for a piece of consumer software. Lines formed outside CompUSA outlets and small computer shops hours before doors opened, and reporters covering the crowds found buyers who had come to purchase a box of floppy disks without owning a machine to put them in. The retail edition shipped on thirteen 1.44-megabyte disks, or on a single CD-ROM for the smaller share of households with a drive to read one. None of it was cheap: Microsoft's suggested price was $209.95 for a full copy and $109.95 to upgrade from an older Windows, real money in 1995 for anyone with no PC to run it on. Microsoft's own sales numbers suggest the crowds weren't small: Windows 95 sold a million copies in North America in four days, a pace MS-DOS itself had taken forty days to match on its own release, and reached seven million within five weeks.

What actually changed on the screen

Under the marketing sat a real break from the interface Microsoft had sold since 1985. A taskbar ran along the bottom of the screen. A Recycle Bin held deleted files until a user chose to empty it. File names could run to 255 characters instead of the cramped eight-plus-three format DOS had enforced for a decade. Plug and Play let a new sound card or modem announce itself to the operating system instead of requiring a technician to configure it by hand (it worked often enough to be useful, rarely enough to become a punchline). At the corner of it all sat the Start button: small, gray, and named for a rock song most of its buyers never registered as a rock song.

Where the interface goes from here

The button has not always stayed put. Windows 8 dropped it in 2012 in favor of a full-screen tile interface, a change unpopular enough that Microsoft brought a Start button back, though not the full menu, in Windows 8.1 the following year, and restored the menu itself in Windows 10 in 2015. Even that detour never moved the button off the corner of the screen for long.

Windows now runs on more than a billion active devices by Microsoft's own count, a design lineage held in continuous use longer than any other consumer software product has managed. The company that once needed the Rolling Stones and a floodlit skyscraper to make an operating system feel like news now ships changes quietly, in the background, overnight. Retailers no longer open at midnight for software; there is no current equivalent of a shopper standing in line for a box they have no machine to run. What has not moved, on most versions of Windows still sold, is the corner of the screen a new user looks to first.

Sources

• Neowin, "Trivia Tuesday: Windows 95's golden days"
• Network World, "What Microsoft paid The Stones to help launch Windows 95"
• Vice, "This Guy Rappelled Down the CN Tower For the Launch of Windows 95"
• Rare Historical Photos, "Remembering the Hysteria Over Windows 95 Launch: Photos From 1995"
• The Spokesman-Review, "Windows 95 Sales Hit 1 Million Microsoft Customer-Help Lines Swamped With Calls" (August 30, 1995)
• The Seattle Times, "Microsoft Suggests $209.95 Retail Price For Windows 95" (June 1995)