IT must have been the greatest show on earth last week. The launch of Microsoft Windows 95, that is.
More than two years and a US$200 million marketing budget - and who knows how many sleepless nights for Microsoft chairman Bill Gates - later and the company finally gave birth to the operating system that is expected to change the face of the personal computer industry.
An estimated 15 million lines of code, a whole new 'look-and-feel', and an incredible amount of hype went into Windows 95, the 32-bit operating system that finally makes IBM compatible PCs work more like Apple Macintoshes.
Windows 95 went on sale in most places around the world at a minute past midnight on August 24. The response was enough to make you think Elvis had returned from the grave.
People queued up for hours so they could 'be the first' to buy the new operating system. Some of them knew little or nothing about computers.
I bumped into a middle-aged woman outside a Seattle computer store last week who was quite upset she had bought Windows 95 10 minutes earlier. She had heard so much about how it would change her life she had not stopped to think that she might need a computer to run it on.