Home schooled as well. However, I just thought it was part of a Happy Days episode and Weezer was a throwback band from the time. Didn't find out until later that it was all just clever editing and Weezer was current.
Wow I was talking about this with my sister. I sent her Weezer" buddy holly" and she was like, "remember the demo disk that came with our win 95' hp pc?! Lol I could talk for hours about what was on that disk
There was a capture the flag game on it. There was also a disk that presented a different userface than windows 95. You could link books on a shelf in a virtual library to link a program that you would like to launch.
I dunno, I’d ask your wife to be sure, since she seems to remember the event better than you do (wives usually do remember weddings more completely than husbands do). I could be wrong, but I don’t think most young people of the 90s were turned on to Weezer by the Windows 95 installation CD. I very well remember when that disc arrived in my mail. My own personal reaction to it was not “wow, what a cool new song” but instead “WOW! They put Weezer’s ‘Buddy Holly’ video on here!” I bet you guys loved Weezer even when you used Windows for Workgroups, 😜!
Windows Server 2003 had No Hay Problema by Pink Martini as the 'title.wma' or OOBE background music, but as Server 2003 never had any OOBE then it falls unused
I remember that, excellent! Also Beck's Beautiful Way in WM7... but just a 20-second snippet or so, bummer... In Windows Vista there was The Posies' Love Comes. All in all, it must be said that they made excellent music choices... Even going back to canyon.mid!
Yep, playing Weezer as a video and audio test was standard procedure at the shops I worked at back then when we built or upgraded computer. You'd hear it at least several times a day.
I remember when I found this myself back in the day, I thought I had found a huge secret or something. I was so proud of myself. I also remember not being too surprised that it was there because the 90's were just kind of awesome like that.
Wow, didn't expected a much deeper reason than a contract for promotion and money. Putting it hidden in the CD was a much better solution than throwing it at the face of everyone like Apple and U2 did years later.
@@ZipplyZane My younger sisters and I just used the Windows 95 PC to decorate our own virtual rooms with Microsoft Bob. Never would have found this thing
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 And that last part is why I guess some people consider it "hidden." It does seem odd to us today that they would not have made a huge deal on the autoplay about it. But, as I said, I think they wanted to encourage people to use the new Windows Explorer.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 I didn't mean having it automatically play as soon as you put the disc in. I just meant listing it on the popup that autoplays. Instead, if I remember correctly, there was a link to explore the disc. When you did, you'd see a bunch of boring files, but also a folder called FUNSTUFF. And so, being curious, you'd click on it, and find games, videos, etc.
I just ran into this issue today. I was playing my music on shuffle when all the sudden I heard some really wussy music I’d never put on my phone. Oh yeah, it was U2. Well fuck you too, U2! 👎
90s Windows marketing has been my pet obsession lately, it was such a crazy thing, with so many fond memories attached to it as a young burgeoning computer nerd.
I still remember watching both music videos quite a few times as I could not believe I had a machine that could play them at will without inserting any kind of media. They were just there. They were good tunes as well, so that was a bonus :)
I was selling computers then, and it was amazing to see full-screened video of that quality (HighPerf) playing on some of the better PCs we had for sale. Was useful for showing the difference a processor and videocard could make for video playback, and that included Hover game. Thanks for the dive into the subject. I was always curious.
Man, this was really nostalgic. I was 14 when I got Windows 95 and I played that video over and over. It was actually my introduction to Weezer. I played the Rob Roy trailer that came with Windows 95 a lot too. I had zero interest in watching that movie but it was so exciting and novel to have videos playing on my computer that it didn't even matter. Great video. The whole thing really took me back.
I think that was the only video on my Win 95 PC - I don't remember Weezer being on it. Maybe I was too young and my dad kept listening to Good Times over and over? Or maybe in Poland they didn't have the license for it.
That video instantly transports me back to my grandparent's house, sitting in my grandpa's office, on a wooden chair, just playing with and exploring everything on that new PC he got. Like, I even remember the smell of the warm plastic from the tower, the lighting, everything. I love it. :)
I was there when win95 came out. I had been writing games for popular systems like the Vic2- and the IBM PC. The joke about Plug and Play was that we called it "Plug and pray". Because it worked about a third of the time. Good reporting!
Ahh i remember...Such memories of finding this and having no clue what it was aged 12. Thinking it was just an actual old music video from happy days. I had no clue who weezer were at the time.
I remember getting our first windows pc and finding this video. I thought it was dope. Fast forward 15 years or so my girlfriend and I was on a Weezer cruise. This cruise was very cool by the way. But I’ve told my girlfriend a few times of my first experience with Weezer was on my first Windows PC. She’s obsessed with Weezer, that’s why we were on the cruise. Halfway through the cruise they had a Q&A on the top deck and this subject came up. They told the story and it filled the hole that I didn’t know I had burning inside me. Your video of course provided the details on Microsoft’s side that I didn’t know till now. Love your channel!!! Keep it up!!!
This completely ruined my childhood idea that it was on there as Bill Gates really liked it and wanted to share it. Glad to finally know the real story!
Having already been a huge Weezer fan and a fan of computers when I first found this on Windows 95 it was mind blowing. Always wondered why it was on there. Played it over and over as I no longer had to wait for MTV to play it... Actually MTV played it constantly.
I still remember when my dad loaded up windows 95 on our old computer.. It could barely run the video till he upgraded it again. That was my introduction to Weezer at 9 years old and that is still one of my favorite albums of all time... I miss those days... Dad coming home with new computer parts and stuff every few months because the tech progressed so fast. Now I wait years for over priced and under performing hardware and be forced to smile about it because there's no other choice....
If you read the minimum system requirements for Windows 95 that described my computer at the time. It ran 95, but it was the slowest computer I've ever dealt with until some of the ones we have at work now.
@@hunterlong1820 I actually chatted with my mate about this, what is going to be the next "revolution" of this decade. We had : 1980s : Home computer revolution 1990s : Internet revolution 2000s : Wireless revolution 2010s : Smartphone revolution 2020s : ??? My mate theorized that this time it might be blockchain and NFTs, but who am I to predict that, we're still early in the decade
I've still got that Win95 beta CD that first came with the Weezer video. I had been asked to beta test their PowerStation Fortran (some silly name like that for their Fortran compiler) app, which required official current Win95 beta to run - but hadn't been on the Win95 official beta tester program (although I *cough* maybe had been running various betas for over a year already *cough*). I sent them an e-mail and promptly received the beta tester kit - woot. My first PC I used it on could play the video but some frames skipped due to the CD-ROM buffer not being quite large enough. It was the perfect sample file to include to test out to see if somebody's machine could handle multimedia, back in the era where you often bought a CD-ROM and sound card bundle kit (IDE based drives were out by then I think, but tons of legacy Creative hardware used a controller on the sound card, and not all had the same performance).
Ohhh, yeah. Trying to play those through an ISA multi-IO card that only supported PIO-1 IDE speed. Or how about the early 4x CD-ROM drives that just could not slow down when connected to an early IDE controller? They'd rev up to top speed, toss a huge slug of data then drop to idle while the controller tried to pass the data through, then the transfer would timeout and stop.
@@greggv8 yeah that was an interesting era for sure - I had built myself a Cyrix or AMD box which was equivalent to a mid range Pentium but even then, trying to burn CD-ROMs was always an interesting experience. I had a lot more RAM than most users realize you could even have (I had 192 MB in one box in that era when the typical user had 32 or less) which definitely helped, but we (college neighbors and I) were the proud owners of a Yamaha quad speed burner; this when single speed burners were still shockingly rare, we ubergeeks said screw it and got the pro model. At the time, blank discs were $12 a pop, although they went down to $8 a pop by the end of the school year. This is why we kept those early coasters, as we had an investment in them - they were the reminder of what happens when the write buffer runs empty mid-burn; and something that luckily quickly became a thing of the past - however for that time, when you wanted to burn a disc, it was common to shut down all sorts of Windoze services, antivirus and anything that could possibly want to write to the hard disk at the wrong time. :P
The irony of it is that these videos also run perfectly well on Windows 3.1! I remember playing 'Goodtimes' a lot. I’ve still yet to watch 'Robroy' in full though.
On the OSR 2 CD, the standard AVI files were removed, it only has the highperf ones. But, it includes the two music videos in MPEG-1 VCD format too. I had a 486 PC that could only play the MPEG files as a slideshow.
I worked at a University computer lab at the time. I remember me or a friend finding the Weezer video at some point on the CD. As the this video points out, the video was a year old at that time, and I was in my early 20s, so of course I'd seen it far too many times MTV as it was in maximum rotation. So for me this wasn't like discovering some new hidden gem, more a curiosity. My reaction was more along the lines of "Huh, that's kind of interesting and random that Microsoft put this video on the CD. I wonder how that happened. Kinda cool". But honestly I don't think I thought about it again until 26 years later. Going back and looking at the original AVI I can see why. The quality, even for the "high performance" file is very fuzzy and grainy, and about the quality you might expect from a very noisy, fuzzy TV signal. Audio is pretty good though. There wasn't really much digital video at the time. Quality was low, processors were a bit too slow. These were the days when mp3 was just barely getting started... There were a few mp3s available on FTP sites, but video was.... pretty much non-existent. Remember, even DVD at a gargantuan (at the time) 4.7 gigabytes didn't come out until 1996! Computers didn't really get fast enough to compress a video under a gigabyte until maybe the late 90s. The first movie I downloaded was in 1999, off of Napster. So from a technical perspective including this video on Windows 95 was a genius idea. It showed what was then possible. The other thing I'd point out is that Windows 95 was the first "modern" Windows operating system that was designed from the get-go to run more than one program at the same time instead of it being shoe-horned in like it was in Windows 3.1, or MacOS through 8. Windows 3.1 suffered from horrible crash and lockup problems, primarily because any program could write to any memory location it wanted (the memory space was shared among the whole OS in 16 bit mode), and each program had to yield to others. MacOS had similar problems. Remember the great bomb icon? So any program that was buggy could lock up the whole system. Windows 95 (when used with 32 bit programs) solved both these problems by creating a separate memory space for every program, as well as putting in pre-emptive multi-tasking, so any buggy program couldn't lock up the whole computer since the OS was in control of tasks. Windows 95 really was "a big deal". So the claims of Apple that Windows 95 were just "MacOS 7" were completely ridiculous. It took Apple another 6 years to release OS-X, which finally had the protected memory, and pre-emptive multi-tasking that Windows had in 1995.
I remember that I rather used my Amiga 2000 and 1200 for a long time since PC's back then was so far behind on many levels. I could not grasp why I would have to buy a separate graphics card and sound card in order to get somewhat halfdecent graphics or sound. With the Amiga we already had all that, we had a really great GUI and a function to put programs into and execute from RAM. That was awesome. 😃
Your videos are so well researched and presented. Channels like this have made youtube so awesome to watch. When I was younger I wouldn't question why things are like they are. Weezer on my Win95 install CD. Meh, that's just how it is... Now you point it out, it's very strange and intriguing. 24mins just flew by, very entertaining, thank you!
In '91-'92, one of the computers in the school I attended demonstrated the playing an early MP3 sample file of "Start It Up" by the Rolling Stones from it's hard drive in MS-DOS. A bit ironic, in light of Microsoft's use of it in their introductory ad for Windows '95.
15 minutes in, and 2 different plugs for some spammy “sponsor”, the weezer song was put on the OS because they wanted to show off the trendy and fun new operating system that plays videos and stuff
@@JosephByrne creators don't get anything out of your decision to pay for premium. Premium money only goes to google and is an excuse for them to not overload you with their ads. If you want to give creators money through youtube, the channel memberships is the only way to go
I will never question the power of a website banner ad. I just listened to the soundtrack to Beavis and Butt-Head Do America because I saw an ad for it on an almost 30 year old image of the Geffen records website. The album still rocks.
Yeah Windows 95 was definitely considered ground breaking at the time. There's a reason that the UI it started has been iterated on for other versions of Windows to this day. Sure, Apple had some of the stuff, but not all of it. In particular, it didn't have the hierarchical Start Menu or taskbar. It didn't make it automatic to put shortcuts on the desktop. And, most importantly, it didn't have proper multitasking. Everything still ran in the same memory space, meaning a problem with a single program would take down the whole system. System 7 still used cooperative multitasking used in Windows 3.1, where the programs had to be designed to let other apps work.
yep and windows can't remove the start menu now, everyone is so used to it. win3.1 gui was so chunky. desktop was the other thing, having a place you could just dump everything.
Oh man, I remember stumbling on these on my friend's dad's PC in the living room. It was summer of 96 and we were looking up Sailor Moon stuff. He heard the video playing and got pissed because he thought we somehow managed to download something of that size back then! I showed him where they were located and he was like, "Oh...ok then" and went back to smoking his bowl. Good times.
You have your timeline a little out. Windows 95 wasn't really "internet ready" out of the box, since you had to buy the Plus! add-on pack to enable that. It only came built into the OS with later versions. I was working at a computer shop just after the Windows 95 release and we used the Weezer video to test the audio and video on newly built PCs.
Yeah, but it was quite common early on for the Plus! pack to be integrated in, especially on new computers. He does at least mention the Internet Explorer required the Plus! pack.
I was a teenager when Win 95 launched, and a huge computer nerd. It was so exciting. I don't know if I've ever been through a product launch since that carried that kind of energy. I had been reading about it in PC World and PC Computing for months, and had a beta copy I downloaded from a BBS. I definitely navigated all around the CD, found the Fun Stuff folder, and clips therein. A friend of mine came over and we watched the Rob Roy trailer, and went out and rented it that night. Good movie!
I was a bit older, though still in school. The video responsible was in DOS games The 7th Guest and Under A Killing Moon. The latter ended up a particular favourite. I consider it one of the best adventure games ever made.
This was the first time I'd ever seen live video on a computer before. We had upgraded our Tandy 1000 to an Acer w/ the 75mhz Pentium and it came (a couple months later) with the Windows 95 disks. Still remember that moment.
I have Weezer's "Buddy Holly" (self-titled album) and Edie Brickell's "Good Times" ( _Picture Perfect Morning_ ) on my Win 95 CD, which I still have around somewhere. (1:01) I forgot about _Rob Roy._ Multimedia kits and promos were still a thing then. Good times, indeed.
I love seeing early 90s technology stuff when they’re having that weird bridge between “big-glasses goobers are the tech nerds” to “everyone in the world kinda needs that tech and suddenly it’s cool as heck” Like all those polo wearing nerds dancing on the stage would normally be cringe as shit but then you see the surprisingly huge audience watching them do so
Several years earlier I had to wait 10 mins to download a colour photo of Samantha Fox. LOL! It downloaded 1 horizontal line of pixels at a time. It was probably a 1200 baud modem back then, about 150 bytes per second or 9KB per minute. Talk about anticipation!
Crazy days, convincing your parents not to use the phone while you "legally" downloaded music. For me it was like 15 minutes per song. Video was insane, I remember watching the Phantom Menace trailer, playing the same few seconds over and over again as it took an age to download the whole thing.
@@ProffyChaos I remember terrible quality RealMedia and QuickTime files taking over a day to download just one. I think we were able to use our phone and internet at the same time. I don’t remember how.
Seeing and hearing that song when I did back in the day made a huge impression on me. It's oddly one of my most vivid memories of my childhood. Ps... I wonder why the hell your captions in this video take so many liberties...
Pretty amazing to realize I was already using icons and such from 1985 onwards with the Amiga. :) The only time I used a command-line was on the beloved 8-bit computers. And yes, cyber-cafe's, those were such fun... when the Internet was still... just fun and interesting. Man, such a shame we live in a time where tech is awesome, yet all the comm things suck big time.
i remember that some times when i felt exhausted and tired from life, i started the video in the little window, and it was so smoothing to see that computers can now play video, so bright future has finally come :)
Mr. Nerd, do u even comprehend what kind of nostalgic feelings I'm getting watching ALL the extra footage you included even so far as the commercial with the stars from Friends and the MTV VMA acceptance for Weezer's Buddy Holly???! LOVED IT!!! THANKS!!! -Sincerely, Just and old man in his early 40s who lived the 90s as a teen and wish he could go back and relive them again 😫
I would play the video fullscreen on my 15 inch monitor because it was the one of the few full-motion video you could get on a PC c.1996. Felt like "I was watching real TV".
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 The branding came many years before DR-DOS came on the scene. The original deal to supply the OS for the IBM PC branded as PC-DOS. Microsoft retained the right to sell the nearly identical MS-DOS. IBM believed this wasn't worth all that much because the copyrighted BIOS of the PC was critical to having software run as is. This worked for a while. Machines like the TI Pro and the Tandy 2000 ran MS-DOS but needed software specific to them. A developer could use most of the code that went into an IBM PC version but whether a particular machine merited the work for its own version of a program, especially when this meant sinking capital into manufacturing the separate discs, and dealing with the hassles of maintaining multiple versions. These machines were often a fair bit nicer than the IBM PC, especially in the area of graphics. But that also meant getting the most out of them meant a lot of extra work as opposed to a port done in less than a week. So, while those machine brought in a lot of revenue for Microsoft, they didn't get much of the market. When Compaq legally cloned the PC BIOS to make machines that ran off the shelf IBM PC software, followed by a clone BIOS becoming available for anyone looking to make IBM PC compatible systems, that changed the game entirely. (Compaq wasn't the first to market but they were the one who got the most stuff right, both in the BIOS and other aspects like marketing, so they became the big name in IBM clones.) It was at that point IBM regretted not paying Microsoft more and taking full ownership of PC-DOS, including derivative versions. Digital Research lost out on the original base OS for the IBM PC because Dorothy Kildall, the wife of founder Gary Kildall and a savvy attorney, looked at the contract IBM proposed and came back with a long list of objections and changes. IBM thought they were taking advantage of Microsoft's comparative youth and hunger, even though Gates didn't lack for serious legal advice either, as his father was fairly well known in the WA law business. The real difference was the perception of where small computers were heading as a business and that it was worthwhile to make some sacrifice initially to get an advantageous position. It went against the grain for DR, who were then a big fish in the small pond of microcomputers, to put up with IBM's snobbery.
Weezer (or their label, rather) were very smart to include this. Everyone wanted to play videos on their computer, after all. It was amazing, it probably wasn't the first time you saw a video on a PC but it was universal, everyone with a PC modern enough to run Windows 95 had this video and the exposure for the band was immense. I''d be surprised if Weezer didn't see a lot more sales for their music out of it, not that they were an unknown band or anything but this got one of their better songs and a pretty cool music video into peoples heads.