Windows 95's release to manufacturing build was compiled exactly 27 years ago today, so to commemorate the occasion, I present some extremely rare footage of various prerelease builds during the usability testing sessions, back when it was still often referred to by its codename: Chicago!
The first portion of the video gives an insight into a focus group for Windows 3.0 and 3.1 users back in 1992 explaining their experience with the interface and what shortcomings could be improved on, presumably used to aid in the research for Windows 95's Explorer interface. It's mildly humorous to hear their reasoning behind the shortcomings saying how "it has nothing to do with the rest of the industry", especially knowing this would be taken into consideration for designing Chicago.
The next piece of footage (dated May 13, 1993) shows a user aptly using Windows 3.1 with the task of locating and opening the Write application, elapsing 9 minutes in total. One of the program groups is also named "Usability Labs Software Server", perhaps used to store various pieces of software for the subjects in question to look at if given the task. The user then takes more than two minutes to attempt and find the application before the footage cuts off.
It then transitions to another clip (dated February 24, 1994) which uses an early build of Chicago from around the end of the Milestone 5 phase and the start of Milestone 6/Beta 1's development. From the looks of it, the build would've most definitely been in-between builds 81 and 89e seeing as it uses the new icons from the latter, and that it still retains the older Start button design from 81. "Help..." in the Start menu has been renamed to "Help Topics..." in this build, which would later be seen in 89e (the footage also predates when that build was compiled). The network icon also reads as "My Network" instead of "Network Neighborhood", the former name of which wouldn't be used until Windows 2000 and Millennium Edition under the longer title of "My Network Places". Clearly, they were wanting to use the "My" suffix for consistency with the other icons at one point early on. As far as the task given to the user in question goes, the time it takes for her to find WritePad (later rebranded as WordPad) is much shorter than it took under Windows 3.1 to find Write.
Cutting to another clip (dated April 11, 1994) of a newer build shows that the network icon now bears its finalized name, and the Start button also looks identical to that of builds 89e and 90c since it still has the arrow next to the text, which would later be removed in build 99. Being dated after 90c was compiled, this would be in-between that and 99. This time, the task given is essentially the same as before, but with a different user and that its Notepad being demonstrated instead. This is the last clip that I showed off of one tape, as the next set of footage is from another tape entirely.
These last set of clips are using a much later prerelease of Windows 95, which appears to be on or around build 189, hence the release notes shortcut on the desktop. The overall scenarios played out here are mostly identical as before, this time with narration. While probably not be as groundbreaking as the usability testing footage for some very early builds shared back in 2012 by Channel9, it does provide a broader picture of the developer's design process with the Explorer interface and the many drafts it went through.
Stay tuned, because where this footage comes from, it isn't even one quarter of the full picture! There's still *plenty* more unforeseen prerelease footage coming your way!
