How many floppy disks did Windows 95 come on?

Raymond Chen

Thirteen.

In case you were wondering.

And those were thirteen of those special Distribution Media Format floppies, which are specially formatted to hold more data than a normal 1.44MB floppy disc. The high-capacity floppies reduced the floppy count by two, which resulted in a tremendous savings in cost of manufacturing and shipping.

(I’m sure there are the conspiracy-minded folks who think that DMF was invented as an anti-piracy measure. It wasn’t; it was a way to reduce the number of floppy disks. That the disks were difficult to copy was a side-effect, not a design goal.)

(For comparison, Windows 3.1 came on six floppies. Windows NT 3.1 came on twenty-two. And yesterday, one of my colleagues reminded me that Windows NT setup asked for the floppy disks out of order! I guess it never occurred to them that they could renumber the disks.)

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