Windows 98
personal computer operating system by Microsoft
Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x line of Microsoft Windows, a family of operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was released to manufacturing on May 15, 1998, and generally to retail on June 25, 1998. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid 16-bit and 32-bit monolithic product with the boot stage based on MS-DOS.
Windows 98 was web-integrated and bears numerous similarities to its predecessor. Most of its improvements were cosmetic or designed to improve the user experience, but there were also a handful of features introduced to enhance system functionality and capabilities, including improved USB support and accessibility, and support for hardware advancements such as DVD players. Windows 98 was the first edition of Windows to adopt the Windows Driver Model, and introduced features that would become standard in future generations of Windows, such as Disk Cleanup, Windows Update, multi-monitor support, and Internet Connection Sharing.
Microsoft had marketed Windows 98 as a "tune-up" to Windows 95, rather than an entirely improved next generation of Windows. Upon release, Windows 98 was generally well-received for its web-integrated interface and ease of use, as well as its addressing of issues present in Windows 95, although some pointed out that it was not significantly more stable than Windows 95. In 2003 Windows 98 had approximately 58 million users. It saw one major update, known as Windows 98 Second Edition (SE), released on June 10, 1999.
“Windows 98” enters the record as personal computer operating system by Microsoft. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Windows, personal and computer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Windows 98” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Windows, personal and computer provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q483132. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2003 and 1999.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Windows 98” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.