Windows 95 came out swinging in August ‘95, and one of the underrated built-in apps that quietly did its job was the CD Player. This thing was dead simple—pop in an audio CD, and it’d play it, no questions asked. No flashy visuals, no streaming, no ads—just your music, straight from the disc. The app showed up first with the original release of Windows 95 and stuck around in later versions like Windows 98 and early builds of XP before fading out as digital files and MP3s took over. You could even manually enter album info (since there was no internet lookup), which felt normal back then. It wasn’t flashy, but if you had a stack of CDs next to your beige tower PC, this was your go-to.