I never get over the weird feeling seeing something like Windows 95 which was released with such spectacle, Jay Leno and millions of dollars in launch events, requiring the latest available PC equipment to boot the same day, and of course the looming threat of the SPA sending you to PMITA prison if you didn’t pay your $209.95 being reduced to a small square on my mobile phone still running faster through a million layers of framework. Seemed like serious shit at the time.
Not trying to be a hater, but I did recently install a Windows 95 VM on my Mac to relive that old experience… and then the very first error alert sound, that incredibly tinny really loud annoying sound that would always make me jump out of my chair with crappy PC speakers came blasting out of my much much better speakers backed by a subwoofer and I realized there is no nostalgia value to be had here.
I liked what I had at the time when it was all that I had but I would never want to completely relive that experience. If I got sent back in time to the day Windows 95 launched and had to live the rest of my life from that point on, I honestly don’t know if I would want to touch another computer until like early 1999, maybe late 1998 at the earliest, and only for work.
Same. It was around that time I discovered Linux, and then the *BSDs. Before that, getting online required Trumpet Winsock. I did some tech support for an ISP up until 1998, so I had to know the stack, but rarely touched it myself. From the mid-2000s I moved to Apple, but only because I wanted a laptop with a unix command line and working bluetooth and that was _hard_ back then.
Just realised that means I've not owned a Windows machine - and barely touched one professionally or even much in my personal life - in almost 25 years now.
It's so funny to see the SPA and RIAA being mentioned in the same context as PMITA prison because I just told my friend yesterday that if I ever released the software I actually want to build, that the RIAA and WMG would PMITA in court without so much as spitting on me in disgust before starting.
