Ah... those were the days... when windows 3.1 seemed advanced with its colours when coming from an atari background! And a built in hard drive... plus a hdd indicator LED (seemed pointless but soon learned it had its uses lol).
Then came windows 95... absolutely mind blowingly modern.. more colours, a more realistically modern feel to it..
Then came Windows 98... we knew the human race was going places now.. computers were becoming serious now that MS had released another OS so soon after 95. Sadly i wasn't a great fan of 98 due to the crashes but it was still better than 95!
WinMe... well that was the end of 90s computing really wasn't it.. many hated it but i found it far more stable than 98.
I remember being at college and starting with 3.1... it was so advanced compared to an atari and you had to "shutdown" instead of just turning it off at the switch! Nobody told me.. so i was just .. yeah.. turning it off like an ST lol.. it was only one day when i overheard someone else being "educated" about it and the damage they'd caused that i realised i needed to do this new hassle too. It seemed pointless and absurd at the time.. but i figured i better keep my head down and out of trouble so shutdown it was. I also remember some folks would boot the computers using their own boot disks.... lol.
My mate had a super cool IPX (I think) based chat program that ran in dos.. can't remember what it was called but we'd turn up for lectures, the entire class would silently boot into this program behind the lecturers back and we'd all be competing to gain admin privileges in this chat program so we could boot the others off... great fun for a while lol. Nobody would actually use it to chat.. we all just wanted to boot the other guy off before he could boot us. When successful there was always someone somewhere letting out a huge sigh and making a rude sign at someone else for it lol. Needless to say none of us got great marks for those assignments though..
Then we got introduced to windows 95 in a different computer suite... wow... so modern! The building has gone now but i still remember it like yesterday.. the fresh paint, the "new" computers with all their super cool fans that were spinning like turbines.. big clunky monitors that looked serious professional and state of the art... ah... life was full of hope.. well kinda. I became hooked on this internet thing and would hit the library at lunch time to find a computer to use.. working on my geocities website while looking at other 90s style websites... and it was all so advanced and ultra high tech! Silly animated gif images of JCBs on "page under construction" pages... etc.. the world had never seen this kinda thing (and now no longer does as everyone has to have a "pro" look to their site with custom error pages etc).
It was a wonderful early computing experience really. In many ways while OS's and websites have got better, those early websites on geocities, tripod and all the rest ... well they were the magic that made the internet magical. Shame most of them have gone now..
I need a new signature... i'm bored of the old one!
), and 
. One of the admins noticed I was accessing syscon and I got a telling off.