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Best memories of Windows or OS?

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Reply 20 of 37, by Bruninho

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My best memories come from Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.

We had W95 on our first ever laptop (Acer Extensa 710T) and when I borrowed it from my dad to use while I was spending some days with my grandparents, I was caught by surprise when I turned it on and after logon and instead of the default sound, I heard a voice saying "Oi, tudo bem, tudo bem??" (Portuguese for "Hello, how are you, how are you?"). It was my dads voice, he recorded it as a joke on me...

Then after the decent W98 and W2000, it all went downhill with Win XP. When Win 7 came, this was the moment I switched to Apple Macs and never used Windows again as my main OS.

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 21 of 37, by Jasin Natael

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This is a tough question.

Our first family PC, and later my first personal PC (PPC??) was a Packard Bell Legend with a 386sx and Windows 3.1.

I have tons of fond memories playing Golf, and Paint Shop Pro as well as playing Klotzki, Wolfenstein 3D, Blake Stone and Golf.

Also playing Wheel of Fortune with my sister. I also messed with the modem and tried out various AOL free Trials, 🤣.

From there however i moved on to Win95 on my grandma's PC a Pentium 166MMX on the weekends. This was the first PC that I got online with, first experienced Yahoo chat rooms, and other such nonsense, but I rarely got to use this machine so not a ton of memories on Windows 95.

Probably the machine that I have the most nostalgia for was the first PC that i helped assemble and later upgraded myself.
This was a PC Chips based system of course, 🤣. M598LMR to be exact with a AMD K62-500 and 64MB of RAM.

This one ran Windows98SE and I spent the most time on it, upgraded the RAM to 196MB and added a AOpen CD burner (4x with no buffer)

Added a Nvidia MX400 GPU later on...but played lots of games, Quake and Quake 2, Unreal, UT Tournament, Half-Life, Re-Volt all the NFS games. Tons of memories with those.

But also spent the most time on the internet, I mentioned the CD burner so of course this was the Napster, WINMX and later Ka-Zaa PC. Geocities, Angelfire, WinAMP.....
Microsoft Plus....the list goes on and on.

Long story short...Windows98SE I guess.

Reply 22 of 37, by 386SX

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Windows 98 first edition for game and upgrading memories but the best feeling came with Windows 3.1 when coming from msdos was like night and day. The "multitask" windows experience was a whole new world for who back then was used to MS softwares only. Back then I didn't even know AMD cpu existed when I had the Intel 386SX-20.

Reply 23 of 37, by buckeye

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Heh, using dos 6.22 with a "front end" so I could jump right in and play Front Page Sports Football 95 - good times!

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Reply 24 of 37, by Anonymous Coward

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Workbench 1.3 was my first GUI, but I think Windows 3.1 was more memorable because that's where I got my first exposure to the internet with Netscape 1.x browser, and it was a more colourful experience.

"Will the highways on the internets become more few?" -Gee Dubya
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Reply 25 of 37, by canthearu

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My 2 nominations are:

a) Windows NT 4.0 - I used this for a year or so, and it was glorious. Highly stable and decently fast. But then I had to go back to windows 98 for 3d gaming that was taking off at the time.

b) Slackware Linux - It's reliability was legendary, with features that wouldn't make it to PCs for years (like IP masquerading AKA NAT). Compiling your own linux kernel was a fun and necessary adventure.

Reply 26 of 37, by keenmaster486

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I have plenty of fond memories of Windows XP on Pentium 4 era hardware... nothing spectacular PC-wise but lots of fun for a 10-year-old. I downloaded a lot of old games off the internet... some of which I still have, that have been copied hundreds and hundreds of times; the originals being long gone! I remember it being a big deal if I could find the full version of an old DOS game on some bootleg site, instead of just the boring old shareware version that was plastered everywhere. I was pretty reckless on the Internet.

I cut my teeth with OS configuration / system administration on DOS and Windows 9x stuff, because that was the kind of hardware my parents would let me tinker with. Through pure trial and error I figured out how computers work. I probably installed DOS and Win98 (or WinXP) hundreds of times. I had a lot of fun with Windows 3.1 too, although I could never get it to do what I wanted it to because I was trying to run it on XP-era hardware 🤣

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Reply 27 of 37, by Caluser2000

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My first experiance was DRDos 6 with GeoWorks Pro 1.2 on a 286/16. Next was MSDos 6.* Windows 3.1 with a dabble with OS/2 v3 on on a 486 system. Ran Win 3.* along with Calmira for a very long time. Never really used Win95 much at home. I did run Windows 98 for a long time as a home system upgraded quite a bit with w2k theme, wifi and usb support. It turned out being the houses gateway system using 56k modem. Started playing with Linux and find it very useful. Got a few P4s with XP but I usually replace it with some form of Linux. Never touched windows again until my wife bought this laptop with Win10 installed. When it craps out Linux will be going on it.

Other than dos/windows systems I've got some Acorn RiscPCs running a number of variants of RiscOS. Always wanted one back in the early 90s. Got a couple of Amiga A600s as well.

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Apparently 32-bit is dead and nobody likes P4s.
Of course, as always, I'm open to correction...😉

Reply 28 of 37, by JSO

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DOS 5 and 6.22 and Windows 3.x definitely! Good old memories playing games, writing texts on Word and Professional Write and just messing with Windows 3.x.
Prince Of Persia, The Lost Vikings, Aladdin, Lion King, Sensible Soccer, Mortal Kombat I & II, Street Fighter II, Double Dragon III, Pang, Arkanoid, Grand Prix, Test Drive I, II & III, Lemmings, Tornado, Falcon 3.0, NCAA2, NBA Playoffs, Fifa 94, World Cup 94, California Games I & II, Skate or Die, Cyclones, Doom 2, Last Crusade, Fate Of Atlantis, Monkey Island I & II, Supaplex and more... I forgot to mention the Entertainment Packs for Windows 3.x! I had it all!

I was using an i386dx until the summer of 1998 when I switched to P55c and Windows 95c.

I have a friend which I could use Windows 95 after it's release at the end of 1995. He use to have a Am5x86 back then... So I missed on my own home the 1995 - 1998 Windows 95 Multimedia era, but I didn't lost the contact with the new Windows and the DirectX-3D games.

And new best memories came after the purchase of my MMx PC on July of 1998, which soon added an STB Black Magic Voodoo 2! On summer 1999 the cpu upgraded to a K6-2 450 Mhz. From 1998 to 2001 was the best era for me...

DOS IS THE POWER OF OUR CHILDHOOD MEMORIES!

Reply 29 of 37, by chinny22

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Good question, not best OS but best memory
and surprisingly like most it's Win95!
We had only had the PC for 3-6 months and got a legit Win95 OEM CD for $30au from a mates dad. Cant remember when but it was before December so was a VERY good deal.
Installed it on our DX2/66 and hated as I didn't get it, even stopped playing with the computer for bit but then I realised. Treat the start menu like Win3.11 and My computer as dos then it all made sense.
It's not my favourite OS, but its one of my earliest "big moment" after getting the PC of course

jheronimus wrote:

I distinctly remember one evening on the New Year's Eve when I tried to "trick" Windows 95 into thinking I had a modem. I tried adding various network devices via Control Panel and messing with whatever "Internet" stuff was installed. Somehow I thought I could overcome the fact that I had no wired connection to the telephone line. Or, you know, an actual modem.

I was six years old at the time. Life was good.

Ha I remember something similar trying to use fast forward on the VCR to skip the adds on live tv, Kid logic eh?

Reply 30 of 37, by SirNickity

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appiah4 wrote:

to be honest the memory management tools of MS-DOS 6.0, oh screw that, the DELTREE command alone made the upgrade worthwhile.

"move". By far the thing I miss most when going back to DOS 5. Followed by the F8 menu.

I remember going to a friend's birthday party (I was in... 6th grade? at the time) and being a little frustrated that he was having his big stupid birthday the same weekend my dad finally bought the MS-DOS 6.2 Upgrade. I was a weird kid. 😉 ... eh, not much has changed really.

canthearu wrote:

Slackware Linux - It's reliability was legendary, with features that wouldn't make it to PCs for years (like IP masquerading AKA NAT). Compiling your own linux kernel was a fun and necessary adventure.

My friend and I were using Windows 95's Internet Connection Sharing to do this early 1999. We had just moved away for college and got our first place together, so we did what any rational person would do. Went straight to the phone company and ordered a phone line and dial-up Internet, and then made a long Ethernet cable. I had saved up and bought a shiny new 3C905B NIC, and had no clue about networking, but I did eventually find that if his IP and mine were only like one number apart, and if we left the last digit of the subnet mask as a 0, we could communicate.

It was a couple years later before I got into Linux. I asked a friend, who was a big *Nix fan, what distro I should get. He asked what I wanted to do with it. I said, "I want to learn it -- like actually learn it. Tired of installing Red Hat or Mandrake and having a mostly-working OS that I don't know what to do with." So he said, "if you want a Linux distro that only works when you learn how to make it work, try Gentoo." So I did. I had an evening shift at the helpdesk for an ISP, which was usually slow. I had an old Pentium under my desk attached to a spare monitor, and I would compile ISC-DHCP, bind, xinetd, telnet, apache, etc. etc., until I had a working router. I have used a Gentoo box as my router ever since.

Reply 31 of 37, by canthearu

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SirNickity wrote:
canthearu wrote:

Slackware Linux - It's reliability was legendary, with features that wouldn't make it to PCs for years (like IP masquerading AKA NAT). Compiling your own linux kernel was a fun and necessary adventure.

My friend and I were using Windows 95's Internet Connection Sharing to do this early 1999.

I was setting it up in 1996, a little bit before windows 95 came around to my neck of the woods. I spent a couple of days learning how TCP/IP actually worked, as opposed to firing up trumpet winsock and it doing everything at the end of a PPP connection. The clients were Windows 3.11 machines which after trying trumpet winsock with dos packet drivers for a bit, installed the 32-bit windows 3.11 tcp/ip stack and used that instead.

I stuck with slackware for a long time, but I eventually changed a few years back because I was looking for a distribution with better, more intergrated KVM support. I just use centos 7 now.

Reply 33 of 37, by appiah4

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I used to do connection sharing with Redhat 5.2 in 1998/1999. Before that I had used Slackware in 1997 but only had a Modem (I have really fond memories of IRCing on ircii..) but in 1999 we moved to a cable modem and the only way I could get my dad to finance it was to promise sharing it in the house, so we bought an extra NIC, a switch and a lot of CAT cables. The weekend saw a lot of holes being drilled in walls, and all of a sudden we had a whopping 256Kbit internet connection in every room, thanks to Linux. It was like magic.

It's amazing now that I think back to it, that the cable modem we had at the time had no firewall or NAT functions to speak of, it basically routed everything to a DMZ.

I believe it was 2000 or thereabouts when we got our first 802.11b access point, so I no longer had to do the NAT stuff on my own PC. That was when I moved to Windows 2000 and basically stuck with it until Windows XP SP3 or so..

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.

Reply 34 of 37, by canthearu

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appiah4 wrote:

I believe it was 2000 or thereabouts when we got our first 802.11b access point, so I no longer had to do the NAT stuff on my own PC. That was when I moved to Windows 2000 and basically stuck with it until Windows XP SP3 or so..

At first when I got ADSL, I had a USB DSL modem and did the routing on a linux PC. A whopping 256kbit connection, like you. But that PC died (it was such a nice cute little Unisys box, miss it greatly) and I changed to a modem/router like everyone else 🤣.

Reply 35 of 37, by Miraculix

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The first computer I had access to—a Pentium II with 350 MHz—had Windows 98 in its first edition installed. Messing with the system and in DOS mode left me a lot of good memory. Once I edited the IO.SYS, MSDOS.SYS and COMMAND.COM with a hex editor to make it show "MS-DOS 7.1" instead of "WINDOWS 98". It was even possible to prevent Windows starting and make it remain in DOS after boot. Then, WIN.EXE had to be executed in order to start Windows.

Knoppix 3.7 was the other OS I liked a lot. It was the first Linux distribution I got to run on my own machine, an Athlon XP with 2200 MHz. They had and still have the Artwiz mouse cursor theme in use, which is not available anymore on other distributions. It's really hard to install and especially to keep over updates there, since it's overwriting the original X11 mouse cursor.

Reply 36 of 37, by Bruninho

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bfcastello wrote:

My best memories come from Windows 3.11 and Windows 95.

We had W95 on our first ever laptop (Acer Extensa 710T) and when I borrowed it from my dad to use while I was spending some days with my grandparents, I was caught by surprise when I turned it on and after logon and instead of the default sound, I heard a voice saying "Oi, tudo bem, tudo bem??" (Portuguese for "Hello, how are you, how are you?"). It was my dads voice, he recorded it as a joke on me...

Then after the decent W98 and W2000, it all went downhill with Win XP. When Win 7 came, this was the moment I switched to Apple Macs and never used Windows again as my main OS.

I forgot to add... I remember doing some stuff with MS Visual Basic on Windows 3.11, I was mostly doing the GUI part but for programming behind mostly was done by my dad 🤣

Now, I still do pretty much the same thing - I do the UI/UX of apps and websites on macOS Mojave and with Adobe 🤣/Sketch, but sometimes I do some light programming for websites, just so my designs can work.

I also remember spending a lot of time playing GP2, GP3, GP4 and talking to my friends through mIRC and ICQ about the games and stuff like that. OMG I want to go back to this...

"Design isn't just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
JOBS, Steve.
READ: Right to Repair sucks and is illegal!

Reply 37 of 37, by SirNickity

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I really miss summer vacation. Three months of staying up all night discovering music, playing games, and hacking on stuff. I learned so much just having that kind of time to explore.