(no subject)

[arethinn]

Your own preferences and computing ideology aside, Windows 95 is an undeniable icon. For hundreds of millions of people, Windows 95 was personal computing, spanning the inscrutable crudeness of the Windows 3.1 era and the soothing balm of Windows 98. It was inescapable. It was, possibly, the first operating system you used at home.

Hmmm, not really...



I know my household was unusual in that we already owned more than one computer per capita in the mid-90s, but still, my little mind boggles.

Comments

[dragonzuela.livejournal.com]

Apple IIGS, baby. Operating system? You only need to insert that floppy for some of the programs you want to use.

[danodea.livejournal.com]

The first OS that I used at home was CPM-86, followed quickly by PC-DOS (the IBM version, not the MS version).
That was about 11 years before Win95.

[arethinn]

CPM-86

Had to look that up. I'd heard of CP/M (which appears to have been its predecessor), but for some reason I was associating it with minicomputers or something.

[danodea.livejournal.com]

...and you would be correct :)

It also ran on hobbyist machines, the ones where you bought parts from Radio Shack and soldered them together yourself.

My first "home PC" was an early near-clone called an Eagle. It was designed as one monster backplane that supported up to 8 daughter boards, each of which could hold an 8088/8087 and 64KB of RAM. It was designed to run multi-user systems.

Instead, I used those extra 7 slots to build out what was a monster machine at the time, with 640KB RAM, Clock (you had to add-on those back then), and an RGB video card. It also had 2 SSDD floppys and a 16KB hard-drive, which was almost the best you could get back then.

I ran it under CP/M-86 for about 3 days, and switched to PC-DOS.
...
and pretty much never looked back; I ran PC-DOS until I was forced to upgrade to Win95 to stay current.

[charcoalfeathers]

99/4A junkie here ;)