My Personal Computing History | Part I: The Windows Era (1995 – 2009)

Earlier this week I was perusing Locals when something caught my eye. It was a post from a user named Greg Gauthier listing each operating system he’s used over the years going back to the early 1990’s. The list included his daily drivers as well as the ones he was experimenting with at the time, and it got me thinking why not compile a list of my own. It took about twenty minutes or so to recall them all and to put them down on a list, but in doing so I noticed a few trends that I’d never really considered before. So I figured this could be a fun little post revisiting my own personal computing history, and an invitation for you to share yours as well! Below is a screenshot of my list which includes my daily driver, any alternative systems I was using at the time, and experimental systems that I was testing out.

The list can also be broken down into three distinct eras: The Windows Era, the Linux Era, and the Use-All-the-Things Era.

WINDOWS 95 (1995 – 1998)

My family got our first home PC in 1995. It was a Packard Bell Legend 822CDTW Minitower running Windows 95, and it was magical. Before then I hadn’t really used a computer for anything substantial; mostly just playing Oregon Trail on my school teacher’s Apple IIGS, really, but when we got that computer I started exploring the system and finding fun things to do.

In 1997 I started middle school and, in something I did not realize as being very strange until much later, the school I was at issued all of the middle schoolers laptops. I swear I remembered them running Windows 98, but I was only there for the fall semester so it must have still been 95 (cut me some slack, I was eleven at the time), but regardless of which OS it was running it was so cool to have my own laptop. That may be common these days, but in the mid-90’s it was pretty unheard of! We used it to write our papers and to do homework, and as an added bonus it served as weight training as I would have to lug that 2,000 pound slab of metal and plastic on my walk to and from school.

One cool thing that I look back on fondly was the way the school was really invested in helping the students in my grade to have a leg up by requiring classes on how to use Windows (which I was already familiar-ish with) but also the ins-and-outs (as well as some advanced features) of Microsoft Office 97 which serve me well to this day. It was that same year that we had to take a computer class — yes, a different computer class. I remember walking into the computer lab and being very confused because we had these fancy new Compaq laptops with the latest software, but we were being taught MS-DOS on old PC compatible machines. If I am totally honest, I hated it back then, but I’ve grown to love the DOS environment over the last few years.

WINDOWS 98 (1998 – 2000)

We had Windows 98 at home when it launched. To be totally honest, I don’t recall much at this time. I wasn’t much of a tech nerd at this point and this part of my life was a little fuzzy as we had a lot going on including several moves and having to get acclimated to new schools several times in the course of about two years. That said, I do have fond memories of this time. This was around the time that I started geting into PC games for the first time. My step-dad worked in IT at the time and so we had two computers in the house, both running Windows 98 and we would play games like Command & Conquer (C&C, Red Alert, and Tiberium Sun) over the LAN. We would also make pretty regular trips to the mall to visit our local Software Etc. to get our next fix. Games we played back then included things like Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 and Combat Flight Simulator 98, Delta Force, NHL 98, and a myriad of Lucasarts titles including my favorite of that era: X-Wing Alliance. It was also around this time that we got high speed internet and were able to play online with some of his friends. We would play Red Alert with his co-workers and I would constantly get demolished, but it was a great time and a lot of fun.

WINDOWS ME (2000 – 2004)

When I shared my OS list on Locals one of the guys on there said to me, “You used ME for 4 years?!?! You’re either insane, or one tough SOB!” Now I’ve already covered my thoughts on Windows Millennium Edition in another post here, but I’ll restate my experience with it for the sake of this article. I used Windows Me because it was what I had. This was the year I started high school and so my parents gave me one of our desktops to use. I know a lot of people think it’s the worst Windows OS ever, but that was not my experience. I used it to do school work, but really it was mostly used playing games and interacting in some pretty fantastic online storytelling communities. Perhaps it was because of the hardware in the machine, or maybe it was something else, but I really didn’t have many issues with it blue screening on me or with it slowing down until 2003-ish when I started using P2P alternatives when Napster got shut down. That’s enough to kill any PC.

“You used ME for 4 years?!?! You’re either insane, or one tough SOB!”

Scott Loveless

Overall, I had a good experience with Me, which is probably why I am running Windows 2000 Professional on my vintage ThinkPad at the moment. It’s got the same look and feel, but with the stabilty of the NT 5 kernel.

FUN FACT: Many of the application install wizards on Windows to this day are still using Win2000/Me icons in them!

WINDOWS XP (2004 – 2009)

Here’s the big one. Windows XP, in all it’s glory! Like many people my age, I loved Windows XP. It was the first consumer version of Windows to run on the NT kernel (launching with NT 5.1 if I remember correctly). Everyone remembers it because of the blue and green theme and the famed Bliss wallpaper (the green hill one), but I was more of a Windows Classic theme kind of guy. After graduation I was given one of our older PCs to replace my dying Windows Me box, and it was the one that I used through out my early college years.

I enjoyed gaming on XP, though at this point I had shifted more back to consoles with the PlayStation 2, the original XBOX, and the GameCube but it was around this time that I started getting more serious about writing. I had started taking an interest in writing fiction a year earlier thanks to one of my high school english teachers who took the time to really invest in her students and to encourage us to explore our creativity.

Also, in early 2004, I gave my life to Christ and took an interest in topics surrounding Christianity of which I have written extensively and a lot of that started on that old eMachines XP box using Microsoft Office XP. It was at this time that I started blogging as well. Looking back, I was fascinated at just how much of my personal development happened all at once which is probably why I remember using XP so fondly.

In 2005 I went to college and my life transformed pretty significantly. It was the first time I had branched out on my own and pretty early on I met my beautiful wife. This was around the time I started taking an interest in the technology itself too. I took a part time job with the school’s IT department where they had me take apart and reassemble PCs to get used to working on them. I had friends who did support work, cloning drives, scripting; all things that I use to this day, though I wouldn’t get real hands on experience doing those things for a few more years.

I went on to use XP until the Fall of 2009. We had just bought our first house and I was taking classes at a new school as I continued to pursue my Bachellor’s degree. I had given my XP tower to a friend before we moved and my wife’s XP laptop was about done, so we bought two new PCs when we moved in to the new house. One was an Acer Aspire One netbook running XP. I loved that little netbook (as I mentioned in the last post about elementary OS). The other was a Dell all-in-one machine running Windows Vista…

WINDOWS VISTA (LATE 2009 – EARLY 2010)

Vista was… rough. I felt for Vista the same way that many people apparently felt for Me. I loved the theming of the dekstop. The Aero theme was gorgeous at the time. I liked the black taskbar with the circular start menu icon. I liked the way they built upon the improved XP start menu. I liked the glassy blue folder icons. I liked idea of the desktop widgets. I liked a lot of the design choices they made for Vista, but it was slow and cluncky. I recall back then joking that Microsoft was trying to be like Apple (who had already done many of these kinds of design elements in OS X, but better), but they just didn’t know how. Add on to that the frequently crashing applications and the intrusive User Account Controls (UAC) pop-ups and I was getting really frustrated.

It was at this time, around March of 2010 that I noticed the kid in front of me in my psychology class had a laptop that looked strange. It wasn’t a MacBook, but it definitely wasn’t Windows. I stopped him after class and asked him what he was running and he said it was this thing called Linux. So I looked it up and… well, I suppose that can wait until next time.