Missed this from @anildash this week on Windows 95 (h/t @gruber) and I love it. I was 12 when Windows 95 came out and our Toshiba laptop wasn’t really capable of running it, but the launch was EVERYTHING to a budding computer geek. https://anildash.com/2020/08/25/what-windows-95-changed/

My best friend Lee Vuong and I were so excited. His 486SX *was* capable of running it but he had to use some sort of RAM doubler that was a scam. We were still very, very excited. We used his CD-ROM to install it on the DOS cards in our brand new PowerPC Mac lab at school.

That was when we learned an important lesson about software licensing — a lesson we promptly ignored. This was all the first or second week of school.

I didn’t get a computer that could run Windows 95 of my own until we got an HP in January 1996 - Pentium 90 with 8MB of RAM, a 1MB video card, 4X CD-ROM and a 1GB hard drive. Lee’s brand new Gateway 2000 computer had a 133Mhz chip and 2MB of video RAM and a 6x CD-ROM

Even though Lee had the better computer (not that I was *that* jealous - honestly, I was just happy to have a computer at all), we spent hours each night on the phone with each other on our computers. Not online with each other. Talking on the phone as we played with our PCs

The Windows 95 CD-ROM was so good because it had the Weezer Buddy Holly music video. My older sister would come home from college and would get so annoyed that I’d play it nonstop because I had the Blue album on cassette or CD and she wanted me to listen on headphones.

But 12 year old me could not be deterred. I had a Spike Jonze music video in glorious 800x600 full screen on my 15” .28 dot pitch CRT monitor with attached stereo side speakers. Suck it, Kelley!

The new PC (which was the family computer in name and location only. The $500 for the monitor came out of my own pocket. I was a pre-teen miser) had a 14.4 modem that was much better than the slower external modem I bought for the laptop from Software Etc. the previous summer

(Side note, the two computer books I owe everything to are DOS for Dummies snd Modems for Dummies - got Modems for Dummies from the public library along with a book on the stock market the summer of 6th grade)

Although Lee and I liked taking on the phone while we played with Windows 95, we really wanted to talk to each other over our computers. Sending each other faxes using our fax modems and inkjet printers (mine was an $450 Deskjet, his some Canon with higher DPI but worse quality)

Was great, but we wanted to do more. Our parents wouldn’t pay for us to have online services and widespread ISP services weren’t very common in January 1996. So we compensated by creating free email addresses using Juno via a floppy disk Lee’s computer programmer uncle gave us.

At least twice a day, I’d dial up into the Juno client to check my email. Cew4 (and later, after I forgot my password or messed up my account, [email protected]). Lee, Lee’s uncle, and my software engineer aunt were the only people who sent me mail at first.

At the end of January, we had a language arts project and were told to create a presentation about African folktales. Lee and I were partners. All the other kids used poster board but I had a brilliant idea. That month’s PC Mag featured an article on making your own web page

(Side note, I’m pretty sure my future colleague and friend @LanceUlanoff contributed to that article)

I had spent very little time on the web or even AOL or USENET, but from the first time I learned about it (in a Nintendo Power article about the XBand Modem in 1994), I was hooked. I was obsessed. The web was what made sense to me. It was my thing before I even used it.

So I decided Lee and I would build a web page. We used the PC Mag article and some resources we found using the AOL connection in our Mac lab (where Lee and I had been made defecto admins after something like the fourth day of school) to print out some resources on HTML.

We built our website on AOL’s Hometown thing — again, because the school had an AOL account with some limited full internet capabilities. I don’t remember why we didn’t use GeoCities but we didn’t. It was a huge hit.

The design was poor but the content was great and it worked. Plus, we mostly built it on the highest-end Mac that belonged to the wonderful woman who was our school’s technology specialist (I can’t remember her name :( ) because that was the only one at the time with a modem

Because we spent so much time doing this, we managed to see/understand the password for the middle school’s AOL account. Remember, this was before AOL offered unlimited plans so most plans were for 10 hours a month or some bullshit. What I learned though was that either schools

Got a special unlimited account or no one in Gwinnett County’s central IT office monitored the Sweetwater Middle School AOL account. Because Lee and I figured out the password was sms17 and then had free AOL.

(The reason we didn’t just use free trials was that the free trials wanted a credit card and neither of us were bold/dumb/bad enough to dare take a credit card from our parents wallet)

Anyway, we both used that AOL account until BellSouth started up its ISP service in the fall of 1996. The password wasn’t changed and the account was active until sometime in 1998 when the county finally did an audit and canceled it.

Now the problem was that Lee and I couldn’t talk on the phone and be online at the same time. Enter ICQ. 1845645. Later in 1996, after the stunning success of our African folklore website, Lee and I both got our own GeoCities accounts and pages.

We used to get into competitons over who could implement new features first. Lee got Frames working correctly first but I was the first to embrace JavaScript. The scrolling marquee that welcomed you to Christina’s Home Page was really something special.

As was the auto-playing Smashing Pumpkins MIDI file (“Today,” of course). The summer before 8th grade, the school upgraded all the Macs in the Mac lab to use Ethernet to connect to a T3 or ISDN line. Lee and I were paid $40 and some Chick-fil A to help install the network.

I’m still mad at AppleTalk btw and I will never recover. You don’t know the pain of configuring a LAN until you have to use AppleTalk on System — excuse me, Mac OS System 7.5 or some bullshit. Fuck you, AppleTalk.

By the time I was 13 — a year after Windows 95’s release — computers WERE my life. Other than acting (my after school activity that became a much bigger part of my life as I got older), computers and the internet were my passion and obsession.

That first web page in January 1996 led to many more and I needed more storage space from GeoCities (b/c 2MB is not enough!) and became a Teen Community Leader — meaning I was unpaid tech support and also responsible for content moderation. I was 13.

The fact that minor children were responsible for reviewing blocks of pages for content/rules violations is of course, insane, but I didn’t care. I got 10MB and a custom short domain. GeoCities sent me an Amazon gift certificate in 1997 that I used for books.

I got a free hat and t-shirt when the company went public, along with 50 shares of stock. When Yahoo bought GeoCities in 1999, that stock became Yahoo stock and I was briefly very rich. My mom wouldn’t let me sell the stock when it was $400 a share (21 years later I’m still mad)

After the GeoCities acquisition, I filled out some feedback about how Yahoo could integrate GeoCities community stuff with Yahoo Groups. They liked my response so much, they included me in a call with engineers snd PMs.

I was now 16 and ecstatic. The call was going great. There was some talk of me coming to Sunnyvale for meet and offer feedback. Would that be an option? They’d pay for my flight. It was then I said I’d need to check with my parents. Silence.

Yahoo was not thrilled to learn that not only was I a minor but that minors had been acting as defacto employees. Today, I’d still get flown out for some sort of developer conference. I’d probably be featured at the event. Back then, the convo just ended. No trip.

Soon after, the Teen Community Leader program ended and the CL program ended altogether not long after. I feel responsible for at least the teen component. Being 16 is tough.

Anyway, that’s a long ass thread except to say that my life forever changed on August 25, 1995. I didn’t even have the damn operating system until January — but Windows 95 changed my life. For that reason, it will forever be my favorite piece of software of all time.