Pah! W95 is the johnie-come-latey. My first home machine ran DOS 3.1 and WIndows 386, but I'd been using them in the office back to DOS 2.11 and occaisionally firing up Windows 2.03 (on a twin-floppy machine with a monochrome display).
That's about where I started with the PC series except that I could only afford a 286 at the time with a mono screen. 386s were another $500.
My first computer was the TRS80 model I with a cassette tape storage system . I later spent a small fortune on an external interface box with floppy drives (single sided - 360KB) and TRSDOS 1.3. Of course I used a hole punch and a notch to make floppies into flippies - double the capacity. With 360k disks at $4 each, it was something of a saving. I later bought a TRS80 model IV; I still have it. I get it out every so often to listen to the sounds of floppy drives and their musical clunk. I must connect up my original Epson MX-80 printer ($850 back in the early 80s) for extra sound nostalgia.
No BSODS in those days - they worked as expected and the screen was green anyway. TRS80s are making a comeback amongst hardware geeks. There are clever interfaces available to put everything ever written for them on a single SD card. I'm not sure what happens after that. Perhaps they also have a dot matrix printer running off the Centronics port ....
