Burn

Windows 95 arrived, and the computer became everyone's.

Before that, personal computing meant the PC-9801. My grandfather had one. I borrowed it sometimes to play games. CUI only. You inserted a floppy and booted. You typed DOS commands, carved out memory in config.sys, set your paths in autoexec.bat. No GUI. You didn't even need a mouse.

The Start button caused a stir. Press the bottom-left corner and everything begins. Not File Manager but Explorer. Dial-up got you onto the internet. Lines formed in Akihabara. Late-night shoppers appeared on television. A queue for an OS launch — unthinkable now. I never saw that particular line in person.

Slightly later, Microsoft ran a members-only developer program. MSDN Subscriptions. Preview builds of operating systems and tools arrived by mail. You could touch the next Windows before its official release. A friend handed me a CD-R and I ran the Windows 98 beta ahead of everyone else. The licensing was dubious, but I think we're past the point of anyone caring. There was a smugness to running what nobody else had yet.

There was an OS called Windows NT. A separate lineage from the 95 family, built for enterprise. Stable but heavy. NT had a variant called Terminal Server Edition that almost nobody remembers now. It ran a Windows desktop on the server and let clients operate it remotely. The forerunner of Remote Desktop. We pushed that heavy NT over thin lines. Remarkable that it worked at all.

Now, never mind remote desktop — an entire OS runs inside a browser. The night I carried that CD-R home feels impossibly far away.