Gosh windows 95 was great - especially the ability to navigate the OS from the keyboard alone - At one point I knew W95 so well I could literally navigate the OS by hand without a screen.

An aquaintance at one point changed all the graphics settings to black - so ever screen, menu, text etc was black and you couldnt see anything. I was able to help her by using just the keyboard to navigate to settings and restore defaults. I did it from memory and key-clicks.

Also, it was a fun OS to fuck with people in the nascient realm of virus' of the time, there was setting the desktop as an image and hiding whatever was actually on the desktop so nobody could click on things... remote access BSODs etc.

I'm on an HP flagship gaming laptop now and it consumes probably 1,000 times more power (watts) and Compute to just display this single text entry form on HackerNews than any W95 machine back in the day...

In ~1997 or so I had to shutdown a branch office in San Diego and when I did so, we had a number of plastic sealed boxes of brand-new W95 on 3.5" floppies... I kept them for over a decade and then sold them on Ebay as collectors items for $75 each... and wrote a tale about how they were computing history.

But I had a PDA in 1993 which was by CASIO - and it had a little spreadsheet app on it, and I made a Gematria translator app in it - so I could type in any words and its formulae would spit out all the Gematria numbers for a name (the Celestine Prophecy was a famous book of the time)

That PDA was similar to this one, but less sophisticated - and I had that thing for ~25 years... but unlike OP I didnt take out the battery and it ruind the device.

Back when phones had physical keypad buttons and T9 text, I could send a message without taking the phone out of my pocket. It looked suspicious though

As fond of memories as I have of the time I used Windows 95 and how much I learned from using it as a pre-teen, I mostly remember my maintenance schedule of reinstalling by the entire OS about once every month or so when it broke. I guess that jumpstarted my lifelonglifeling career/hobby of computer fuckery.

My first PDA was a Casio too, I don't remember which exact model but it was a Pocket Viewer and it was great. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pocket_Viewer

My "true" PDA was an Audiovox Maestro I got used off of eBay. I even got a compact flash modem adapter so I could dial-up using it. I was shocked to see almost 10 years later when I got my first smart phone, a T-Mobile Dash 3G, that the OS had barely changed since the Audiovox Maestro back then!

Not sure there's a point to any of this except my own anecdotal trip down memory lane :)

"Memories... they're basically the only thing you have to think back on"

-- Steven Write

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I love "anecdotal trips down memory lane" -- because its stunning how much I have done and known in my life that I forget.

I truly regret not listening to my mom's advice to journal.