23 years

8,401 days

201,624 hours

12,097,440 minutes

725,846,400 seconds

Lets go back all the way to August 24th, 1995 and the release of Windows 95 by Microsoft.

Windows 95 First Run Desktop Screen

My own tech journey began about 10 years earlier when I purchased a Commodore 64 and started poking around BASIC and playing games that used 8-bit sprites on the screen. I spent hours on that machine and used one for so long that members of our Naples Commodore Users Group, yes the Italy version of Naples, eventually passed along all their gear to me as they shifted to IBM compatible computers.

That move for me happened in the early 90’s. My first IBM compatible was a machine I got as part of a computer course from a school in Scranton, PA. The course took me though learning about the system, its architecture and add-in cards like the Sound Blaster 16 that I received and installed. That system had a 286 processor as I recall, 4 MB of system memory and a 10MB hard drive. It ran Windows 3.1 – my first version of Windows. Ultimately, I upgraded to Windows For Workgroups 3.11, upgraded the CPU and added memory over the course of a couple of years.

Then August 24th, 1995 arrived.

I was actually back in the states attending some advanced Navy training when Windows 95 launched. I was attending classes  at Rutgers University in New Jersey and a local electronics store was having a midnight launch event for Windows 95.

Of course, I went and got in the line and had a blast leading up to the store opening. Local press was there to cover the event and everyone was generally geeking out pretty good. My biggest memory is just walking into the store just after midnight and seeing these massive displays of Windows 95 in its blue box with the Windows flag flying on them. There must have been thousands of copies for sale.

I had another week of classes left before I could get home and install the Windows 95 Upgrade on my system. The instruction book/user guide that was included in the Windows 95 retail box was the most read item over the course of those 10 days or so. I knew everything possible about the Windows 95 operating system – at least everything that was in that booklet.

So I got back to Italy, installed Windows 95 and never looked back. I was and still am very much part of the PC, Windows and Microsoft ecosystem.

After hearing about GeoCities from a friend, I started my own site at GeoCities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/1094 and called it Another Windows 95 Links and Resources Page.

Why that name you ask? There were so many Windows 95 related web pages popping up on the Internet that it truly was just another one of them. A couple years later GeoCities started supporting the redirection of domain names to your site and I registered my first domain name – AnotherWin95.com and pointed it at SiliconValley/Heights/1094.

That was my home on the web until well after Yahoo! bought GeoCities in January 1999. A couple of years later I moved the site and purchased my first web hosting for it. During this time frame it was still all HTML that I coded myself in Notepad – a very manual undertaking considering the things I was posting and sharing back then.

It was around 2004/2005 that I decided to move the site over to WordPress and start fresh. I also retired the AnotherWin95.com domain name, it still redirects to this site, and selected WindowsObserver.com as my new destination.

Since then there are more than 5,400 articles posted here, almost 300 episodes of the Observed.Tech PODCAST and more than 410,000 tweets.

I have had a blast along this journey for the last 23 plus years and look forward to even more. Thanks for taking the trip with me.

Stay Safe Out There.

P.S. No doubt the timing was planned, but a developer over on GitHub named Felix Riesberg has released Windows 95 as an electron app. If you are on Windows, macOS and even Linux you can install it and stroll back into those ancient DOS based days of Windows 95.