> If I had to pick, my nostalgia lies with Windows 95 to 98.

Ouch.. I truly feel sorry for people who've never had the experience of "switch machine on, wait 1..2 seconds, start coding". All the machine's capabilities at your fingertips. No OS install to maintain, no updates, no viruses, no hassle.

It was sooo easy to get into (not to master!). Stores in my country would have a C64, ZX Spectrum or MSX running a demo or something, you'd come in, hit a key combo, type something like:

  10 PRINT "RetroTechie was here    ";
  20 GOTO 10

For example an early machine code adventure: I'd read in a magazine some biggest prime number had been found. Fyi: a Mersenne prime, 2^n-1, with n being a big number (10k+).

I quickly realized that number could fit into ZX Spectrum's 48K RAM, if encoded 2 decimals/byte (packed BCD or plain binary 0-99). Worked out Z80 assembly code to do 1 doubling using pen & paper. Some POKEs, a small BASIC program, and voila some semi-big primes appeared. Upped the counter, machine was number crunching for hours, and... yes! Starting & ending digits matched those in article. All the digits from biggest prime science had found up till then, calculated by that humble machine.

Just one of many examples. Modern computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful. But imho much of that era's magic was lost. Windows 95/98 you say? Booorring...