#AskFedi: for those whose first computer experiences were with Windows 95/98 (or NT) and who look back on it fondly:
What would be needed to rekindle that early experience of wonder around computers and/or the internet? What stands out in your memory as the cause for that sense of wonder back then? (The answer to these two questions can be different!) 
@joepie91 The amount free time to poke around it a kid in elementary school has. It's hard for me to seperate it from being a young child ( I'm younger than windows 98, but it's still the first computing experience I had).
I have good memories of spending hours trying every menu and every function of the software (e.g. in controll panel, or word 2003)
@joepie91 I have way too many feelings about that to describe in a toot or even an essay.
@joepie91 sorry, it was dos and windows 1.0 (which was horrible) and then wfw 3.11 (similarly horrible) and then Slackware Linux (which needed the help of a friend to get x11 running).
It was nice that you needed trumpet winsock to connect to the internet (Microsoft didn’t implement tcp/ip natively for wfw).
One thing that stands out for me was that we had 10 mbit/s (and later 100 mbit/s) in our dorm rooms at the Campus in Enschede and that those speeds reached the US at really low latency.
One of the really nice things was when we got quickcam’s that used parallel port as an interface. 😎
@joepie91 of course that was before #Connectix was acquired by Logitech see this Wikipedia page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickCam
@joepie91 The big difference is that before there were certainly still corporations trying to make money, but in the computer space it was more along the lines of "buy this thing". So when you bought Windows, Windows was largely a software product meant to do its job well. Even ads would just be a static banner to sell a product.
Now they're trying to monetize your every action. Subscriptions, tracking to sell your profile to advertisers, the focus is no longer a product. You're the product.
@joepie91 What wonder? It was a computer. It worked, we could pplay games on it. :)
@joepie91 The lack of intrusive advertising, and sites like geocities that allowed the average person to create a page or series of pages about their special interest(s) easily.
@joepie91 That's a really good question! (And I don't really know.)
Looking back, Windows 98 is objectively, worse than all other systems I have used (eg. no lockscreen or disk encryption and a rather cumbersome terminal UX), but I do have fond memories.
Interestingly, I also have those fond memories for other old systems that I have used a long time (Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu 12.04), so it's probably not the software.
@joepie91 There was so much to discover. The computer and all its software and was really complex and you could dig around and understand it bit by bit. Change the boot logo. Find the hidden file that reset the counter in the shareware you got to use for 30 days. Everything was like a magic bounty hunt. I spent a lot of time playing with different audio and music tools from www.maz-sound.com. I learned to master Paintshop Pro and later Photoshop. This thought me loads about signal processing and how everything was put together. Since the beginning for me in the early 90s I have just followed along with the development of everything and related it to earlier knowledge. The magic is not here any longer as we do not have the same control over our devices anymore. The Android modding community and Linux is the closest to what I experienced growing up.
@joepie91 For sense of wonder, if it has to be Windows, it should be one of the 3.x Windowses.
Windows 95, especially the early releases, were a lot more fragile, and a lot less wondrous, than 3.x
@joepie91 I think it was mostly Windows 2000 but I did use Windows 98 for a little bit before that.
What would be needed to reproduce that? Me being very young, not knowing much about the world, not having much responsibilities
Most of the wonder came from learning new things, without the complexities that come with learning new things today.
The answers I've gotten to this so far are very different from what I expected, but very interesting!