We couldn't afford to upgrade our 4MB 486 either (well, more like I wasn't allowed to) so I was stuck with Win 3.11 all the way till 1999, skipping 95 completely, skipping color (monochrome monitor).

But by '99 I was old enough to build my own PC, so I built a fancy PIII-450 box, with one of the first nVidia GPUs (RIVA TNT) with 16MB RAM (later upgraded to 32) and finally stepped into the world of fancy color graphics (new color monitor, yay), Win 98, and the world of multi-booting with Linux, QNX, BeOS and of course DOS. I had this fancy GUI boot manager (with mouse support too!), can't recall what it was called but it was so much more advanced than anything else at the time, it had a built-in partition manager and could also get past the 4-partition limit. Man, those were the days, so much cool shit to play around with.

Yeah, Windows 95 was an incredible step up. We had a Mac at home at the time, and 95 was when Windows went from an absolute joke to pretty fricken comparable to what the Mac could do.

> $400-$500 to take it to 16GB

Perhaps you meant 16MB, because an 80486 processor didn't have a snowball's chance of addressing 16GB of real memory?

How was Linux in 1995? Must have been relatively early in its development

I remember reading about it those magazines, but got a love cd much much later