At the time, I was one of those geeks who loaded it the very first day. I wasn't one of those imbeciles who lined up at the store at midnight but I did take the day off from work and went to the store that morning. I spent the rest of that day upgrading my two home computers and learning all the new tricks.
I never liked the clunky Win 3.1 and I was so happy to be done with that. Windows '95 was awesome by comparison. My computers suddenly looked and felt like Macs. No other upgrade since provided such a drastic overnight change.
Oh yeah, and I remember being blown away by the Weezer video that was contained as an "extra" on the Win '95 CD. Good memories. Seems like so long ago now...
BTW, I am VERY happy with XP. Most stable OS so far.
Win95 was historic because it cut Apple's advantages down to where the hardware choice available for x86 PCs was worth more to the customer.
WinXP was important because it ended the need to choose between a real OS - WinNT - and an easy-to-use OS - Win98.
It is hard to see how Longhorn could be as important. It might make .NET more useful. But it's too late to save .NET from being a non-event.
It wasn't "Buddy Holly" by any chance, was it?
I concur. My problem with XP was figuring out I needed to upgrade my hardware in order to run the OS properly. My machine is primarily a DAW (digital audio workstation), running pro-sound apps for multi-tracking and mastering. We have 4 machines networked and running smoothly with XP SP2.
Now, if there were only the same quality pro-sound apps and gaming choices for linux I would certainly give it another look. However, I'm not gonna turn my Corvette into a VW bug just to be free from M$.