I met my first girlfriend through Windows 95: An Internet love story
Summary
And luckily I had quite the hiding place: a nook on the room’s far wall, sectioned off in such a way that the light from a single window, the sound from a nearby stereo, and the glow from an overweight CRT monitor filled the whole space. My outsider feeling lasted through most of my middle and high school career, and though I dealt with it by hiding with comics, video games, and books, I was also hungry to make friends. At the labs, I recall typing out BASIC programs from issues of 321 Contact, dabbling in early LAN computer games like Bolo, and teaching myself how every little menu and option in Windows and Mac OS worked. I alternated between reading the cryptic modem instructions and learning from my own trial-and-error to find the right jumper and BIOS settings—I’d once gotten a Sound Blaster to work with the computer game Jazz Jackrabbit, so I was qualified enough, I figured. He told me to come back a week later, and when I did, I found a stack of free beta-testing invites to why.net—a long-gone ISP whose remnants are still up at the Wayback Machine—along with instructions for how to connect to the service via Windows 95’s clunky internal dialer.