@Boom_Stick

It was the Microsoft launch announcement of Windows 95. Which sold 7 million units in the first 7 weeks and 40 million units in the first year, at suggested retail of $210 per unit.

The person in the tan shirt is Bill Gates. Nerd for sure and can't dance for shit, but he was celebrating that he was about to become one of the wealthiest men on the planet.  

To give some perspective because it's sometimes hard to wrap one's head around, today, according to Forbes at least, President Donald Trump has a net worth of 2.1 Billion US Dollars.  

The nerd who can't dance for shit can now buy and sell that, 56 times over, at a current net worth of 113.3 Billion US Dollars.

Any and all software was available on BBS's. Given enough time to download 6 disc. You could get programming langauages like Turbo Pascal and such. All games and then you had to print out the file that had the wheel of info to break the copy protection by answering the question right.

In work we all used a 386 with a math coprocessor to run AutoCad. Imagine people nowdays having to buy a separate chip to run certain software. Then onto 486 and then off into the wild blue yonger or some such. I got a PC for Christmas in 1982. Brother of dads employer that funded a lot of the business when they got short of cash was big on getting into the computer age. I worked at the same company after high school and the brother signed my checks in the engineering department even though he lived in another state. Google had a series of lectures on him. Wrote the book used in teaching on field effect of transistors. Worked for Texas Instruments then got into venture capitalism with a partner from wall street. Funded several companies that made it big. Including Electionic Arts. EA games....Yeah he did well for himseling, got all his knowledge via being in the Navy in the Korean war and then going to school on the things he got from the Navy.

I knew exactly who those nerds were, just didnt know what the specific ocassion was.

Ah yes, the Doom, Duke Nukem, Mech-Warrior, Wolfenstien days. My dad got pissed when I gave some chick in New Zealand our home number I met in a chat room.

I do not miss the early PC computer days of the early 1990's and prior. Fiddling with autoexec.bat files to get certain dos games to work was a pain in the ass. Never mind if you setup the IRQ of a new hard drive wrong on some IDE models, they would eat themselves.

To me, personal computing did not get enjoyable until Windows 98 came out and USB was pretty much going to be a long term interface standard.

I did all of that. Great times.

Windows NT was my first real trouble-free experience.

AOL, Compuserve, and BBS weren't connected to the Internet though (or at least not until the late 90s).

The early days of actual dial-up Internet:   mid-late 1980s, college had unix servers which had a few modems attached to serial ports.

Being able to dial in from home on an IBM PC on a 300 baud modem, log into a unix shell, and actually telnet/FTP to other unix machines on the internet was almost mind-blowing.

ASL ?

I can still hear the screech of a modem getting on the Internet... and I remember when I got cable internet and what a great experience.

I had a T1 line at an old company I worked at in the early days of the internet. I vividly recall walking in on people watching online porn.

Thought I was ballin’ when I got 56K. Even though the internet sucked the 90’s was the greatest decade ever.

Lol

I remember 300 Baud on an 8-Bit Atari back in the BBS days.

Commodore 64 with 300 baud accoustic coulpler here. We old.

My son and I did that and it was the best, ever.

The first dial up I used used a teletype tape to transmit the code.