As MS were completing the traverse to the zenith of control. IBM had already made all their retarded decisions about OS/2 by this point, DEC had yet to sell out to Compaq, and HP made expensive workstations and printers that we actually liked.

And everything sucked and everything was a lot of work. I looked after a modestly sized Netware 3 setup - maybe 150 PCs, two file servers, a GroupWise server. Things were transitioning from the previous PathWorks arrangements, which was a hideously complex (hey, it came from DEC! If it wasn't hideously complex, it wasn't value for money, right?) system that basically provided file and print sharing to PCs from VAX VMS systems. In the background we had a number of VMS systems that were used for development, and people logged into these primarily through VT220 and 320 terminals on their desk; there were a pile of terminal servers multiplexing the serial connections.

(Remember that MacOS at the time was a pile of crashtastic, incompatible - sometimes even with itself (hello my massive list of extensions! Which one of you is making my computer fail to start? who can say?) - unstable, expensive shit, and OS/2 was just Not A Thing. There were no Macs in our business, and the only OS/2 system was some third party box with which we were required to integrate one of our products)

The NetWare client for Windows was never great (my very first job was as a NetWare 3 admin for 30-odd WFW3.11 clients), but come NetWare 4 and Windows 95, it seemed that the Novell team were coding with their feet. Or someone else's feet. It'd crash. Or not connect to the server. Or connect to the server a lot, consuming the per-connection licences at a hideous rate, causing me to have to go down to the server console and manually disconnect the superfluous instances.

And did you ever see the fuckery that was involved in configuring a NetWare server?

This shit was all on Novell; we had a Windows NT 3.51 fileserver (airgapped for some super-sekrit project or other) and funnily enough the client connections to that thing might have been slow but they fucking well worked. Hell, PathWorks might have been a dog from hell (it was), but it worked.

And the dicking around you had to do to set someone up with a VT and an account on the VAXCluster - let's just say the technote for that ran to 3 single-spaced pages, and leave it at that.

With the advent of Windows 95 (which enjoyed a mercifully brief tenure at our place, being rapidly superseded by the dull-but-worthy NT4), we discovered a new type of user: the one whose Windows would become mysteriously unstable. Well, mysteriously more unstable than usual. They'd have many more than usual blue screens. They'd have trouble starting up and shutting down their machines. And they all - to a man (and it was always a man) - had discovered a tool called REGEDIT.EXE.

Y'see, I think that (and remember, I'm not defending business practice here; MS were evil, right enough, and they're not now, so I'm going to move on even if you can't) in the vast majority of cases, computers are fairly kindasorta deterministic. Even things like memory leaks and race conditions satisfy the conditions; do things X and Y often enough for long enough, and Mr Crash will come a-knocking.

But there's an old saw - a little knowledge is a dangerous thing - and it's never more true than when (a) The Internet and (b) REGEDIT.EXE are in play. Windows 95 was perfectly capable of shooting itself in the head, and did so with alarming frequency, but that frequency was drastically elevated when the user in question was a "computer expert" (dude, just because you know VMS Pascal inside out doesn't mean you automatically know a damn thing about Windows) who was given to "tuning" or "tweaking" their system. And this extended to the domestic arena. Regular people would have the usual frustrations with their W95 or OS7/8 boxes, but for real, off-the-scale unfixable RRR stuff, you need a Power User. Or, as I like to think of it, "people who don't know much but they do know just enough to make a real mess".

And what we must remember is the harsh reality - Windows 95 was what let people Get Shit Done. Through all the crashes and the blue screens, it was what people could afford (OS/2 was hilariously expensive; Macs ditto) and it let them run that old copy of WordPerfect or WordStar without any excessive fuckery. Sure, it crashed - but it would be Windows 2000 that delivered a reliable desktop OS, and that was half a decade away.

Alternatives? Linux? In '96? Bitch, please. Mac? Sure, if you liked crashes and spending lots of money on kit from a company that had clearly lost its way and wasn't looking good for making it to the millennium. OS/2? Sadly, OS/2 required too much memory (which wasn't cheap, remember; Windows 95 would boot and sort-of run in four megabytes), hardware support was patchy (especially in the fast-moving-at-the-time world of display drivers) and wasn't cheap itself. Workstation offerings from Sun, HP/Apollo and so on were priced well out of the range of regular enterprises.

It was a fun time to be an admin - security was yet to be the overarching source of worry, paranoia and legislation that it is today, so there was a lot more freewheeling, there was a lot more diversity (everything's all Windows on the client and Linux/Windows on the server these days, with the odd OS X box for flavour), and things were changing fast - but it was frequently difficult, often frustrating, and when shit broke, it broke hard. And I went up and down the stairs a lot, too.