Jeff Pack, Brown University '99 (English 112, 1996)
In the summer of 1995, our family bought yet another computer, this one for me to take with me to Brown. This one was, at the time, fairly high-end (a 75 megahertz Packard Bell Pentium with 16 megabytes of RAM, countless times faster than that first Packard Bell IBM-compatible), so that it would presumably stave off obsolescence longer.
This new computer also came bundled with the much-hyped Windows 95 operating system. Functionally, there are few changes in the interface from Windows 3.1; most of the changes deal with either performance issues (Windows 95 runs DOS games much faster than Windows 3.1 does, for example) or purely cosmetic alterations. There's all sorts of odd software (like Apple II emulators, or occasionally Linux) running on this machine at any given moment; as I write this web page, I'm also running an e-mail program, a web server, and a talk daemon.
