>Also let's not forget those early days when the OS wouldn't stand in our way (of course, back then the OS couldn't do much anyway, so we often had to write the low-level code to do things because we couldn't accompish it by a system call).
>
>And how about the days where cold-boot of the computer often only took less than a minute? (of course, we have to ignore the original IBM-PC which sat there not doing much for a minute or two after you flipped the ON switch)

Ah, when three-finger salute actually worked? And when someone would ask on a forum how to do it with two fingers, which was possible then, with a thumb over the right ctrl and alt (there weren't any redundant keys between them then). You could watch people vanish from the forum after reading the instructions :).

>And those early days when we *didn't* have to worry much about viruses? (and before Win95, computer viruses were things that only Macintosh users had to worry about)

The honeymoon lasted what, seven years? As early as 1989 there was that Vienna-B virus, with falling characters. And it had a bug :).