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by 52-6F-62 3362 days ago
"...for the home-user."

I think that says it all right there. In 1994 I was still very young, learning DOS on my mother's old 80286 she'd purchased for work in the mid 80's. I'd had some exposure to Win3.1, but Windows 95 was when I thought the future had arrived.

I was ignorant; but it was more highly polished (than Win3), just looked easier, and it had much greater market exposure because of the business world. It had a few stupid games, could still run most DOS applications (at my age, games), and a clean up of the skeuomorphism that had arrived in the other OS's at the time. Everybody knew what NOTEPAD.EXE did.

Sure you could say the same for Mac, NeXT, OS/2, and pretty much whatever GUI was popping its head up at the time, or eventually.... but my parents didn't know what a Mac was. They weren't cool. Or wealthy.

Queue: what's available for purchase for uncool people in rural Canada who still have technological wants.... and nothing.

Getting that price point down was key in pervading such a wide variety of demographics in the marketplace, and getting the home, unwitting user, hooked; for better or for worse.