Great write up! 
For me, I didn’t grow up with Windows, only as an young adult I came into contact with computers (late 80s), my first contact there was with DOS (and GEM (I think, don’t even remember it)) 
First Windows contact was 3.11 and grew further up to Windows 95, at that time I came across with alternate OS’s , first contact there was RH 5.1 (which didn’t really suited me), so started after that with SuSE 6.0, with some fidling with the kernel rebuilds I managed to get that up and running.
Then came BeOS, it blew my mind on what it was capable for!
Your write reminded on when I first met BeOS, thanks for that!
1 Like