His timeline was really confusing. HN probably stripped out the newlines he used.

  3.1 = buy  
  95 = skip  
  98 = buy  
  ME = skip  
  XP = buy  
  Vista = skip  
  7 = buy  

He skipped ME.

The "every other version" rule left him on 3.1 while the rest of the world was on 95, though. Seems like a pretty broken rule...

Yeah, it ate the newlines and I kind of posted in a hurry... oopsy.

Thing was I didn't have a computer capable of running Win95 at the time, and even then convincing my parents to drop $100 on that plus the requisite hardware upgrade was pretty tricky.

Then this and that happened, we got the new computer with 95, and then upgraded it to 98. Ah, those were the days :)

No, I went to XP.