Back in my day they had a physical power switch that killed the mains to the power supply. Why we even had to format our 40mb hard drive and reimagine the box once a week, both way… in the snow! And we liked it that way! Kids these days!
I asked my dad to buy Windows 95. But he didn't realize he bought the floppy disk edition. So I had to install windows 95 using the very slow floppy drive. It was either 13 or 26 floppies, I don't remember.
Imagine sitting there while that percentage bar moved glacially, waiting for "Insert Disk 12"
But I still remember how great it felt to get a 1 GB hard drive. "We'll never fill it up!!!"