It sounds like you want people to talk about when they switched from teletypes to terminals with displays, and then from the console/terminal to a graphical interface. Arguably, from a technical perspective (given that this is a Mac forum) this whole board isn't the right place for that, but if there were a home for it, the Lounge would absolutely be it. I can move the thread for you if you'd like, but if you'd prefer, it can stick around here.
My own disdain for the traditional subforum classification of discussion topics probably belongs somewhere else yet, but that's a discussion I'm not prepared to have at the moment.
That aside-- what changes in peripherals are you talking about? Are you seriously asking for people's thoughts on the switch from teletypes to terminals?
If it makes you feel any better, my first two or three computers were predominantly DOS based machines. I believe the third was the first I owned that primarily booted into Windows. I also availed myself of several Apple II systems in elementary school, before seeing most of those swapped out for Macs, and ultimately NT boxes. I don't suppose that edutainment games count as "applications" or "use cases" though.
And, let's be honest, I wasn't particularly doing a lot of file management therein (on Apple IIs, in grade school) anyway, so it didn't matter if I booted to a desktop and launched the "app" with a mouse, booted to a launch screen and launched the "app" with my index finger, or put a floppy disk into a drive and booted directly to the "app."
Actually, what would be really interesting is if any K12 teachers my age or slightly older showed up and compared education software on touch interfaces like iOS/android/Windows-Modern-Interface to education software on Apple II, Mac and DOS/Windows. The iPad in particular has a whole heck of a lot of features geared toward education and using the devices with small children, such as the feature that lets you lock the iPad into a particular app and disable certain regions of the screen, making it perfect for configuring the whole "lab" of iPads (which can travel to the students, saving valuable time that was previously spent changing contexts) to run a single app that the class will be focusing on that day, such as Oregon Trail or Number Munchers or Math Blaster, or whatever equivalent software there is at this point.
It was a bad enough joke that I had chosen to ignore it. It'll be interesting to see where Google Glass goes, and in no way am I going to imply that I think an auxiliary product meant to provide ambient HUD information is the next big revolution in human-computer interaction (although it may be, we've now got small technology that's powerful enough to make the idea interesting), or that I think it's intended to provide a new primary interface. Google Glass, a lot like joysticks, spaceballs, and pads of dials, is going to be a very interesting secondary interface for specific purposes. You don't navigate your desktop with a joystick or a spaceball, and I don't think Google Glass will make any attempt whatsoever at being that type of environment for people.
This statement makes no sense, but I presume you'll mean that early adopters get what they sign up for -- a beta quality experience.
However, if you'd ever looked at Windows 8, you'd notice that the task bar hasn't moved. ever. Not in the final version nor in any of the previews was the taskbar removed. In one or two of the previews, Microsoft was still toying around with some Windows-menu ideas, although I believe this was before they'd gotten the charms and other interface elements down pat. It was, after all, a beta release. (It wasn't even a release candidate at that point, it was in the first developer preview, which was like 8 or 9 months before the final release.)
Also, W4WG is not the truncation or abbreviation of "Windows for Workgroups." The accepted abbreviation is WFW. You can also type "WFW 3.11" so as to indicate that particular common version specifically.
My guess is Microsoft stopped selling it to them. There was a point at which Windows 7 became cheaper than XP, and more economical for netbooks, which kept XP far longer than they should have.
A gig of ram was a whole heck of a lot when XP was new. More than some desktops even supported, and certainly more than a lot of contemporary laptops, but Windows XP SP3 is just a glutton -- and not in a way that actually helps the user, like the caching in Vista/7/8/8.1.
Windows XP Home for netbooks truly had a 1GB memory limit? I may have to find a 2GB stick of DDR and trueImage my eeePC's install of XP back onto it to see.
Netbooks suffered a greater problem though. The simple fact of the matter is that many netbook users were trying to do things on them that the hardware was simply never capable of. Despite being Intel-based, Atom processors have pretty terrible performance. When you spent your $400 or so on a Netbook in 2008-2009, you were getting a computer that was really similar to $400 desktops in 2003 or earlier. The CPU more than the memory is what made 2001's OS feel so poor on them. (Well, that and their really low display resolution often made existing Windows software really difficult to use on them. One of the purported advantages of the Ubuntu Netbook Remix is that it worked well with screens below 600px tall, which was a thing on some of the very lowest-end Netbooks. In a lot of ways, Netbooks were 2008's Chromebooks and tablets. It's just that here in 2013, Chromebooks have 1.8GHz dual-core i5s and four gigs of ram, and tablets have quad core ARM processors and two gigs of ram, and an even slimmer OS.
The people I know who have netbooks just to run one IM window, an e-mail client and Word/OneNote/Evernote or even OpenOffice/LibreOffice (which is an exceedingly heavy Java-based office suite whose performance I need to test soon) for note-taking and other reasonably light tasks (Stuff people here say their G4s are good at) had an okay experience with them.
The people I know who tried to buy a netbook as a primary computer and subsequently did things like games or heavy browsing (let's say "heavy" in the context of a netbook is more than three windows/tabs) and apps bigger/heavier than Office had a very poor experience because they were often replacing a fast, expandable desktop with a slow, non-expandable netbook.
When "CULV" systems like the HP dm1 and the Dell Latitude 13 and Vostro V130 started showing up (which was essentially the precursor to today's Ultrabooks from PC vendors, btw) -- the value proposition of a small system with a really long battery life well-suited to Internet usage became more clear because most of these systems supported two or four gigs of ram and sported processors using a more updated architecture. At the time, a system like the Dell Inspiron 11z were giving you not only a more physically comfortable system to use (with a display larger than 600px tall) but one that was much faster, with at the low end, a low-clocked single core Penryn chip. (Disclosure: I am typing this on one of the faster Penryn chips that was ever available, but this gives you an idea of the capability of these systems. If I'd bought an Inspiron 11Z in 2009, and I thought very hard about it, I would still be using it today, hopefully with the same SSD and 4GB memory upgrades the Penryn system I use got.) (1)
Today, there are a few Atom-based tablets and I believe there may actually be one or two Atom-based "netbooks" still on sale. By and large, the industry and its customers agreed that it had been an interesting experiment, but that 9/10-inches were just too small for real laptops. This is in part because tablets obviated the need for a tiny Internet machine, and did so way better than the netbooks ever did and with even less effort on the owner's part. This is also in part because the things just weren't good at anything. I believe Acer is really the only one making netbooks any more, under its own label as well as under the Gateway label.
Dell has just very recently quit the "netbook" business entirely, killing off the education-focused "Latitude 10" line with the new "Latitude 3330" which should actually be fast enough to run software and big enough for people over ten years old to use comfortably, as well as still being decidedly affordable, and if they ever update that model to a Haswell chip, it will probably get "totally wild" battery life, like the newest 13-inch MacBook Air, which now gets somewhere in the region of fifteen to seventeen hours of battery life if you're using it pretty casually. This is well beyond what even the most careful use of an iPad will net you (minus using the iPad 3/4 purely as an LTE hotspot, which will net you about 24 hours of run-time.)
I'd say that there are products for just about every reason there was to use a netbook.
Hopefully this counts as "covered."
I've been working tech support at a university since 2007 -- both for students and for faculty/staff, although generally not at the same time. I've seen a lot and I've seen it all. To be honest, I have no problem at all believing that either HP messed up the factory image so badly that this was possible, or that something you did broke it. I wouldn't call Windows "fragile" -- but it's also not hard to mess up if you either know what you're doing, or don't know what you're doing but think you do, or don't know what you're doing and just don't care. (Typically, it's something you have to have done though. "installed an app" isn't the only thing that affects Windows.
If it makes you feel any better, and because it's not worth my time having too much more discussion, I'm leaning slightly more toward "HP is very poor at consumer systems and something in their pre-load was essentially a ticking time bomb that was destined to make the machine fail if anybody bought it and used the preload instead of putting their own OS on the hardware.
(1) I just looked at the Latitude 11z. It may have been available in multiple versions. The references I found are to a product that uses first-generation Intel Core parts, which are actually a generation newer than my Penryn (last-gen Core2Duo) system. This puts the Inspiron 11z at fairly late 2009 or early 2010 as a product. "Netbooks" were very much beginning to peter out by then.