The most memorable changes to older OS

[Black Mage]

What is the most memorable feature change that occurred in older operating systems you once used?

For me it was the transition from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, and there was no longer any management of virtual memory. Like I use to set how much virtual memory a game or program was able to use. Escape Velocity was only allowed 16 megabits, and thats it. And OS X said they would manage it for us, and everyone was sure unsure about if this was a good idea or not.

[jrusso2]

I don't know about shocking but some major events I recall, Kernel 2.0., change from lib5 to Glib, KDE beta, change from OSS to ALSA, and XFree86 to Xorg. Gnome beta. Mozilla going open source. Sale of Star Office to Sun and the release to the open source community.
Oh almost forgot getting rid of my scourge ext2 file system when Reiser then ext3 came out and finally XFS.

[vishzilla]

i didnt experience any "memorable" change while using Windows. Although as jrusso2 mentions, Mozilla going Open Source is one of the defining moments in the software industry