MSFN was awesome (it still is) but more active then probably because Windows was less dumbed down and Windows 2000/XP were such a huge step up from 9x (although 9x itself was pretty amazing for its time). Update/service pack slipstreaming was fun, automating various pre and post-install things, tweaking things was exciting.
And given Microsoft's commitment to backward compatibility of Windows features, people (I feel) were a lot more interested in investing their time and effort in finetuning and automating Windows because they were sure that feature would be there for years to come. There were no advanced smartphones like of today's era so PCs is where all the magic was.
I started with Pentium with MMX (Pentium I) on Windows 95 RTM, a motherboard that supported USB 1.0 expansion for future upgrade, Cirrus Logic 2 MB PCI Graphics, ISA ESS 1868 AudioDrive sound card with amazing FM synthesizer, 16 MB EDO RAM, 1 GB Quantum Fireball HDD, Samsung Samtron CRT monitor, Packard Bell keyboard with a 5-pin DIN connector, and a Logitech mouse. A 56 Kbps modem and Realtek Ethernet/LAN card was added later to it.
Future upgrades came to my PC with Pentium III, SiS 6326, then NVIDIA GeForce2 MX 200, 32/64 MB RAM, Samsung SyncMaster monitor, Creative SoundBlaster, Seagate 8GB and Samsung 40 GB drives (UltraDMA and all that goodness), Microsoft IntelliMouse etc.
Microsoft was at their best in that era - in the sense that decisions taken to improve Windows were always in the best interest of USERS, they weren't evil corporate decisions by evil management to maximize their business growth.
I didn't even know Windows could be upgraded back then but once I became aware, I gradually moved up with time to Windows 95a, OSR2 (b), then c with IE4/Windows Desktop Update and then Windows 98, 98 SE, Windows 2000 Professional and Windows Me. IE4/WDU really made my first Windows 95 PC hardware crawl. In my opinion, all the releases of Windows up to XP were simply outstanding for their time, even Windows Me although the trouble with it was it came out after people had had a taste of what Windows 2000 Professional was.
When XP came out, I remember I had the ISO after RTM but before it was officially launched in October 2001. It was the most amazing OS for its time and blew me away with the visuals and sounds, besides all the extra options and the superb user eXPerience. Yes even RTM, pre the "Service Pack 2 with Advanced Security Technologies".
If you really want to know in detail about each OS's features, go and read:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT_4.0
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_98
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_XP
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
Vista was a nasty upsetting shock but much more tolerable with SP1, SP2 especially on my laptop. Windows 7 - I liked but not as much as XP. Then Ivo Beltchev developed Classic Shell to fix the 7 menu+7 Explorer (I tested it with Ivo and gave lots of feedback on resurrecting how old features should be reinstated etc). Vista was the last OS I ran on desktop PC, after which I moved to mobile workstations and gaming laptops and ultrabooks.
Windows 8 was the most mean-spirited and depressive release for me, (even though I got a detachable tablet with Windows 8 to really give it a try with an open mind and not be biased or dismissive). But it was fixable with Classic Shell or StartIsBack and I quickly moved to it from Windows 7 realizing as a platform, it was improved in some nice ways over 7.
Windows 10 was another bad shock due to the forced updates and forced version upgrades and massive bandwidth the OS takes and downloads huge amounts of data without even telling you how big the size is. Today I run a Lenovo Legion Y740 17 inch laptop and a 15-inch 11th gen Tiger Lake ThinkPad, and on it Windows 10 is tolerable, not likeable, but liveable with tons of third party apps of course to "fix" it - StartIsBack++, OldNewExplorer, StExBar, Everything, 7+Taskbar Tweaker, MPC-BE, Open Shell, VistaSwitcher, Winaero Tweaker and so on.
As for the processor platforms that I owned, these are the ones marked with a red underline which I owned (not that many, I was "poor" back then and upgraded very less often).
For me, the real golden era of Windows ended with XP. XP was the last time Microsoft did changes that were mostly ALL FAVORABLE. Starting with Vista/7, it was a mixed bag of really nasty changes that couldn't be fixed or circumvented easily vs some many welcome changes. Although with massive effort from third party apps, it is possible to fix these OSes. The same is true of Windows 8/8.1/10. And yes I know how much of a big change Vista/NT6 was and the Longhorn fiasco, nor would I run XP only today given some must-have and fundamental improvements in modern Windows. I contributed to some of these massive Windows feature articles myself on Wikipedia so I know just how major or minor a release is, how much and what was added or removed but still given the user experience out-of-the-box without third party apps required in a big way to fix and patch things up, I can't give any system after Vista, the XP level of approval (that's why I am xpclient)