That's how I learned web development in the 2000s. I downloaded stuff at school on floppy disks and took them home to inspect them. I had cool gifs, midi files, html files and I had Home Site 4.0 which had a great documentation about HTML and some basic JS.
Sadly, for me in the late 90s, it was learning the ins and outs of how to modify Win95 UI. Turns out a whole lot of those skills were total dead-ends. But I can help you make your Win95 look and feel however you like!
Need your cursor to be animated but change animations depending on what you're doing? You got it! Find that editing .ini files lacks a certain flair? No problem! Prefer a fuchsia screen of death, or a "fortune" style "safe to turn off your computer" message? I got your back.
I recall that custom animated bootup screen was something that had a different variation of the quirky hack in different subversions through 95-98.
Also made a point of reskinning every last pixel. I still get a similar feeling tweaking my Linux environment (albeit stronger focus on productivity these days). Some inspiration in /r/unixporn, maybe you can relive that again ;)
Cool times anyway. Windows 95 brought back the fun I was missing so much since when I reluctantly moved from my beloved Amiga 4000 to an anonymous Pentium PC circa 1994 - I had been programming under Windows 3.11 for a while when Commodore went down the drain.
Ditto, plus ROMs. SNES/MD/GB ones could be compressed very well, even the N64 ones could be splitted with split(1) and merged with cat.
PC games were expensive and except Max Payne, I'd get bored of them very fast.
But the moment I (re)discovered interactive fiction (I seldom played it under an Spectrmum emulator) for the Z-Machine and Nethack from a distro CD, I was hooked.
