I'm talking 20 years ago, when the average windows machine was a bugladen mess of crap piled on by the OEM because they got paid a bit, and the only "restore cd

I'm talking 20 years ago, when the average windows machine was a bugladen mess of crap piled on by the OEM because they got paid a bit, and the only "restore cd" was an OEM disk which had all the crap. A proper windows CD would have allowed people to wipe all that out and just have vanilla windows. Microsoft weren't interested in that.