Posted by Henry Butz on September 13, 2006 at 10:08:38:
I witnessed the dawn of the Personal Computer, otherwise known as the "PC". I've seen it all - from the Atari, the Radio Shack TRS-80, Timex Sinclair, Commodore Pet, CPM, to the dawn of Microsoft PC-DOS aka MS-DOS. I have used such operating systems as OS2 and PC-DOS7, Windows 3.0 and 3.1, the horrible Windows 95, the better Windows 98se, and the best "accident" which Microsoft ever released, Windows 2000.
I remember when ComputerLand featured salespeople in suits and ties pushing the IBM-AT with monochrome monitors (that's green or amber letters on a black background - not color) for thousands of dollars. You can't even give that junk away today - that is, if you could find one still running. If you could go back in time, you would laugh at what passed for a "computer" back in the glorious 80's. A hard drive was optional, Internet was years into the future, and DOS was king.
I put my money on the IBM-PC since Apple's offering was a bit unfriendly. Apple wouldn't let anyone produce third-party hardware or even software for their machine. It wasn't expandable. Even the floppy disk format was strictly copyrighted. Back then, the PC platform was cheaper and more friendly than the Apple. The market agreed. If you ventured into a computer store and asked where the Apple software was, the salesman would snicker and point to a corner in the back of the store.
Today, the Microsoft PC platform is as bad as Apple was in the 80's. I cannot purchase games for my computer. Although my computer is over 1000 times faster than the one I used twenty years ago, it's still too slow to run games on. At a snail's pace of 1.1gig of processor speed, the entry level for games is 1.3gig. Most of the applications software being sold does not run straight out of the box - if it installs at all.
I have files on my computer which the operating system will not let me delete. Microsoft software keeps changing my preferences and installing software without permission. It spies on me and broadcasts a list of movies and CD's which I have listened to. Every time I turn on my computer, I'm never really sure if it will work. At least once a year, I need to re-install my operating system because it had a melt-down.
It's gotten so bad that I refuse to install any new programs on my computer. When I'm forced to install software for a printer or a scanner, I cross my fingers and hope that the installation did not break something else. If I install anything from Microsoft, I find myself fighting with the computer for hours or days to restore files, preferences, and settings - sometimes being unable to repair what was done to me.
But, this is the worst thing: Although Windows 2000 was the best "accident" which ever happened to them, Microsoft wants to quit supporting it. I refuse to install Windows XP. Even now, Microsoft is working on a new horror of an operating system which won't even run on any of today's computers. If anyone buys a computer today, Windows XP is shoved down their throat. So, again I look at Linux and Apple.
I installed Linux on my PC and delved deeply into it. I installed chat programs, media players, and web browsers to bring it up to date. But, Linux is a cheat and a lie. My sound card only works 10% of the time. Reading a floppy or a CD-ROM is often impossible. The fonts are miserable and the screen is fuzzy. What took seconds to do in Windows takes me half an hour at a command prompt to do under Linux. And, anything you've heard about "wine" is a lie. When I drag my mouse on my Linux machine, an annoying sound comes out of the speakers. It's horrible. A GNU software platform written by a million different programmers is just not doing it for me.
Then, something wonderful happened. Apple went dual-processor, incorporating the dreaded 80x architecture into their precious machine. I'm looking at the "mini-mac" - for a few hundred bucks, I get USB, Firewire, 802.11g, bluetooth, Ethernet, DVI video, and a DVD drive along with a ton of software. This is a lean, mean machine. For a few extra bucks, I can run Windows, Linux, and DOS in separate windows - now, I've been lied to before (e.g. wine for Linux). But, this could work. Instead of attempting to emulate Windows, the emulator for mac emulates only the PC - some bios calls and hardware hooks, which are much simpler. Oddly enough, I only need Windows to run on a mac to use a handful of programs - which I will probably find replacements for under OS X.
Linux running inside a window would be neat - just as long it's not the primary operating system. Linux just has never made it as a desktop environment, except to maybe some bored geek sitting in front of a Linux server for ten hours a day. Once you try to do some real work with it, you discover that it's a GUI on top of X-Windows on top of the kernel - most "designed by committee." And, device drivers? ha ha. If you want to add a printer or a mouse or a sound card, you'd best be writing it yourself. Sorry, I don't have the time to kill. I've got a life! I don't have the patience to spend three months writing a sound card driver.
Microsoft has been quietly eliminating the hardware functionality of the PC. Many laptops no longer have serial ports. The good 'ol Centronix Printer port is just about gone. Everything is going USB, which is a nice interface. Unfortunately, Microsoft has gotten their sticky fingers into the guts of the hardware. I can never get a USB video camera to work properly - I have to use Firewire. Firewire works on a PC since Microsoft doesn't muck with it!
All this migration to USB fits in very nicely with the Apple platform. They've been offering USB for a long while. Simply string your peripherals together with a single, small cable and you're done. I looked up the compatibility of my scanner, printer, label maker, and monitor - all purchased for the PC. Will they work on a mac? Oh, yes indeed! I just need to visit the website and download my new drivers. I've never noticed.
The hardware people have been busy, quietly increasing compatibility for devices to run on a mac. All the peripherals I own will quickly plug into a mini-mac without any problems at all. How cool is this? All of my devices are either Firewire or USB already. I'll have to make some adjustments and upgrades, but this is starting to look exciting.
Unlike Linux, which has miserable fonts, poor support, and device drivers written by hackers - OS X has always been the choice for desktop publishing. I can't tell you how many times I have wanted to send a file to a magazine for publication to be thwarted by, "We only accept mac format." Now, I understand why. The mac is the ultimate Windows platform. I've just never liked it because it's been so horribly unsupported.
Microsoft is their own worst enemy. Talk about unsupported - I have never been able to walk into a computer store to purchase software for my PC, especially games. Whenever someone even suggests that I install something on my Windows computer, I cringe in horror. The operating system is constantly being patched and upgraded. Every time I install software, I watch it update system files - wondering what will break. I don't like the registry. I don't like "shared files." I don't like automatic updates. It's all so awful.
I can only hope that my migration to the mac platform will be rewarding. It's about time that Apple produced an affordable machine which provides for a slow migration. And, now is the time to migrate - at the end of Windows 2000, the best "accident" which Microsoft ever produced and will never produce again.