For about 30 years watching the tech scene, I’ve been in the Linux/Unix camp, because the design just “clicked” for me, and later in the Apple/Mac camp because it was a better desktop and yet had unix-like internals. I spent less and less time setting up/using Windows machines, only using them when I had to or someone needed one for working at home. I would look at the unfamiliar screens now and then and try to figure out how to actually navigate it.
Paul Thurrott is fairly well-known in the Windows world, but I didn’t pay any attention, until recently he came out with an ebook “Windows everywhere” which is a history of Microsoft, the company I loved to denigrate. But then I remembered that I was once a Windows fanatic, around the time of win3.1 (“TrueType fonts!”), 95, and NT.
So out of curiosity I’m skimming that ebook and remembering the occasional MS event that I went to locally in the 90’s. There was one talk where the MS spokesperson was trying to persuade the IT audience that they should migrate to winNT 3.1 because it was “stable, reliable, solid”; almost no one was convinced, because it required 8 meg of ram and (at least at my workplace) no machine had more than 4 meg. RAM was expensive then. We actually did move to NT 3.5 rather than win95 (mostly), with a few printer/fax compatibility problems, and overall I still think that was a good call at the time.
When I look back at those years and later, what strikes me the most now is that I let an adolescent partisan enthusiasm for a certain product/ecosystem affect my relations with the people around me; I became unreasonable sometimes over something that wasn’t worth getting upset about.
And more broadly, I can look back at times in the last 50 years or so when I judged the actions of people around me, particularly those older; now that I’m in that age bracket, it’s clear to me that most people did the best they could and were perhaps fighting stresses and hardships I had no idea about. Too wrapped up in myself. And wouldn’t you know, when I meet some teenagers now (by no means all) they too can be wrapped up in their selves, their dreams and aspirations for their future, like I was.
I feel very blessed to live to an age where I can start to see that better, and calm down a little.
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