[switchbak]

"The 1990s were expensive and awkward" <= this is what folks that didn't experience it don't realize. It wasn't just an earlier time with slower CPUs, computers were pretty trash at the time, peripherals sucked, the connectors sucked, everything crashed all the time, software quality was crap, and things were outrageously expensive. Oh and they had a lifetime of a couple years before they felt unbearably slow compared to the new expensive and faster crappy products.

It was actually novel when you'd find a well written piece of software that did its job well and didn't crash (at least for me, being poor and stuck in the world of DOS/Windows). Things like AutoCAD that people used to do actual work. Early WordPerfect struck me as pretty good too.

I still resent Microsoft and particularly Gates for keeping the state of computing in the dark ages for so long. Using Linux (circa 96 or so) was such a revelation, it's hard to explain how massive the jump in capability was. That Microsoft went so long not even leveraging protected mode in commodity OSs (not NT) speaks volumes.

It is nice to reflect on how far we've come, but I also appreciate Alan Kay's perspective on things: that phone and iPad style environments are primarily designed for passive consumption, and we could do a lot more to empower the users of these devices. But still, we're absolutely light years ahead of where we were!

[anthk]

You install a driver under Windows 98-> BSOD. It happened to me with he chipset ones. The official CD from the OEM.

On Linux distros and BSD's, a proper KDE setup from 3.5.10 times was light years ahead of Windows 98 and even Windows XP with Konqueror blending the file manager, the shell and the browser.