PART 5: WINDOWS XP TO THE PRESENT

Funny how catching up on all this history reads a little like a resume. It's also been a little nostalgic so far, and it's not all been bad. I've skipped over Windows 98, including "SE," which was one of Microsoft's best products - ever. Windows ME was hardly noteworthy, and on the business side, Windows NT and 2000 were largely catch-ups to Windows 98 SE in terms of user functionality. However, NT's file system became the backbone for Windows XP, which ruled the first half of the first decade of the new millennium.

I do want to mention here, however, that during the second half of the 90s, the Web became extremely boring. With the exception of Web-based mail, hardly anything else was going on. There were tons of boring Web pages, and it was a period when every single business and organization was establishing a Web presence without much consideration for anything other than getting a unique URL and reproducing paper-based information in an online format. Personally, I was so disgusted with the Web, in spite of all my previous enthusiasm for the Internet and the early Web, that I was ready to swear the whole thing off. It was downright boring. Also, the gross commercialization of the online world was quite a difference from the earlier days when advertising and business were not only absent, they were prohibited.

Back in the desktop world, Windows XP (including "SP2") ended up being a fairly stable and reliable system, though, as usual, it took Microsoft a few years to get it all together. That's the price of being so big, I suppose. There will always be too many user and equipment variables to account for, globally. Apple suddenly sprang back onto the scene with the introduction of the iPod and a sudden spurt in popularity of iMacs and MacBooks. The new Mac OS was competitive with Windows XP (not that Mac's user interface was ever inferior to anything from Microsoft), and it appeared that Apple had finally revived from its sad demise during the 90s. I have to applaud the die-hard Mac users who never abandoned hope. I'm a fair-weather friend of Mac, for sure, and in 2006, I liked Mac again, especially after the adoption of Intel processors.

I went out and bough myself an iMac in 2006, and I particularly enjoyed the fact that I could run Boot Camp or Parallels to make a virtual Windows machine for "emergencies" when I'd have to do Windows for work or something else. I was happy for a while, and my kids clamored for Macs too, so I bought them MacBooks for school. My whole family, except my engineer wife, had gone Mac. The wife remained loyal to Windows XP. One thing was immediately clear was that Macs are expensive, which everybody knows. Their software licensing is pretty strict, and it was nearly impossible to share applications between machines due to "registering" software with Apple. I can accept that, and it's certainly fair.

Somewhere in early 2007, I decided to add a Linux virtual machine using Parallels. In fact, I ended up installing several distributions: Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Xubuntu, Freespire, Red Hat, and Damn Small Linux all paraded through my system over the course of a couple of months. However, I couldn't get any of them to use my Internet connection (I tried, but not real hard), so I scrapped them all eventually. I didn't want to do Linux for Linux sake, but I did like what I saw compared to a very brief flirtation with Red Hat back in the late 90s, which didn't work out real well on my laptop.

So it was Mac OS and Windows running off the same machine for a while, but soon my hard disk filled up and I eventually pared it down to Mac alone. Who needed Microsoft anyway?