Our Opinion January 2002

Our Opinion Page for January 2002

Change to the scheduled opinion page.

I bought my first PC in 1986. It was an Amstrad PC286. It came with an 8 MHz 286 processor, 1 megabyte of RAM a 40 megabyte hard drive, MS-DOS 3.0 but no Window (hooray) and a manual that told you everything you wanted to know, which I curled up with in bed. I learned Debug, wrote a little screensaver and thought I was pretty cool with my black and amber screen. I updated DOS every chance I got, mastered batch files and made my machine dual boot into either DOS or Windows 286 (acquired of course). I really did like it.

I learned about HMA and how to make DOS load there. I learned how to load device drivers and TSR's into high memory as well. I optimised my machine so well that when Windows 3.x was released I was able to run it on my meagre 286, often quicker than a lot of 386 machines could and was soon envied at uni.

I loved Microsoft (honest), who gave me the tools to make my system do exactly what I wanted. They didn't exactly give them to me, but I took everything I needed from my university's network. The geeks (hello Alan and Brian) who ran it were absolutely clueless about security. It was a UNIX system and I logged in as root everyday without their knowledge and copied whatever the hell I wanted on to a floppy or three and took it home to try it out. I'm not a criminal. I was more than covered under the uni's site licence I reckoned (Uhum !).

Next came a modem, an acoustic coupler, which I used to browse the uni network from home and I didn't need to be very good to make monkeys out of the network admins. I used IRC, Telnet and Mosaic and got really good at exploiting them.
Then I added another 2 megabytes of RAM to my humble Amstrad and managed to run Word for Windows very fast. Again, I had grabbed it off the network, of course. 386's had been appearing all over the place, but Word ran faster on my 286 thanks to the manual that came with the machine and of course some imaginative memory management.
All this lasted until 1993 when I moved to Birmingham. A lot happened there and the less said the better. I set off intending to sow my wild oats (once again) but only managed one harvest and later married, because although I used every excuse not to, her gran (nanna) kept coming back with answers.

When I returned to Scotland, wife and all, I built a 486 DX266 with a 120 megabyte hard drive and just 8 megabytes of RAM. Considering my knowledge of DOS and Windows I soon had it jumping through hoops. I added a sound card and started playing the odd game to (Doom). Time passed and my wife left after meeting back up with an old boyfriend and on the way out the door commented on never having to look at the back of my head for hours/days on end ever again.

Windows 95 was becoming increasingly harder to ignore. In 1996, I was now using a Pentium 75 MHz processor with 16 megabytes of RAM and a 1 gigabyte hard drive The processor was overclocked to 100 MHz. One of my friends had bought a Compaq because she needed a machine there and then so an OEM was still within her budget. This piece of garbage came with a quick restore CD which would reformat her hard drive whenever Windows needed to be installed. Those responsible at Compaq have a lot to answer for as more and more brand name machines followed there footsteps.
Windows 95 brought more despair of its own. It didn't respond to DOS settings like 3.x. It had a bollocks registry which took me ages to get a grip with. It was Microsoft starting to refuse to let me do what I pleased with my computer.

I was still loyal. Microsoft had treated me well over the years, which is a lot more than I can say about my ex. I had always been able to tweak my system and had learned to do it the Microsoft way. Instead of running to Linux as I should have, I bought the Windows 98 CD hoping that Redmond (Redhat chaps) would see the folly of their ways and fix the OS so as to give me the user, more control.
It got worse. DOS 7.x is a joke under Windows 98 and there wasn't much I could do to make my machine my own. Bill Gates obviously owned it. The definition of malicious code id code that prevents me from doing what I wish it to do or any code that makes a computer do anything I haven't instructed it it to do. Under that definition, Windows has clearly became an extremely malicious virus. So, I installed a copy of Red Hat 5.2 that came supplied on the cover disk of a popular computing magazine, that I ha left lying in a shoe box for a year or two, but the installation screwed up so much and so often that I decided it was as bad. I hated and resented the dinosaur software. I remained under the Windows umbrella. By this time I resented an hated it too, but a little bit less than Dead Rat and its joke system.

Then Microsoft offended me so intensely that I wouldn't be caught dead running their virus called ME on any of my computers. Now it's Win-XP. The product activation code just got to me. I have put up with steadily deteriorating software and my steadily deteriorating control over it but the idea that I would have to buy a separate copy of their crap OS for each machine I have makes me puke. I can sympathise (a little) Microsoft cashing in on business that use their software to make a profit but to tell me that if I buy their software for my home, I don't actually own it and have to buy a separate copy for each installation is going to far this time.

Fortunately a lot of the newer Linux distro's now install nicely on any X86 system. So I have been able to install it successfully and then refer to the docs to tweak it the way I used to with Microsoft's products before the cheap money grabbers shrunk their documentation to a glossy advertisement brochure.

I have one copy of FreeBSD, which is installed on every machine I own (there are five). I haven't broken the law or any pseudo-law such as that in Microsoft's EULA. All my machines run well, as I have learned from the vast amount of documentation provided by the Linux community, how to tweak Linux.

Until next month cya in cyberspace.