The Changing of the Guard

Zenith ZF-151-52

I bought my first Intel based computer - the Heath/Zenith ZF-151 - in the early 1980’s. A near clone of the first IBM PC, it came with MS-DOS 1.1 on a single 120 k-byte 5 1/4inch floppy disk, and the new and much expanded MS-DOS 2.0 on two 160k-byte disks. I was in high cotton indeed. The very first version of Microsoft Windows was still years in the future.

The state of the art for actually using a PC in those long ago days was the grandfather of all spreadsheets: Lotus 1-2-3. I didn’t have much need for a spreadsheet so for me it was really much more of an educational toy, much like Legos or an Erector set.

The world and I moved to present, through 3 or 4 no-name clone boxes, a couple of refurbished systems from Dell, a Compaq or two, and most recently two generations of HP Notebooks. The one constant was that every one of them came with Microsoft software. From the original text-based MS-DOS and through the earliest practical Windows (386), the beloved and long lived XP which is just now having support pulled, the unloved Vista, or the current “old” version (7), I’ve had an uninterrupted love/hate relationship with the boys from Redmond.

Somewhere along the way, my initial infatuation with computers as toys turned into a view that they were simply one more appliance. We use different rules for appliances - they’re suppose to make our lives easier. So each subsequent “upgrade” with its attendant reinstalls, viruses, changes to user interfaces which I hadn’t found to be difficult stripped a bit more of the luster off the Microsoft image, until its tattered modern day self is noteworthy only for not being really much different from Apple’s OS-X. One comes with more viruses, the other won’t let me run any software more recent than 2011 without paying Apple a lot of money to upgrade.

The place of computers in society has changed as well. For a long time, people mostly used computers at work, and so when they got one at home they generally bought something a lot alike what they knew there. Most businesses use Microsoft, so most homes do too. Then one day people started carrying around those new-fangled smartphones. Each one of those, although it may be slow compared to the current state of the art, has as much or more processing power and storage as a desktop computer had a couple of generations (or less) ago. The explosive expansion in the number of smartphone apps has also meant that most people now do their personal computing almost exclusively on smartphones or their close cousins, the tablets. Traditional pc sales are falling rapidly.

So it has come to this: that about 30 years since the first Microsoft based computer entered my house, there’s only one left now, and it dual-boots into a version of Linux as well. In fact, the only reason I “need” a Windows pc at all is to run specialty software to act as a DVR for over-the-air tv and to program an Arduino Yun. In both of those cases, I could meet the need without Windows - I just haven’t troubled to figure out how yet. Everything else which once would have taken a pc now runs on Android. The play and education aspects are once again fresh, but can be taken care of with sub-$50 Raspberry Pi’s or Beaglebone Blacks, where we can experiment to our heart’s content without ever risking doing something to the “main” box that would undermine its use as an appliance. The chance that I will ever need another Windows based computer is tiny.

There will probably always be a workstation in our life. There are just times when it is really convenient to have a big screen and a keyboard. But whether those user interface devices are attached to a smartphone, a dedicated thin client which is mounted on the back of (or in) the monitor (or the keyboard, or the tv screen), or as part of a Chromebook, it’s evident that at least for me, the era of Wintel is over. You may still be Microsoft, but we will no longer be assimilated.

It was a pretty good run, while it lasted.