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Here I'm republishing an old blog post of mine originally from June 2012. I've updated it slightly.
This is something personal. Why to read this entry? Well, reading a bit about my experiences with computers will give you an idea of what I’m interested in and which direction things here are likely to take. Also you perhaps like a little nostalgic retrospect? If not, skip this.
My dad bought his first PC way back when these were rather expensive and it was not at all common that a family had one. I was a child who could not yet read or write, but I was immediately hooked by this new machine. I enjoyed the simple games that the 80286 offered and didn’t mind that it was all black and white. The first letter I got to know was actually "y" (a VERY uncommon one in German!) - the key I had learned to press when a game asked something like "would you like to try again"?
The first operating system I remember was MS-DOS 5.0 - but it’s basically the memory of the less advanced prompt. I got a little older and computers fascinated me even more and more. Soon we had Windows 3.0 and I was often playing around with Paintbrush (more or less the same thing as nowadays’ Paint).
Windows 3.11 (German): Main window with groups, icons and Paintbrush open (PNG)
At one point my father sold his 286 and bought a 386. Quite some time later, when the new 486 PCs were released, he bought one, too - but instead of selling the old 80386, he gave it to me. My very first own PC!
Over time I taught myself a lot by watching or asking my father and by trying out things on my own. Soon I was rather familiar with my DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11. After school I usually turned on my PC and played games or did other things with it for hours. Remember Lemmings, Commander Keen, Monkey Island, X-Wing/TIE Fighter, WarCraft and many other classics? Since this is where it all begun for me, I still have a soft spot for DOS and DOS games to this day!
WarCraft: Orcs & Humans - Water Elementals destroy an Orc base (PNG)
Then we got Windows 95. I remember well that I was very excited and got into this new OS quickly. Being all graphical and mouse-driven, I felt that it already lacked something, though... It just wasn't the same thing anymore - a bit of the PC's "magic" was gone (and would vanish more and more over the years, drowned in overly colorful rubbish). Of course, Win95 came with quite some useful features and so overall I liked the system (weren't we all used to the "Blue Screen of Death" phenomena back then?). Well, and it still allowed to boot into pure DOS. So everything was fine for me. Also DirectX and a few other new components allowed for very nice new games and I certainly had a great time.
My younger brother got his own PC, too. And finally my father gave in and bought three ethernet cards. I got addicted to play multiplayer matches with friends and finally my parents forbid it since we were occupying my brother's PC a little too often... I also got into map-making with WarCraft II thanks to the official editor that came with the game.
In school I made friends with a classmate who had taught himself to code. We had a lot of fun with several smaller projects. I also learned to write small programs in qBASIC and later a little Pascal and Delphi, too.
Doom95 launcher on the Windows 95 (German) operating system (PNG)
Next I switched to Win 98 (SE, since I knew the FE was extremely unstable). This was about the time when many of my classmates got their first PCs. Even years later, I was shocked to see how little they knew about computers even though they spent a lot of time with them. They couldn't write a single batch file and if Windows didn't start up properly... Well, being left with a command line and no mouse, they were about to panic! I'm still very grateful that I learned DOS and didn't start with a graphical system and Win 9.x or later!
A bit later I was mapping for the game Jedi Knight with a program called Jed that I had found on a compilation CD. This may actually be the first piece of free software of which I was aware that it had been coded by enthusiasts instead of regular companies. I thought that this was a great thing and that more people should publish their programs for everybody to use. Then my father decided that it was time to get an internet connection. Since only his PC could connect to the net, I wasn't online too often (or for too long since minutes spent online were expensive), but it was another very interesting thing to say the least! Especially since there actually was more free software to try out and enjoy!
Windows ME was released and we got that one, too. Yes, I know how much a lot of people despise it, but at first I kind of liked it. It booted up comparatively fast and for the first time it didn't take us too long to get the network setup properly - Win ME just did that automatically. But hey, what's that? They removed the option to boot into DOS! Right, there was a way to get it back, but I felt that it made the system even more unstable than it was anyway...
Next I got Windows 2000 and to be honest, I liked the system a lot. Yes, there were a few downsides like it being not really suitable for gaming and of course the missing DOS. But the stability the system offered thanks to being NT-based was extremely nice. Oh yes, I still can’t understand what the hell MS was thinking in terms of the console... They added some really nice functions that could be great for batching (math, randomness, etc) - and at the same time removed _CHOICE.COM_! Doing so they mindlessly ripped out the heart of batching for me! Luckily there was the FreeDOS project on the Net which provided a CHOICE replacement that could be freely distributed.
I had an old Pentium 90 around that run FreeDOS, just because I enjoyed playing with that system and DOS games ran fine on it. Soon I configured my main PC as a multi-boot machine with Win2k (for "serious" stuff like writing, managing my music collection, etc) and Win98 (mostly for playing games). Things were good and fun - and I even got my first experienec with multi-booting. Little did I know that this was actually the last time when I was quite happy with my Microsoft-powered system!
THEN came... Windows XP.
