I first learned how to work a computer on an Apple Mac.  Marvellous things they were – I’ve still got my old Apple Mac 128K in my garage.  I didn’t want to learn on a DOS machine. It looked like the effort might be considerable and for the limited reward of rather clunky word processing.  The Mac was a revelation and fun fun fun. I transitioned reluctantly to the windows world (I think) when I was in John Dawkins’ Office in Dec 1990 – with the horrble Windows 3.1 which was apparently a lot better than the more horrible Windows < 3.1. (Given that the first decent GUI Microsoft came up with was memorably in 1995 assuming Windows 95 came out in 1995 perhaps Windows 3.1 wasn’t with us at the end of 1990. Anyway, I was certainly on Windows by 1994 and despite various infuriations (not unknown in the Apple world either) Windows 95 was a good interface, 98 was better and, looking back XP was very nice because it was as intuitive as Windows 98-8 and stable. I didn’t have to reboot it twice a day as I did with 98 as 98 gradually became unreliable as one worked on it.

I now have a very nice little ASUS Ue2. It’s a nice machine but running Vista it’s slow.  And Vista does nothing seriously better than XP (for me) and the search function remains deeply mysterious. But it’s OK.

I remember keeping my eye out for ways back to the Apple world.   Continue reading →