As I write this on my Amiga 2500, the IBM clone that was recently given to me is sitting a few feet away, attempting to power up. I got on Yahoo! Chat a few days ago and tonight I thought it might be neat to participate again for a little while. In the time it's taken me to turn on the Amiga, wait for the Workbench to load, load this word processing application (Excellence!) and type to this point, the Windows '98 title screen has stayed up. It's starting up, you see. It's the first popularly awaited upgrade in the history of home computing to run slower than its predecessor, and yet people still buy it.
Ah! There it goes. Attaboy. Now to try and load Explorer and get the chat applet running without experiencing any lock-ups. Should be fun.
Adam says that the reason it takes '98 so long to start is that it needs more RAM than '95 did. I don't have enough RAM for everything '98 does when it starts up, so it's using my hard disk to store temporary data. Microsoft instituted this "upgrade," in my learned opinion, to force people to buy more RAM, more chips, more everything. It's an altogether commercial corporation. The love of hacking, the fascination with the possibilities inherent in bringing computers into the homes of laymen, is gone.
Back in the heyday of the Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bits, the late-'70s Apple mentality was still rampant: Those who made the machines, operating systems and software were excited about the craft to such an extent that sales, while still vital for obvious reasons, weren't the impetus behind their dogged pioneering. They stood behind their products, remained proud of them for years and squeezed every drop of potential out of them.
Now, thanks to Microsoft and to a slightly lesser extent Intel (who makes the Pentium chips), that moonstruck community is extinct as far as modern computing goes. It's all saleability: goading the customer into buying "bigger and faster." There's no exploring or revolutionizing to be done because chips and software become obsolete -- deliberately -- within months of being issued. I wouldn't be surprised to learn of a cooperative crossover deal between Microsoft and Intel. Never mind Microsoft's monopoly; that's another whole subject in itself, one that's covered amply in the mainstream press due to government lawsuits against Mr. Gates. I'm happy that those suits exist (or is it obvious?).
But how about the products themselves? Now that Microsoft has muscled its way onto every IBM and clone on a variety of levels, and sold its flash to every new computing enthusiast thanks to the lingering naivete of the average consumer, can we at least find more good things than bad about the magic potion that Mr. Bill's Traveling Show has preached about?
Nope. For one thing, the hard drive keeps going and going. You can't move the damn mouse pointer without hearing that annoying muted clacking. What the hell is it loading all the time? It gets in the way of operation; half the time, double-clicking on an icon won't execute its program because the OS thought you only single-clicked, because it was busy doing that mysterious pseudo-disk-access (there are technical reasons for this, but none offer any defense; suffice to say that nearly every intentionally memory-intensive Windows program that's been released is trying to work with the antiquated, slow MS-DOS that's hiding behind it). The way Windows accesses the hard disk is cumbersome and inefficient.
Another thing: All of these lock-ups aren't necessary. I'll repeat that for the morons at work who think they're computer programmers because they figured out how to change the font size in Word: IT'S NOT A NATURAL FUNCTION OF COMPUTERS TO LOCK-UP CONSTANTLY.
Chat didn't work, by the way. It's locked-up. I'm serious. It's convenient timing, considering the subject material of this article, but now I have to reset the computer.
That's another thing. Why the hell should I have to read a message telling me I didn't shut my OS down "properly?" There's an on/off switch. What else do you need, y'know? And you're going to tell me that this is well-written software? And the coup-de-grace: If you shut down "correctly," you get large, important letters stating, "It is now safe to turn off your computer." Oh, THANK YOU, High and Exalted Mystery Machine! Don't explode or anything, okay? It's an intimidation factor that was researched and tested by Microsoft's marketing division. Make people feel that their computers are intimidating machines controlling them, instead of the other way around, and you won't have those annoying bursts of independent creativity that could jeopardize big, blanketing companies like Microsoft.
I'll conclude with just one sentence: Support your local Amiga users' groups. -- CF