I’m a big fan of anything that goes against the “System” or sticks it to “the Man”.  It’s hard to believe that I was once a Microsoft fanboy.

I vividly remember the chaotic anarchy of forces pushing the computer industry in so many different directions back in the late 70’s and 80’s. I owned a Commodore 64 when friends had Apple II, Texas Instruments, Atari, or Radio Shack TRS-80 computers. We didn’t share much software. We didn’t have much really, but a couple of cassette tapes or later, floppy disks, with tiny crude programs that entertained and kept us busy. What we did have though was enthusiasm and excitement for the seemingly limitless possibilities that all these nascent computers offered.

Follow up:

 
Years later, the IBM PC was released and the swirling, competing scrabble was on its way to subsiding. IBM won back then and soon we were all using the same PC. Sure you had a choice between Wordperfect or Word but the hardware was all the same. Even the operating system was all the same – Microsoft DOS. DOS turned into Windows, and we were all off on a merry journey of comforting compatibility. Everything worked pretty well, but even then, computers weren’t easy to use at all. If you knew your way around the nuances of DOS and Windows, or you could take one apart and fix it, you had a job for life. I liked the ease of sameness – I think most of us did, for a while. It’s easier to compare options when you have none.

 
My descent into the establishment was about to reach a peak (trough?) when I was programming browser-based applications, lamenting “Why can’t everyone just use the same web browser and make life easier!” This was not long ago when Microsoft had a virtual stranglehold on everything. We used their operating system, we used their office suite, their development tools, their web servers and their browser - Internet Explorer. We were so entangled with this all encompassing bedfellow that we couldn’t see daylight from the hole (comfortable and warm as it was) we had willingly climbed into. Point in fact, this was the time to sell all the Microsoft stock you ever owned, and maybe then some more that you didn’t, because “The times they are a-changin’”

[Microsoft share price 4/1986 to 7/2009. That peak in the middle is December 1999]
 
1999, things did change and fast. For whatever reason, people started waking up from the Microsoft coma we were living in, and realized that, sure, it’s all easy, but the spark, the fun, the adventure is gone. If this had been a marriage, we’d all be off looking for an affair. I am not going to recount the disastrous crash of the Internet bubble, the rise of Apple and the resurgence of competition during the next 10 years but suffice it to say that things changed and the bodies of those unwilling to change fell by the wayside.
 
I continued to chafe with Microsoft products. I eventually replaced Internet Explorer with Mozilla Firefox. I switched to StarOffice (now OpenOffice, an open source collaboration from Sun Microsystems). I started using Linux servers instead of Windows servers. I switched to MySQL, I installed Apache, I made a wiki. Finally I repartitioned my own hard drive and installed Linux side by side with Windows XP. The final straw for me was the Windows Genuine Advantage Validation ‘tool’ coupled with complete disinterest in Windows Vista.
 
This near free fall into the open arms of the open source community has been a giddy roller coaster in itself. The fun was back! Things didn’t always work together and you actually had to think again! People joined together in virtual communities to answer questions and share knowledge. It is something similar to a Woodstock effect in that people were united in wanting to make all these beautiful things work in the face of the implacable “Man”.
 
I can’t begin to emphasize enough that the variety, the diversity in these fantastic computer tools is back with a vengeance. You can pick from hundreds of different operating systems (including Microsoft!), scores of word processors, movie players, MP3 players, desktops, toolbars, widgets, screenlets, programming tools, web browsers, mail programs and photo viewers. Things may not be quite as easy now, partly because they are the works of many different people, some less skilled than others, and partly because you have so many options and not everything works perfectly together. But the raw fun can’t be underestimated. Go pick some random Linux distro and install it. Break it! Install it again! Try a different one, try 4 at once. Download 6 different word processors and pick the one you like best.
 
Henry Ford said in 1909 “A customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”. Those days are over, as are the dull, dull days when every computer was beige. Take your computer and grab a brush. Find the colors that make you happy!

[This amazing computer case can be found here at http://hacknmod.com/hack/pink-floyd-extreme-case-mod/]