At dinner the other night, my family began reminiscing about which version of
Microsoft Windows they liked the best. After a round of bashing
Vista, the list of favorites was revealed.
My 10 year old stated he prefer
Windows XP. My 16 year old said she really misses
Windows 98. While I rolled my eyes in disbelief that this was actually the topic of dinner conversation. I did not want to appear too geeky, so I silently acknowledged how long it took me to get over not working at the
DOS level once
Windows 95 came out.
I'm old in "
OS" years. Back in the day, there was no "point and click" -- we had to know the commands to launch a program and type them right into the command string at the DOS prompt. In fact, there was no "point" there was only "click" and that was the sound that came from clicking keys on the keyboard as you typed.
I remembered that my husband's software partner, Dan, who got his start in the world of IT early by keypunching cards for his dad at the age of eight and, as an adult, could type at least 100 words a minute. He was constantly out-typing the typeahead buffer on his PC. Imagine waiting for the computer to process your command string...Wait, we still do that. Only today we know we're waiting because an hourglass, a status bar, or the words "still working" tell us so. Waiting on the computer. I guess some things never change, regardless of your operating system.