Why I like Microsoft Windows....

I MIGHT GET ROUND to installing Linux on one of my PCs here - Egan Orion reckons it's really simple and as we write so many stories about it, I guess I ought to give it a try.

I once got invited on a trip to IBM Austin on the basis of a column I'd written saying OS/2 was fantastic. The IBM spinster said: "I read your column on OS/2, Mike, I'm glad to see you've finally been converted to our cause".

As usual, the reason was far more banal. My subs on the weekly magazine I edited were screaming like hyenas for meat for my regular column - I panicked, and thought "What shall I write about? I know, I'll say I like OS/2".

As I'd been exposed to the early command line version of OS/2 I must confess, at worst, to hypocrisy - at best, to sheer panic at having to knock out 600 words in a screaming hurry. Plus ca change...

Everything was up for grabs in the mid-1980s. The PC was a mewling, puking infant - you could run Desqview, you could install GEM, you could stay with DOS or you could even run some pesky Microsoft graphical user interface which as I recall only had one good application that worked with it in those days, Aldus Pagemaker.

IBM followed its not-so-very-fantastic command line interface with the "Presentation Manager" - my god, DisplayWrite for OS/2. What a boon for the world that wasn't. In the next two years, only one third party vendor came out with a wordprocessor for OS/2 Presentation Manager, as we recall.

In those days, His Billness used to come cap in hand to people trying to persuade them to use his crappy software rather than the perfectly functional Lotus 1-2-3 or the enigmatic dBase.

But Microsoft showed far more cunning than its competitors. The very pretty Excel was received enthusiastically by distributors and corporate dealers because it sold more monitors, it sold more memory, and it sold more everything.

Whether that's a good thing or not, I'll leave it to the Zoroastrians to decide.

But Microsoft won - not only on the operating interface front but especially on the application software front. Egan suggests I try this OpenOffice stuff - and I will, when I get round to installing Linux on a machine here.

Will that mean I have to abandon my super duper 2GHz+ processor and 512MB of memory as well as not be able to run all the Windows application software I've already got, though? Some DOS applications still work, although I must confess that games don't work too well on this new Variant Eyecandy thing....

We suspect the British Civil Aviation Authority, which converted millions of lines of existing code to run under Windows years back, is probably considering it's got Hobson's Choice too. µ

* JUST ABOUT TO DOWNLOAD the Windows version of OpenOffice -- I'll let you know...