April marks 40 years since many of us married Microsoft.–PC Pitstop.
Married to Microsoft for 40 Years
by Marc Thomas for Daves Computer Tips
Give or take a few years and with the benefit of poetic license, it could be said that we are all celebrating, or in some cases commiserating our marriage to Microsoft all those years ago on the 5th of April 1975 and like all long marriages, we’ve certainly had our ups and downs along the way. For my part, I’ve never been married for that long to a real person, but I’ve sure seen some fine examples of couples who have managed to survive that long manacled together, in what some might call a life sentence without parole. There are others of course who would describe their forty years as a blissful love fest in a rose covered cottage made of marzipan and chocolate and who are we to argue?
Love or loathing?
Ever seen a couple at each other’s throats and you’d swear blood might be shed, or worse still, you may witness a particularly messy homicide? It’s been like this for years in our marriage to Microsoft and like most long relationships, the early years were a long and loving honeymoon where we could still remember walking down the aisle to a choir of angels.
From those halcyon days of DOS, that incredible deal with IBM and the release of Windows all the way through to XP, we felt that our perpetual honeymoon would never end as the proceeding years gave us shinier and better stuff to play with and we heaped the love on Microsoft, who lapped it up and took it to the bank. However, our honeymoon came to an abrupt halt in 2007 with the release of Vista and boy did our marriage turn sour very quickly and like all one-sided relationships, we were not in a forgiving mood. We stamped our feet, threw the furniture around, then threatened to walk out and find another loving partner in what was then, a pretty bleak landscape of either Linux or Apple.
