On Windows 98

Memories, memories …

I got an Ebay package today and it put me into story writing mood. The content: a used ATX power supply. So here’s a rambling tale about long-dead computers and how I became a Mac zealot, followed by an admission that Windows 98 actually wasn’t as bad as I remember it.

How I got sick of Windows. Back in the olden days of Windows 98, computing was no fun. One day in 2000, during my freshman year at university, after Windows hat fucked up its registry again, I furiously wiped the HDD and reinstalled the beast and swore that this was the last time I had installed Windows.

So I prepared my move to Linux. I practically live in my computer, and I like to live in a place where I know how stuff works, so there was a lot to learn before I could feel comfortable moving to a completely different environment. Also, Linux was still pretty hardcore in back then – no Ubuntu. I started to learn VIM, switched from IE to Opera because it was available on Linux (Mozilla was nowhere near usable back then), and read up on the Unix architecture and dual-boot and stuff, and used the university’s Linux boxes from home over SSH whenever possible. It was exciting, and I witnessed the power of Unix.

But I’m lazy and a coward and never really got around to making the move. I muddled through. Meanwhile, it’s 2003. Hardly surprising, even my greatest care couldn’t prevent the Windows installation from getting slower and hangier and crashier day by day. But, as a CS student and all-around nerd, I depend on it. It became basically impossible to work on the system. Applications would lock up all the time, drag and drop didn’t work any more, plugging USB devices was a gamble. Finally, I had enough. That day, I went out and bought a shiny 12″ Powerbook.

…

Learning to live in OS X: Over the next six months, I slowly transferred my digital life to the Mac. Email and web browsing went over pretty quickly, as did PHP development and everything Unixy, but word processing and image manipulation and heavy-duty Java development and many other things still happened on the PC. (Ironically, I did reinstall Windows during this time. And, thinking that one new operating system at a time was enough, it was Windows 98 again.)

And then it died. One day in mid-2004, the box just wouldn’t start up any more. It became a brick, nothing moved. Dead power supply, perhaps? This was bad but not a crisis because the life-or-death stuff (email and calendar) happened over on the Mac. It was crunch time and so I decided to fix it next week. But next week became next month. Next month became never. That’s how I stopped using Windows.

Fast forward to 2006. I’ve moved four times, but the beige and blue brick is still with me, sitting in a corner under the window, while the trusty Powerbook got old and underpowered, but it is still my workhorse and delivers reliable service, seven days a week. For all this time, an item “repair old computer” was sitting in somewhere near the bottom of my various to do lists.

Better late than never: Recently I’ve been good at knocking items off the list, and today I got a new power supply which I bought for a fiver on Ebay. And yes, the box still boots up, right into the point of my life where it died back in 2004, with the files I worked on still on the desktop and a bunch of Slashdot tabs open in Opera. Which, for me, is probably as close to experiencing time travel as it will ever get.

Some impressions while mousing around:

• The old box is loud. I seriously don’t know how I could get anything done with that airplane engine running next to me.
• I still feel right at home in that customized Windows 98. My folders and applications, the steel-grey color scheme, the custom icons and desktop backgrounds, I guess I could pick up work right where I left. And while the lack of anti-aliased fonts hurts my eyes, I still like the look.
• Windows 98 runs seriously fast on an 1.4 GHz machine. Much more so than OS X Tiger on the 1 GHz Powerbook. Everything starts up instantly, no delays while the beast is swapping, no beach balls.
• It took about 10 minutes until the first application crashed. (Opera, after dragging an HTML file from the FinderExplorer.)
• There are games! A really cool collection of my all-time favorites. My career as a gamer essentially ended the day I switched to the Mac, the only thing I’ve played since with any regularity is Tetris (in the form of Quinn).
• I relied much more on files than email back then. Apparently, every interesting email attachment I’ve ever received was neatly filed away in a person/project based directory system. Today I could never keep up with that, everything just stays in the mail.
• I was a believer in detailed folder structures for archival back then. My email was filed away into dozens of project-based folders, my file system tree a veritable taxonomy. Today I have much systems and rely mostly on search, both with email (Mail.app) and files (Quicksilver).
• Did I mention the thing is loud?

I did a few screenshots.

Ah, what a fun trip into the past. Now that the ugly box works again, I just have to figure out an actual use for the thing … Any suggestions?

(Reading over this again, I notice that something’s wrong. I must have bought the PC between 2000 and 2002, and so must have re-installed Windows after my alleged pledge to do it never again, and before getting the Mac. But it’s a good story as it is, and that’s the way I remember it, so I’ll leave it like that.)