DOS and all that

Once upon a time, along time ago, I had a 386 computer running Dos 5.0 and -- what I really liked -- Word Perfect 5.1, a truly wonderful word processor (all that blue). I used and enjoyed this unnetworked PC a lot, and one day I woke up to find it had contracted a virus -- a Spanish virus no less -- and wouldn't boot. I was appalled, disgusted, outraged, mostly because I had no idea how to remedy the situation.

I took it to a computer shop and asked the nice man behind the counter how much it would cost to fix. He said £25, which didn't strike me as a monstrous sum, probably a result of the fact I was considerably behind the curve and the world had moved on to Windows 9x something or other. Anyway, when he'd finished, I had what I had before only Dos had been upgraded to 6.22. Whoopity-do. I promised myself that this would never happen again. Not that my computer wouldn't fail to boot -- of course it would -- but that I wouldn't be able to fix the issue myself. 

To this end, I acquired Dos on disks -- various versions, though conventional wisdom had it that the latest was the best -- ready for the next time some foreign or home-grown virus infected my computer and stopped it from booting. I learned that these viruses were called boot viruses, and they would pass into history quite quickly. Quite rapidly, infecting networks became the aim of virus writers -- mostly for mischief, but sometimes for gain. 

Once I had all my software -- the OS, my word processor, a couple of games on disk -- I started installing things just for fun... until one day, in another flat, with my partner, I created a quad-boot system on a system with a 1GB hard disk, and danced around in an unseemly way consumed with an inappropriate excitement. For those of you interested, the four OSes in question were OS/2 from IBM, Linux (Caldera, I think), BeOS, and Dos. I used the OS/2 bootloader and was absurdly pleased that everything booted. I still have a box set of OS/2.

Many years later I would understand the politics of what was going on -- that Microsoft, for corporate reasons, was seeking to dominate the OS market by fair means or foul. Mostly foul. They killed off Dr Dos by making sure Windows wouldn't run on it. And leaned on manufactures to make sure BeOS didn't get a foothold. And so they came to market prominence -- so much so that the average computer user would come to view using Windows in much the same way as eating off a plate. Something that wasn't thought about, merely done, and justified -- if justification ever became necessary -- after the fact. 

It was at this point that Linux, an operating system free to install and use took a hold on my imagination. In a world where -- incredibly -- you didn't have a right to food, you did have a right to an operating system. Because Torvalds had decided to use Stallman's licence for the kernel he had created. I didn't understand back then that it was Stallman's vision to create a free OS, and that Torvalds had, by accident, stolen that vision by creating the kernel that made everything fall into place.

So began my trip down Linux Avenue, and my distaste for the corporate shenanigans that went on for no other reason than to protect their bottom line and their dominant market position.