*Sigh*. Once again, Microsoft has been caught doing something clearly unethical. This sort of thing used to infuriate me. People mistook my anger for many things. Often I was told something like, "you are just jealous of Bill Gates' wealth and genius."
Well, I think it is time to set things straight. Let me start at the beginning.
My first real computer was an 8088 running MS DOS. I gained much of my knowledge trying desperately to get my games running in the limited amount of RAM. Over time, I became proficient with the DOS command line. It seemed pretty powerful to me. So much so, that I would laugh at those crazy Apple lovers. PC's were where it was at for me.
After a couple years the 8088 was desperately out of date and it was time for an upgrade. It was a thrilling day bringing home that 386SX. By now we had Microsoft Windows! I thought it was interesting, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do with it. I was happy in the command line.
It was around these years I began to knew I would be working with computers in one way or another for the rest of my life. I had no idea how programs were written, but I thought it would be grand to make some games. So I began to read up on how commercial software was developed. I was particularly interested in Microsoft. In my opinion, they made the best software out there. They were the fastest, the smartest, and they fast became my new idols (it also helped that they were rich)!
I remember vividly poring over Bill Gates biography. I'll never forget the story of Bill writing the scheduling software for his high school and modifying it so he would have the same classes as the popular girls. Mr. Gates embodied everything I thought a smart geek could be. I sincerely believed that his company was out there changing the world.
Our family churned through the Microsoft upgrade cycle slowly but surely. The good old days of memmaker and double-space. Back then I was impressed with the "generosity" of Microsoft. My friend had paid $40 for software to compress his hard drive. I got mine free integerted with my new OS! What a deal!
The days wore on and eventually our computer became a 486/66. Somehow I lucked out and I was one of three students in my high school chosen to get a shell account on a Unix system. Not only did we have access to a Unix machine, we had access to the Internet!
What a thrill I felt when I finally figured out I had to change my serial settings to 7E1 instead of 8N1 to properly connect. Usually, I would get in about 1200 baud. It was plenty of bandwidth for me. At first, Unix seemed bizarre and mysterious. But it was no more arcane than tweaking config.sys and autoexec.bat to get a mouse driver to load in "high" memory.
I explored the gopher space and read Usenet. I was really getting into this Unix thing. I also began to hear a lot about something called OS/2. The advocates of OS/2 were quite vocal telling me how superior this was to anything Microsoft had. I was pretty skeptical, but curious. Somehow I convinced my father to buy it.
After a major headache trying to get the beast installed, I had it up and running. I began to probe its capabilities. I was a near instant convert! This was light years ahead of MS-DOS and Windows!
I happily ran OS/2 and somewhat naively expected it would take its rightful place at the forefront of the consumer OS market. Unfortunately, IBM couldn't market the thing, and Microsoft drove it into the ground. I felt really betrayed by MS. Instead of making Windows better they used their energy to pull down their competitor. It was a queasy feeling.
Soon, everyone began to hear rumors of Microsoft's 32-bit OS code-named Chicago. The magazines hyped it on the front pages. I was convinced MS was finally going to do it! In my heart I knew it was going to put even OS/2 to shame. I couldn't wait to see what the masters at Microsoft would come up with!
I was so excited about it, I convinced my dear dad to pre-order a copy of Windows 95 so I could try it out the day it was released. Finally it arrived, and I threw it onto the computer as fast as possible.
After several weeks of playing with it, I knew I had yet again been betrayed. This thing was a joke compared to OS/2. My parents gave me a bit of well deserved ribbing. I had been hyping this thing to them for months. Those were the days I began to resent Microsoft. I could no longer look up to them. With OS/2 dying a slow, painful death it looked like the future was nothing but Microsoft. I didn't even know if I wanted to pursue a career in software anymore. I couldn't bear the thought of going to work everyday using something this shoddy.
I still wanted to learn C, but compilers for the MS world were way out of my budget. I heard from some friends that there was something called Linux which had a free compiler. I went down to the bookstore and bought two books. A C programming book and a Linux book with a Slackware CD included.
The learning curve for Linux was pretty steep at first, but I was motivated to get through it. It wasn't long before I began to see its true power. I also found that I hadn't been this excited about computing in years! The people making it happen were everything I thought Microsoft was supposed to be. These programmers were shaking the world with their creation and they were giving it away for free. This was something I could look up to!
Everyone was working together to make something they could use and would be proud of. It was a refreshing feeling to know who wrote the software I was using. I had no clue who wrote the Windows 95 kernel, but I learned right away who started the Linux kernel. I felt a sense of ownership to Linux. It was definitely rough around some edges, but was being improved daily.
I have to admit at this time I really hated Microsoft and I let everyone know it. I was 18 years old and I had found a new dream and a new set of folks to look up to.
Its been almost four years since then, and Linux has come farther than any of us would have predicted. I don't have any stock in Red Hat, but every time they go up, I give a hearty cheer. And Microsoft is just a lumbering decadent beast I sometimes take a gander at. Thankfully I was allowed to convert several legacy Windows systems over to Linux at work. I use Linux at home and at school. Life is good.
There are days when I wonder what could have been. Imagine what Microsoft could have done with their billions of dollars of research and their extremely talented developers if they would have had a grand vision other than making money at any cost. What a damn waste. Something must be wrong when a bunch of rag tag developers can compete with and beat the best they have to offer.
So am I jealous of Microsoft? Hardly. How would you feel after finding out your heroes are a fraud?
Matt Michie is a former Microsoft worshiper and now hardcore Linux junkie. He maintains a small web site at http://web.nmsu.edu/~mmichie.
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Tales from a Former Microsoft Addict
Chris Marshall
I'll admit it : My move into the Linux community has been somewhat less then voluntary, but the transition from a simple minded Windows user to where I am today has been extremely entertaining and informative, if nothing else. In retrospect, I now realise that the biggest problem I encountered wasn't the learning curve or the difference in OS 'style', but myself. And at every point along this road I have started dowm, I've received something I didn't believe existed : real, free help from other users who had walked the same path.
I got a copy of RedHat 5.2 about a year ago as a birthday present. Sure, I had asked for it, but to be honest, I think I just wanted it so I'd have boasting rights among my nerdy friends. I was totally baffled by it. I tried to convince myself that it was because the OS was too complicated. To be honest, it was just my own pride getting in the way. I can remember slipping the CD in, getting as far as Disk Druid, and thinking to myself "what the hell is a mount point?" Rather then doing the logical thing, and checking the documentation, I just fumbled my way around with the partitions until the settings I tried 'worked.' After my first install, it took me several hours to figure out that the username it was looking for was 'root.' This is how far behind the learning curve I was, and how reluctant I was to crack a manual. The few other friends I knew of who used Linux would all kindly suggest that I refer to that thick book that came with the CD. Perhaps, they suggested, the answer to my problem was held somewhere within its pages.
They wanted me to read the manual? The manual!? I haven't read a manual since DOS 3.2! My mild interest in Linux was quickly becoming far more trouble then it was worth. After about a month of fumbling my way around the OS, I wiped out the partitions, and re-installed NT, always telling myself "I'll get to Linux later..."
'Later' came a few weeks ago. I took a job working for a reasonably sized company who needed me to help move their website from a virtual host to an in-house machine, among other things. On my first day, they showed me my desk. And there, patiently waiting for me to log in, was a copy of RedHat 6.0
Now, to the best of my knowledge, in the history of all that was, is, and ever will be, no one has ever taken as long as it took me to get CGI and HTTP services working on that machine. I'll skip over the gory details, but I will tell you that it took three clean installs, two compiles of Apache, and countless posts to comp.os.linux before I finally got output from a test CGI script. Again, every time I was confronted with a problem I would blame the OS, muttering something like "this stuff is too complicated" under my breath. But slowly I began to heed the suggestions of my friends, and slowly I would sneak peaks at the documentation. But even with those stolen glimpses of the forbidden book, I wasn't really reading the manual. I was looking for the quick answer, and as soon as I found enough to get by, the manual found its way back into my desk drawer. More often, though, I found myself posting to the Usenet feeds. Which brings me to a most remarkable thing I learned about the Linux community as a whole.
When I would encounter a problem with something in 98 or NT, for example, which I couldn't deal with on my own, I would ask for help in Usenet feeds like comp.os.windows. The replies to my humble requests for help came in the form of very direct and simple answers. Within minutes of reading through the replies, I'd have whatever problem I was having taken care of. So it was nothing out of the ordinary to find myself asking other users for help with Linux. What was unusual, however, were the replies.
To one of my many posts, I received replies that simply said things like "man init" or something, which to me was equally cryptic. But slowly, I began to decipher these replies, and eventually I noticed that nearly every last reply was telling me nothing about how to fix my problem, but rather, directed me to some form of documentation. Just like my friends in the flesh had done, these people were just pointing to the manual, rather then fixing my problem. I patiently waited for more direct answers to my questions, but none came. Soon, I became frustrated and upset with these callous self-centered people who couldn't take a few minutes to tell me what to do to ease my woes. Out of desperation, I began looking through the suggested documentation.
Slowly a remarkable thing began to happen. I wasn't simply fixing the problem I was having, but I was learning about how the Linux itself works. I was beginning to solve problems I didn't even know I had. With my newfound knowledge of the OS's inner workings, I found myself drawing connections between it and the hidden processes of OS's I did know. What I thought were the posts of unhelpful jerks turned out to be the best help of any kind I'd ever received from a Usenet posting. These people didn't simply want to give me an answer and send me on my way. Instead they wanted me to learn about my problems and their related issues.
They wanted me to arrive at the solution on my own, and in this way, become a proficient Linux user. Something that, in the nearly 15 years I've been using computers--the majority of my life--I've never really experienced before. I'm still very new at it, and I've got a long way to go before I'm as comfortable with a terminal as I am a c:\ prompt. But the knowledge that there are thousands of other users willing to teach me how to deal with my own problems makes learning Linux much easier then I previously thought, or at least more entertaining. And this to me is the most fascinating part of the Linux community. Within other communities, such as Apple and Microsoft, you have tiers of users. There are those who simply use the OS. There are those who customize the OS and make it as they want. And lastly there are those who develop the next iteration of the OS. And to progress from one tier to the other, you must climb them sequentially. However, within the world of Linux, there seems to be a lacking of that first tier of users that are found in the more 'mainstream' OS's. And for this reason, the community as a whole is capable of incredible rates of development and expansion. 'Dead weight' users are simply not well accepted. If they are unable to help themselves in some way, then there are few sources that will.
All this doesn't imply that new users should throw up their arms and head back from whence we came. Instead, we should be ready for a challenge. Support is there for us. We simply need to recognize it, as it is a level of support that has never been experienced by most Wintel or Apple users. That said, I owe a thank you to all of the people who have and will help me to all the people that have and will ever help me out, I thank you. And I promise to do my share of helping when and where I can.
In closing, my words for every other new user much like myself are simple: take comfort in the fact that printed on every box of Red Hat is a number for thirty days of free tech support calls, but know that calling them is not the best path to the solution you're search for. Instead, turn to the single most valuable resource that the Linux community has to offer: it's users.