Booting through the years…

In 1990 I bought a 386 PC with 1 MB of ram, 40 MB hard drive, and a whopping 16 MHz of processor speed. It came with no Operating System installed, but had MS-DOS 4.01 in the box on 5.25” floppies. Once I partitioned and formatted the drive, I installed MS-DOS and re-booted. Upon 1st boot, I saw this:

It may not look like much, but to me it was the realization of a dream to own a PC since I first heard of Apple in 1976. It was the beginning of my freedom to explore the world and understand concepts and ideas that I’d never otherwise know. It marked my first success in fulfilling a passion to control technology and make it work for me. Silly as it may seem to some, my life was different from this point forward.

The next big boot came in 1994. IBM was trying to regain ground from Microsoft’s Windows 3.x success. They were releasing a ground breaking operating system – object based – that was far ahead of anything else at the time for personal computers. It was called OS/2 Warp 3.0. On the morning of it’s release I was at the store early anticipating long lines. I was the first one there. I was the only one there. I guess no one else understood how awesome it was.

I brought my Warp 3.0 home and worked on my PC all day, into the night. I had to make a trip to get a new sound card, no small expense those days, as well as a new CD drive. All together I believe it was over $300.00 spent that day. Finally, along about midnight, I rebooted and saw this!

Then this:

I’ll never forget the most awesome boot up sound that came through my speakers!

That was the most exciting boot up to me… the OS was really great. I could run Windows 3 apps, plus it came with IBM Works, a small office package. It was true 32 bit, and Internet ready.

One year later, 1995, I had to have the next big thing - Windows 95!

That OS came with big promises, but I was always disappointed.

It wasn’t easier, faster, more fun, or even possible much of the time. Although I used Windows of every version for work and play; learned every file and option; I never really enjoyed Windows much again until the recent Windows 7 was released as beta earlier this year.

1995 and Windows 95 marked the beginning of my search for a better OS. OS/2 Warp 3.0 had been quickly left behind in driver support, but I could still run it, so I did; and to stay up to date, keep my hardware as capable as I wanted it to be, I began to experiment with Linux.

The third milestone boot-up in my life came in 1995 when I booted my first Linux operating system, Slackware. Free and Open Source software does not have much to do with price, rather everything to do with freedom. Linux was (is) fun and just felt right. Linux was anything but easy in it’s early days, but in time, some distributions started “just working” right out of the box. The first one to do that for me was SuSE version 5.2. It was liberating.  

Today I installed a new (and legal) copy of Windows 7 Home Premium over the Windows 7 RC1. It booted several times before completed with it’s part, and took me 4 hours more of restoring and installing programs before it was really done.

I wonder where this boot will take me.