From the Editor’s Desk: Pragmatic ⭐

As an Amiga user and enthusiast in the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was not impressed with Microsoft or anything it made, especially Windows. PCs of that era booted into a limited MS-DOS command line environment, which I found quaint, and true multitasking was mostly an unfulfilled promise. But the Amiga failed along with Commodore, and when I decided to return to school in my late 20s to study software development, the only question was whether I would need a PC or a Mac. And that meant there was really no question at all, since the computer science college classes at that time all assumed the PC.

I had used the original IBM PC and some clones by that point, but my funds were tight, so I started pricing out the components I would need to build my first PC. Its barely beating heart was an AMD 386SX because it was so much cheaper than the real Intel chips, including the expensive 80486. It would be enough.

I continued to be unimpressed with the PC as a platform. But in time, a few things changed and helped to alter my opinions about Microsoft and its software. The professor of a networking class recommended that I check out Windows for Workgroups, which I did, and I found its 32-bit memory and disk access options even more compelling than its networking functionality. My wife worked at a training company that got pre-release versions of the Microsoft Office 6.0 suite, and I was blown away by the quality of the apps, especially Microsoft Word. Visual Basic had its warts but it was still an impressive way to create apps visually and quickly. And then I got caught up in what became my career and found myself using an early beta of Windows 4.0, soon renamed to Windows 95, that was quite interesting to me.

I also bought Charles Petzold’s iconic book Programming Windows (the 3.1 edition, I believe) and read and re-read it, amazed by how complex it all was. And while this may seem odd, that complexity helped shift my opinions, too, as it was so technical and difficult to understand. Clearly, this was a sophisticated environment, I believed. (Now I realize it was just complex and poorly designed.) I had a similar reaction with the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), a horrible “wrapper” a few years later.

This all happened in the early 1990s. In From the Editor’s Desk: Early Influences ⭐, I wrote about the “era” that, for me, ran from about 1978 to 1993, a 15-year period in which I was what I would now call a personal technology enthusiast. 1993 was (again, for me) what we now call an inflection point, a slice in time when everything changes and this hobby, this enthusiasm, turned into a life’s work. In that earlier post, I noted that we moved to Phoenix in 1993 and that the movie Jurassic Park and the videogame Star Wars: X-Wing were both released that year too. But 1993 was also the beginning of a new era in which I became part of the tech industry, in a peripheral sense, through the writing of books. The first of which were all about...