I'll never forget the day in 1993 that I excitedly unpacked my first PC, plugged everything in, and watched with keen delight as that first DOS prompt appeared.
I was happily running MS-DOS 6.2. Somehow, that friendly CLI (on which I ran a wonderful, long-lost GUI called Geoworks) turned into the vile monster that is Vista.
What happened? Why?
The plain and simple fact is that when you run a CLI, its brand name doesn't matter nearly as much as when you begin depending on a GUI.
I remember playing around with DR-DOS and NDOS as command-line shells. They all looked and acted pretty much the same.
And Geoworks provided a graphical desktop, complete with rudimentary multitasking, as did Desqview and Windows 3.1.
But by 1995, things had changed. 32-bit operating systems became the state-of-the-art, and a prepackaged GUI was an integral part of the deal. Witness OS2/Warp and Windows 95.
While booting into a CLI was possible with Windows 95, there was no such thing as an add-on GUI that would run in 32 bit mode on top of it. So you were stuck with Microsoft's product, unless you wanted to take a walk on the wild side and give IBM's product a try.
Indeed, OS2/Warp beat Windows 95 to the marketplace by a goodly margin, but Bill Gates' farsightedness in getting PC manufacturers to sell their machines with Windows preinstalled made any inroads IBM might have gained temporary at best. At worst, people denounced the alternative to Windows as a misbehaving problem child capable of destroying data. I heard personal experiences from two different buddies.
So, for better or worse, Windows was in charge. And that was when Microsoft started getting ugly.
The monstrously wealthy corporation was getting themselves and their stockholders rich with new PC licensing. But it wasn't enough. The company decided to go after pirates.
Windows XP had to "phone home" to work. That in itself was a pretty strong deterrent to piracy. However, OEM license keys got posted on the web, and MS considered that enough of a threat that it installed a heinous, diabolical program called Windows Genuine Advantage.
WGA's sole purpose in life is to notify you and Microsoft if it determines that your copy of Windows XP, Office, or whatever is not legally bought and paid for.
At that point, July 2005, Microsoft officially began sucking, as far as customer service was concerned.
Beginning then, all customers were viewed as potential pirates, unless WGA proved otherwise.
MS has attempted to create a business environment that requires its 100% usage for a business to function. But open-source technology plugs into MS's protocols just fine, as long as developers can get their hands on the details. Of course, MS does their level best to keep such protocols secret, with threats pf lawsuits against anyone who would reveal them.
What you now have is a corporate entity that is inherently evil in the way it does business.
And that's a shame, because I have fond memories of using MS-DOS in its various flavors, and making it work with a variety of GUI desktop interfaces.
