The end of a desktop era

I think it must have been about 1978 that I got my hands on what would now be called a 'desktop' computer — a Southwest Technical Products machine, imported by the company for whom I worked from the United States.  It had a Motorola 6800 microprocessor, sported an earth-shattering 16k of memory and ran an operating system called FLEX.  A couple of us in the Development Section became so interested in finding out how it ticked that we often ordered beer and sandwiches from the Head Office canteen and worked long into the evening.  Thus it was that we taught ourselves the intricacies of ROMs, RAMs and machine code. I well remember our joy when we successfully reprogrammed the character EPROM, sacrificing the '}' symbol so that we could have a little man walk across the screen!

I regularly took the computer home each evening and weekend to impress my family, in particular my elder son (then aged 6) who quickly became enthralled with a floppy disk of games that I'd programmed. Returning to school one Monday, he wrote about it in terms that must have completely baffled his teacher.  

On Satday I had a computer.

The disk I had was Basic Games

and to get to cat I had to go to dos.

The last line explained that, in order to catalogue the disk ('cat' in the FLEX language) he had to exit Basic and return to the disk operating system. Impressive! Remember, he was only 6 and this was at least 3 years before any of his friends had Sinclair or BBC computers.

I can claim, therefore, to have had a desktop computer at home for the past 37 years – and one of my own since 1987, when I bought an Amstrad PCW8256.  However, that era drew to a close last week, when I gave my trusty Dell computer to my cousin Jan.

Last Thursday, Jan and I set off for PC World in Gloucester to buy a nice new laptop.

I have to say that the salesman was most obliging.  I wasn't sure whether to fork out for a touch-screen laptop or settle for a conventional one, so he quietly watched as I played around with an up-market touch-screen model.  "Yes," I declared, "touch-screen is for me, but not that one.  Do you have the HP 15-G091 that's on your website for £350?"  It wasn't on display and he didn't think he had one, but a few minutes later he appeared with it in his hand.

"Now, madam, Windows 8.1 is very different from the Windows you're used to and quite tricky to get used to. For just £6.50 a month you can have all the technical support you need." I toyed with telling him that I'd managed every version since Window 3 without help, but resisted the temptation and politely declined.  "And we strongly recommend McAffee virus protection for £20."  I smiled and explained that AVG Free had never let me down. "These companies aren't daft," he explained. "They won't give away a product that's as good as one you pay for."  To his visible disappointment, I remained unmoved. "Then how about Microsoft Office for £40?"  Again I smiled benignly and declared my preference for free OpenOffice. Gracefully, and most professionally, he capitulated.  In this woman he'd met his match!

So now, in place of my faithful old desktop computer, I have a shiny new laptop. I spent the first couple of days stripping out all the junk applications that Hewlett Packard thought I would love, then installing my own stuff. Now it's all working sweetly and I'm very pleased with my purchase.

Did I master Windows 8.1?  I'll leave you to guess.