as IF i had NOTHING better to do…

I think one day in future, my little niece will be old enough to ask questions – and then she might ask me about the stuff I used to do when "I was younger".
"Well, my dear", I will reply, "when I was about 17, I got my own home computer. An ATARI 1040 STF with an external 30 MB HDD. In Kenya. Imagine this thing running in an environment with frequent power failures – and it worked! Yeah….and so when those x86 / IBM compatible machines became available at an affordable rate, I switched to a Pentium I with 133 MHz and an operating system called Chernobyl 86 Windows95 which took some time to be installed and had more bugs than features. However, by that time in 1996 I was able to go online for the first time. …So as years passed by, computers became more and more powerful and operating systems more user-orientated. In fact, my dear, I think I’ve wasted spent the best part of my twenties (and 30s!!) in front of different computers, trying to fix this and that hard- and software problem, trying out different operating systems and trying to understand why things just didn’t work out the way they were supposed to be…I mean, all I wanted to do was actually USE those machines, you know?"

"But why didn’t you use Mac computers?"

"uhmm….."

Author: jke

Hi, I am an engineer who freelances in water & sanitation-related IT projects at Saniblog.org. You'll also find me on Twitter @jke and Instagram.

3 thoughts on “as IF i had NOTHING better to do…”

  1. AS LONG AS it doesn’t fail for no apparent reason on a sunny (!) Sunday afternoon just because one system.cfg file was corrupted due to Borland’s stupid Delphi Kit, I don’t care what kind of OS it is… Yani, I just want to work with it. The moment I switch on my computer, this machine has to function properly! I mean, have you ever considered the amount of time you’ve spent in front of computers, trying to solve problems? Are we getting paid for this waste of time? Eh?

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