Firefox market share bounces back 6702

After takin' a swig o' grog, Kier belched out this bit o' wisdom:

Chuckle. I hadn't noticed that insult. Well, actually, it is true, I am not the "sharpest" fellow in the world. Only one guy is! And it sure ain't billwg! LOL!!!

More to the point, here are the commercial platforms I remember:

VIC-20. My first computer! Also C-64.

Timex-Sinclair. Tiny little thing with membrane keys.

Atari 8-bits. Never used one, but a lot of people did.

DOS-PC. Ran my first C compiler on an IBM-XT with a 10 Mb hard-drive.

Mac. Never used one.

Atari ST. My second computer, monochrome screen, real got into MIDI using it. I fire up hatari occasionally for nostaglia.

Tandy systems. The Model 100 was beloved by reporters.

Then there were a number of commercial different OS's and environments:

MS-DOS-PC-DOS-DR-DOS.

GEM.

Mac.

Geos.

And I'm sure the list could be expanded. And then my little computing world kind of collapsed, so that all I was using was a Windows PC. Still used the Atari ST. Saw a thing called "minix" that looked interesting, but dial-up downloading was too slow and unreliable.

Around 1995 I started hearing about "Linux", usually through a news story about some "hacker". But by then Windows was working well enough for me. Plus I got a job hacking out apps on NT.

Some guy at work bought a copy of RedHat 5.1, and lent it to me. I installed it, but couldn't get the graphics working. Actually had no idea of what I was doing. I played with the command-line for awhile, and forgot about it. Finally bought a book with a CD, RedHat 6 among others, and it installed more easily, with graphics. (I was hooked!)

Basically, I stumbled upon Linux. By then, what else was there? FreeBSD, Windows, and Mac. That's it.

-- I love the smell of code compiling in the morning. It smells like... Freedom.