The Personal Computing Story
This is a story of intrigue, misdirection, conning the public and money gathering that beggars the imagination. It’s also an unstoppable game being played that fits in seamlessly with our consumer society.
The Wintel Game. The game has been played now for so long that the main player can release its main product knowing in advance that it can announce a major repair of things gotten wrong and its clients will still buy the original. One player has dropped to the background a little, forced out of the forefront by the limitations of technology, or rather of physics. But Microsoft (MS) rolls on.
What is the ‘game’? It’s been running for quite some time, ever since the guy who stated that he could see no reason why anyone would ever want more than 1MB (MegaByte) of memory in their PC. That’s right, 1 MB! You most likely have 20,000 times that (2 Gigabyte) in your USB drive. Cameras commonly have 5,000 times that amount.
Then Bill Gates and Intel got their heads together and so began the Wintel Game. How it works is this… You buy a computer, whiz-bang-for-your-buck and state-of-the-art. Within a few months, MS releases a new version of Windows, or perhaps of MS Office that pushes the boundary out further. Your pride and joy now runs slower and soon you see that flashy new Intel computer being advertised and find a need to upgrade your hardware to regain the speed you had on your original machine.
One way they did this is by inserting Easter Eggs in the software. Easter eggs are undocumented codes that will run various functions (there was a flight simulator hidden in Excel 97 and Excel 2000 had a game). MS is supposed to have officially stopped inserting Easter eggs, but there was only ever one reason to do it – Easter eggs increased the size of the executable file and so brought the user closer to requiring an upgrade of their hardware.
So as we explore further into the computing world, and as you learn the tips and tricks I glean from the labyrinthine mind of a professional Helpdesk engineer, you will be better placed to decide if you want to continue playing the Wintel Game.
Leave a Reply