I have spent most of the day, when I have not been busy working band camp, catching up on all of the news concerning Bill Gate's departure from Microsoft. While I do not condone Microsoft's tough arm policies on competition when it comes to its overall corporate strategy, I am an avid fan of Windows and a huge admirer of Bill Gates himself. With the departure of Gates (though he will still remain active on the Microsoft board as lead shareholder) we find ourselves in the transition to cloud computing and in the process of moving away from more concrete desktop applications.
My computing days started around 1993, right before the initialization of Windows 95, which changed the way that PC users optimized their usage. In 1993 I also had my first view into internet usage at one of my friends houses with America Online. I can still remember how it felt to initialize my first instant message with someone that I had never actually met before. Windows 3.1 was the great operating system of the time, and my parents purchased me an Acer 386 PC with 2 megs of memory, I believe. I used that computer for five years before finally graduating to a Pentium 1 in 1998 while attending undergraduate school at Henderson State University. In 1996 or so I made an error and deleted an entire partition on my 386 and had to figure out for myself how to reinstall windows 3.1 and learn that wonderful DOS language!! One of the great ways of learning on computers is just digging into it and making mistakes, and then figuring out how to fix the boo boos that you have caused!
I have had many adventures on my PC ever since, and have come to love the Windows operating system. While most users view Vista as a mistake by Microsoft, I can tell you that I am happily satisfied using Vista Home Premium on my current setup, which is a Dell E1705 Inspiron at 1.73 Ghz with 2 gigs of memory.
Thank you so much for what you have done for the computer world Bill, and thank you more for what you are doing in your efforts with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation!
Gates Departure Links of Interest:
LA Time Story:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-microsoft28-2008jun28,0,2384625.story
Microsoft's Bill Gates Departure Videos (Good stuff here!):
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/billg/videos/
Gizmodo's Gates Retirement Party:
http://gizmodo.com/tag/Bill-Gates-Retirement-Party/
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