[fitkoh]

In a sense, M$$'s Windows democratized the access to computing to a large portion of the worldwide population, and for that I will personally for ever be indebted to it. I still remember that the only way I had access to a computer was in our 'Informatics' department back in the 90s... a far cry from what the young generation is experiencing nowadays!

Ironic: I would have said the same thing about linux.

When I was in high school in the mid 90s I tried to take computer programming but I wasn't allowed to because we had no computer at home (they had a cost in the thousands back then, as you probably remember). While I'm certainly not as knowledgeable by some by a long shot, everything I've learned since has been self-taught.

Fast forward a couple years. I acquired my first pc: a frankenstein made mostly of hand-me-downs. It has an error-riddled installation of win95, which is always giving me bluescreens and crashes daily. The total cost for components of my first pc was 400$ - a great price tag for the time, and I saved over a year for it. To upgrade this pc with win98 would have added I think 300$ to the cost? For me, the price of windows was not something that opened a door to computing. It was something that would have prohibited me if not for the discovery of FOSS.

Fortunately, when windows was expensive and out  of reach, a friend came over with a copy of redhat spanning several floppies, and helped me set up a dual boot system, so I wouldn't have to suffer with the broken installation of win95. I haven't had a need for windows since and I don't see that changing any time soon.