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Comment by imdsm | Hacker News Reader

I have warm memories of Windows XP, upgrading to it from ME at about 11/12 years old, where I truly began my independent journey into SWE. I used to switch to the silver theme every now and then to keep things fresh. Windows XP + an internet connection, what more could a 12 year old geek want? Thanks for helping provide that!

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Windows XP was actually the trigger for me to move to Linux full time. There was an option to let windows verify you owned the media files on your computer via a third party service when you set up Windows media player. Since this was slightly after all the hoopla about Napster and copyright law, it struck me then that perhaps Microsoft wasn't one of the good guys.

I was slightly older than you though, so perhaps that gave me a different perspective.

Windows Media team made a lot of bone-headed decisions. This was at a time when WinAmp was taking off. WinowsMedia could have leaned into MP3 culture while giving a very basic nod to DRM, instead they created a bunch of confusion. At the time Microsoft was considered the "evil empire" so being considered not one of the good guys would have made the marketing team proud at the time.

Damn. That's dark but very enlightening. Thanks.

> perhaps Microsoft wasn't one of the good guys

That's the thing that tipped you off? After the 90s?...

It doesn't matter when it started; it matters when you started paying attention to it.

Many people, of age > 0, discover every day that someone isn't a good guy.

Unfortunately, in the 90s I was profoundly more interested in what kind of pop music was acceptable to enjoy. Teenagers are dumb.

I never got on with Linux for a workstation, though I've tried. I used to use Windows XP for my workstation, and I had Gentoo running on an older computer for my home server. This was around 2001/2002, as I remember being on IRC during everything that followed 9/11, and it was during that time that I was learning to compile Linux. Strange time, lots of mixed memories, but also, such a sense of wonder — the internet, Linux, programming, Windows XP.

I am with you on that. Almost same timeline. Plus the amazing art work, icon packs, editing shell32.dll (or whatever it was called, sorry I dont remember accurately) to make it look like Aurora (or longhorn). Those were the days for a geek.

I held out on Windows 98SE for awhile because of games, and then went to Windows 2000 for the classic UI when I learned you could often get XP drivers to load in 2000 with a bit of INI fiddling.

It wasn’t until nearly 2003 that I finally moved over to XP.

I built and installed and repaired a lot of XP machines (tens of thousands, probably), but ran win2k myself until Windows XP x64 Edition came out, and then promptly installed that. Other than in a VM, i've never actually ran windows XP 32 bit myself. win3.11 "wfw" -> 98SE -> 2k -> xp x64 -> 7 'ultimate' -> 10 pro for workstations. In the gaps i used MacOS (7,8,9) and then redhat, then gentoo.

I also ran NT4 as a fileserver because it had the best SCSI controller support. had almost a year of uptime on that before a blackout took it offline.

Similar story, except instead of 98 for me I held on to Win2k (and the laptop running it, the first laptop I ever bought with my own money) as long as I possibly could. Absolutely loved that release.

Yep, the last Windows version I used was Win2K. It was my fave version of Windows by far. After that I switched to Linux on the desktop, warts and all.

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