Ten Years of Computers - Part Two - 1999

1998 had been, as the name suggested (damn corporate sponsorship) the year Windows 98 came out. I was ready to rush out and buy it as soon as poss but once I’d looked into it a little more I began to wonder why. Yes, it had some features that sounded impressive (though heaven knows what they were as I don’t remember anything impressive about it) but I already had most of them. What Microsoft neglected to mention was that Windows 98 was basically the final incarnation of Windows 95 with a couple of knobs on. FAT32? 95 OSR4 already had it. The killer blow was when I discovered that the new look promoted in magazines was just IE4 used as your Windows explorer. Installing IE4 (even though I wasn’t connected to the internet) was exciting. It seemed to give me so many new things to play with. It was like getting a whole new operating system but for nothing.

From Windows 95 style...

...to Windows 98 style.

(photos borrowed from this site)

Sadly, all things come to an end. One day in early 1999, for no obvious reason, I got an error message. Explorer.exe had a problem and wouldn’t start. I got as far as a blank desk top but then got the message of death. This wasn’t great. My first thought (or someone else’s first suggestion – I forget which) was to reinstall Windows 95. In those sepia days you could leave your front door open, there was no such thing as a paedophile, Islam hadn’t been invented and Microsoft would actually give you a Windows CD when you bought a computer. Sadly, the CD required a serial number and in my excitement I’d thrown the certificate of authenticity away with the rest of the cellophane. So Windows wasn’t an option. Still, there were other things I could try. I bought a book about DOS and learned to do some basic things in that most user friendly of operating systems. I was able to back up some valued files to floppy disc, I deleted some system files (at the suggestion of a Welsh computer teacher called Kelvin who said "delete the files tonight and I’ll bring you in a CD in the morning so you can replace them" but never did) and generally pottered about using prompts and commands I’ve thankfully never needed to use since.

As with all my crash stories (as you’ll soon discover for yourselves) I didn’t make things any better. A computer which doesn’t work cannot be made to work even less well, which means I didn’t actually make things worse either. I finally put the whole mess behind me by using the system restore disc – I got my computer back but lost around four months of diary entries and pretty much everything I’d done during my first year.

I decided that the best way of avoiding a similar fate in future was to buy Windows 98. That way I’d always have an operating system disc I could rely on to reinstall without a hitch. The first installation, however, had hitches. In fact, it was as hitched as hitched can be. I was up until two or three in the morning getting things to work but eventually they did. At the fourth or fifth attempt it gave me my sparkling new desk top, audio that worked, more than 64 colours and no more error messages. I would probably have been elated had I not had to get up six hours later to go to my grandmother’s funeral.

1999 was the year of the office suite. After not getting much use out of Works (save the word processor for m’diary) I got Lotus Smartsuite from PC Plus magazine. This was a revelation – a feature packed word processor, a database that actually made sense, a spreadsheet which I actually understood how to use and an organiser that was great and lacked only appointments of importance to put in it. For many years I was a Lotus advocate. As I would later do with Apple’s OSX, I sang the praises of Smartsuite to anyone who would listen. It was better than Microsoft Office, I’d say, and then list several dozen really good reasons why this was so. My only experience at the time of using Microsoft Office was at a training centre I was obliged to go to at the behest of the Job Centre.

I did an NVQ in IT during the first half of the year and largely hated every second of it. From the business hours we were obliged to keep (none of this one or two days a week – this was full time and intensely boring) to being threatened by a knife-wielding student on my first day, it wasn’t a great time to be alive. But – and I mean this in the nicest possible way – I was well ahead of everyone else and they just sort of left me to it. Because they were paid per person, per day by Her Majesty’s Government, they were in no hurry to get me qualified and out of there. I could’ve finished in about six weeks had they wanted me to but they eked it out for six long months and it was only the comradeship with Weird Ian and a Limp Bizkit fan called Steve that kept me going.

At the same time all that was going on, I was also going to night school (at father’s insistence) to do more or less the same thing. The night school course was so much more focused and informative and those two hours a week were worth far more than the thirty five hours I was spending in a stuffy training facility every week. Sadly, the course was on a Wednesday night (I was always late because that was when Late Lunch was on) which means I missed several of the classic matches on route to the Champions League final and Manchester United’s glorious treble.

Still, with hindsight I gained a lot from both courses. A year later I finally found (just about) paid employment and the familiarity I had with MS Office stood me in good stead as even a boss who was determined to find fault with absolutely everything I ever did at work was unable to deny that her team simply wouldn’t be able to function without me.

On a happier note, I did my second hardware upgrade in September of 1999. At about the same time that the moon was being blasted out of Earth’s orbit I bought myself a DVD drive. DVDs were new and exciting and sexy. The small corner of HMV given over to these expensive new discs was sophisticated and new and exciting and sexy. DVD players were still around £400 at the time (and I only had a portable telly with no SCART socket) so that wasn’t really an option. But a DVD drive was and I did the double installation (new drive and an MPEG decoder card) in time to watch my first ever DVD – Sam Neill’s "Merlin". I actually bought the disc before I bought the drive – it was my insurance against chickening out. Merlin is also the answer to another trivia question – name the only four DVDs I’ve ever paid full price for (the others being "The Avengers", "Shakespeare in Love" and "Contact" – all four from HMV and the four receipts entitled me to a free copy of "Austin Powers" so there was still a bargain element to it).

1999 was also the year I started writing. I’d been diarising for months but one day the idea came to me to write a novel. I’d written a fairly short Doctor Who novel on my old word processor and that same machine had born witness to several other aborted projects but this time I was going to do it properly. Now that I had a decent word processor in Lotus Word Pro and a sounding board like Weird Ian to bounce ideas off, I was ready to go for it. A hundred thousand words later and "The Not Very Civil Servant" was fun to write. I tried to stick to 1500 words a day (and managed it more often than not – a far cry from the lazy and/or creatively blocked soul I am today). I have often thought of putting the five novels I eventually wrote in the series (plus whatever other bits and pieces I can, "Salmon of Doubt" style, scrape together) on the website, possibly with annotations to help things along. Some extracts have made it but the bulk of the text (between them they are around 600,000 words) remains a mystery. Actually, much of it is a mystery to me as well because I don’t seem to have non-Lotus copies of the first two books to hand. I know I have them somewhere on CD but I don’t know where.

1999 ended with much celebration and many fireworks (generally I mean, not for me). It was in the final days of 1999 that I finally returned to cyberspace. Dial-up had arrived.