Last Updated On Friday, April 28, 2000

           I have had over 15 years of experience in using personal computers. Originally in some 15 years ago, I bought an 8-bit Apple II for playing games. By then, the Apple II only had a floppy disk drive of 360K which I had to push in a boot disk to boot up the machine. Then I was taught of what was DOS (disk operating system) and how to memorize its commands before I could survive comfortably with my PC. Hard disks in the good old days were very luxurious items. They were used only by large business firms. For home users we only hooked up our machines with a tape recorder to serve for storage purpose or used the separate 360K floppy disks to store up our valuable files. Word processing by then was a very common topic talking among the computer enthusiasts. They swapped their knowledge of using the powerful software called Wordstar. Then in a year or two after, IBM introduced its 16-bit PC to home computer market. And it was at that time when I switched using an IBM compatible XT computer. Applications to cater for more aspects came into use too. Other than Wordstar, we had Wordperfect. Then people were talking of  the very reputable spreadsheet application called Lotus 1-2-3 or the database management application called Dbase III plus manufactured by Aston Tate. Microsoft to my knowledge at that time only related to MS DOS, the disk operating system it developed for use in the IBM compatible machines. Nobody could tell 13 years after, this company has become a giant of the industry that majority of home or small business computer users use Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. And Internet, though not a worldwide network invented by Microsoft but still could be said of being successfully promoted by the company to the world especially to those laymen like me.