I also first started playing around with computers in '80, and I’m also a Windows 7 holdout, except that I use Linux as a daily driver and just have 7 on a couple of old dual-boot laptops. No political motivation for me, just a hatred of Windows 10’s fuckery.
I also have a pristine, never-booted Windows 10 install for my current day-to-day laptop, since I yanked the SSD and put in one twice the size before powering it up the first time, and installed Xubuntu from the get-go. I’m not using Windows 10 if I can help it.
I am amazed at how politics has creeped into OS choices as well. But to be fair, Apple fired the first shots when Guy Kawasaki created Mac evangelism.
It was a good tactic for saving Apple at its darkest hour (unlike Commodore and Atari), but at the same time it did draw some pretty hard battle lines to this day, by making Microsoft the “enemy” instead of competing against IBM, Compaq, Dell, HP, and the others on the basis of the hardware/software synergy.
I used to hotswap ADB like it was my job, never had an issue. SCSI, on the other hand… pretty sure I’ve still got a wide range of terminators in that ornate wooden box in the corner.
One thing I distinctly remember from that time period was that the first issue of Wired had a flyaway card where you circled numbers and sent it in to have advertisers contact you. Talk about low tech. Some tech savvy businesses actually had an e-mail address in their ad for you to contact them.
