28 August 1995
I have spent two days with Windows 95 and would like to report that the future has arrived wearing ankle weights. Everything is rounder, slower, hungrier, and more pleased with itself than before.
It offers a Start button, which is confident, given how much of the afternoon it spent preventing me from starting. Men in shirts on television talk about freedom while my machine coughs and rearranges its own furniture. If this is liberation, it has a very large appetite for memory.
The magazines are already swooning. They write as if a desktop is a moral event. Perhaps for accountants it is. For writing, I require a cursor, a file, and the machine to refrain from behaving like a department store at Christmas.
There is a lesson here, and I dislike it. The world rewards the thing that can make itself look inevitable. It need not be graceful. It need not be fast. It need only arrive with enough noise and money that reluctance begins to sound like eccentricity.
I will keep using my old setup for as long as possible. If the revolution wants my sentences, it can learn to move more quickly.