I went to the, possibly, only university in the country that did not have C & UNIX. In 1973, at USF Tampa, we had an IBM 360 system, complete with punch cards.

I went to the, possibly, only university in the country that did not have C & UNIX. In 1973, at USF Tampa, we had an IBM 360 system, complete with punch cards. Horrible. Engineering required Fortran IV, boring, and the instructor smoked. I finally worked at a defense contractor, which used DEC's VAX 11/780 running VAX/VMS. I was hardware and a good-natured soul introduced me to VAX/VMS. VAX/VMS was painless, easy to learn and use. In October 1981, IBM came out with the IBM PC. $6,000 with a monochrome monitor, no hard-drive, and DOS 1.0, not much more than a loader. Over time, MicroSoft improved DOS and eventually started the Windows franchise with Windows 95. The MS hired Dave Cutler away from DEC to be principle sw architect on the Windows New Technology. Windows was good and MS was innovative. Prices came down. Capability went up. But a new "feature" showed up: software "viruses", then trojans, then on-and-on, building a $10Billion per year anti-malware industry. I still stayed with MS. I liked and knew the user interface. Then came Windows 8, 9, and 10. Over time I had had periodic positive discussions with folks who knew and used C, UNIX, GNU, Linux. My wife is legally blind and finds her way around the display partly by vision (limited) and partly by memory. Windows 8-10 made computer use by my wife impossible. I switched to Linux Mint 17.3, love it, enjoy it, have fun with it. I installed Linux on both mine and my wife's machines, on a friends machine, and no-one has any complaints. Starting on Monday, 22 May 2017, I am teaching my 11yo grandson how to program in C on Linux. I doubt that I will ever go back to Windows.