Actually, it was much worse back then. Nowadays Apple Macs are affordable and alternative PC operating systems are quite usable too. In 1999 there was a usable

Actually, it was much worse back then. Nowadays Apple Macs are affordable and alternative PC operating systems are quite usable too. In 1999 there was a usable but limited/old Win 95 and Win 98 which was crashing on a daily basis. So you can imagine how frustarating it was to work with such a machine. Furthermore, microsoft was fighting open source software which didn't make them more popular: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents Compared to those times the data collection on modern Win 10 systems and forced updates are small sins ;-)