It almost seems as if a growing number of my columns are very much about comparing the present with the past, or just remembering something I did or observed years ago and how it relates to a current event. So I read an article about the iPod’s 15th birthday. But this is something Apple won’t make […]

In Microsoft’s vision of an ideal world, Windows would have fully supplanted the original Mac OS 20 years ago. For a while in the mid-1990s, it appeared that Apple might allow that to happen by default. But when Apple’s executives made a final, desperate move — to acquire Steve Jobs’ NeXT in late 1996 — the future […]

During the year in which Windows 10 was offered as a free download, Microsoft got itself in hot water with its overly aggressive behavior to convince people to install it. How so? Well, the installer was first downloaded in the background. Nothing wrong with that, as nothing forced a Windows user to switch. Where things really went […]

My efforts to solve a problem with the electrical wiring in my home, where outputting a document on my laser printer would sometimes trigger the circuit breaker for that room, has taken on some curious twists and turns. When it first happened, the landlord agreed to have an electrician install a more robust circuit breaker, […]