So Microsoft has announced that they have a new operating system. Rather than just being Windows this one is called Vista. To me that sounds more like a car than a computer operating system but, then again, I am not Bill Gates and there is probably a reason this is not the case. I do hate it when they do this though.

The computer companies always have to bring out new things and people rush out and get them. To me it was never entirely clear what was different from one Windows permutation to the other. This could be that I essentially use my computer as a fancy word processor and to look at porn. To those of you with much more noble uses for your computer you probably could teach me a thing or two about how wondering Windows is and explain what the difference is from one to another. I just know it reaches the point where the old Word documents I have cannot be read by anyone else with a newer version and I am forced to get the newer version.

Since I am not a technically adept person I turned to a friend of mine to talk about this new operating system. I wanted to get an idea of what was different with this new system compared to the existing systems. My friend is a computer consultant. He is also Microsoft Certified or something like that. Bill Gates shows up at his house and plays backgammon with him, I think. Anyway, I wanted to be professional about it. I figured it was his career and his area of expertise. So, I did some research, analyzed the data and sent him an e-mail with one key question.

“So, um, what’s the, uh, deal with this new Vista thing anyway, huh?”

My friend gave me a very professional answer. I knew he would. He always does. What he sent back was the following:

“ Vista is the OS (operating system) successor to Windows XP. It is pretty impressive, but the vast majority of people are so jaded by MS that there isn’t a lot of excitement around its release. It’s been 5 years since an OS release from MS, yet people will not be camping outside the stores like they did for the release of Win95 over a decade ago.

“Frankly, for most people, XP is all they need…..it has the stability and usability necessary to do what most people do.

“This is actually a good thing, because except for a few brave early adopters, I recommend the average user wait a few months before considering an upgrade if at all. Unless your machine is less than a year or so old and relatively powerful, I wouldn’t recommend an upgrade as Vista is fairly resource-intensive and requires quite a bit of horsepower to run smoothly.”

Sounds pretty impressive, doesn’t it? I have no idea what it means other than I don’t need to drag my PC down to him when I decide to visit him and his family in the near future. This is always a good thing. Computers tend to be heavy things.

Of course computer people are always trying to improve things. I am guessing this is always going to be the case. If it weren’t we would all still have computer systems that looked like the one Matthew Broderick had in the movie “Wargames.” I remember when everyone I knew was crowing about getting and Apple IIe. I also remember my friend who had an IBM at home and how it was interesting that the screen and keyboard were all on machine and not separated.

There was a time when my family was cutting edge when it came to technology. Most of it had to do with home entertainment back then. My family had a home Pong game, for example. Way back then you got this game system and all of the games were on the system and you didn’t have to worry about cartridges or things. It also tended to burn the Pong figures right into your television screen so you were left with little digital Pong paddles over the television pictures of Nixon on the news.

My family was also one of the first to have a home VCR. It was roughly the size of a Buick and cost about as much as house. It was also a Beta machine but at the time there was still a debate over which medium was better. You could record for a maximum of two hours and then you had to find another tape player. My dad tried to record the Academy Awards back then and each show would end up on multiple tapes.

Had the computer people of the world not tinkered with those things we would still be trying to find Beta videotapes. I would also still be using a Motorola flip-phone instead of a phone that can do text messaging. I might also still be driving a car from the 70s instead of the car I have now.

So, I am not really against progress. I am just saying that it shouldn’t be so complicated for those of us who are not Bill Gates. At the same time my friend has a family to support so the more complicated they make it the more people need to pay him to make their machines work. It is interesting that we have reached the point where our technology is so far advanced beyond the capabilities of the average users to use. That means we have now created an entire industry of people whose sole job it is to read the instructions that we cannot take the time to read and cannot possibly hope to understand.

This seems to me to be another step in my theory that the machines are taking over. At some point it will be easier to develop machines that will come over and install the new operating systems and get them working. Machines will be there to program the new operating systems and they will run them. Eventually machines will do everything and we will turn into sludge sitting in front of the computers watching them doing everything for themselves.

All I care about is still having the capability to write and watch my porn. If the machines take away those things I will have a problem with them. Of course by then I won’t be able to do anything because I will be nothing but sludge. You see how insidious these machines are.

Bryan W. Alaspa’s novel Dust is available in print and eBook format at his website www.bryanalaspa.com and www.amazon.com.