Operating system

Last month I committed an act of technical rebellion: I bought one operating system instead of another. On the surface, this may not seem like much, since an operating system is something that can seem inevitable. It’s there when you get your machine, some software from Microsoft, an ur-condition that can be upgraded but not undone. Yet the world is filled with operating systems, it turns out. And since I’ve always felt that a computer system is a significant statement about our relationship to the world — how we organize our understanding of it, how we want to interact with what we know, how we wish to project the whole notion of intelligence — I suddenly did not feel like giving in to the inevitable. Ellen Ullman, http://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/