I remember when Windows 3.1 came out and it was on about 22 floppy disks.
One night around about 1992, I was loading Windows 3.1 on my IBM computer. I was on about disk 13 of 22 when one of my friends stood behind me shaking his head in exasperation, saying "these contraptions will never catch on."
lol. I was into computers in the mid 1980s. I learned Fortran and Basic. I had a class in junior high we used Tandy TRS something or other. At home I got a Commodore 64, and a TRS of my own… had dial up connections to reach the small handful of other people - I had to keep their numbers on a sheet of paper but if I typed them in the modem would dial them. I was “chatting” with a kid 15 miles away, my parents were over my shoulder asking “why don’t you just talk on the phone?” Everything was run on a cassette tape on the Tandy machines. Then I got an Apple //e with 2 floppy drives and I installed 2 modems and hosted my own BBS for a year or so. My parents wouldn’t pay for more than 1 extra phone line though so I had to share the second line. It was fine late at night but no good when other people were awake in the house during polite hours.
Then I got interested in girls. I guess maybe if I stuck with computers instead of high school girls my life would be different. After college I switched from Apple to windows because work software was all run on windows. I would assemble my own buying the parts from Fry’s. That way I could add only the parts I wanted and only the best parts vs buying pre-builds. Eventually prices for rebuilds came down and it was not worth my time. I still occasionally upgrade RAM or SSD drives here or there. But I am not in the computer business any way shape or form. Just grew up with them since before I had hair on my schmekel
I think you have a typo there. I was playing with NT (forerunner of Windows) and Windows 1 in the mid-1980s, soon after the Apple Mac came out and Microsoft copied the code. I later became an NT & Windows server admin in the early 1990s. Anyway, I still have bundles of those floppy disks and hated installing Windows, a painful experience (then there were all the OS updates to apply after the install).
New technology is like that, with hurdles to get over until the technology improves. What comes to mind, are the cranks people had to insert into cars in order to start their ICE engines (still present in some makes into the 1950s). My dad had problems with his first car, a Model T, and often had to do repairs on the side of the road. First adopters always hear "it'll never catch on".