A Road Less Travelled - Trying To Live Microsoft Free

"If we have desecrated ourselves - as who has not? - the remedy will be by wariness and devotion to reconsecrate ourselves..."
- HENRY DAVID THOREAU "Life Without Principle"

I will be the first to admit that I am not a trained computer techinician. I am more a tinkerer; I prefer the relaxed lanes of the Information Super Highway and cruising along at less than gigahertz speeds, and I prefer to use machines that I have rescued. So far, in my rescue efforts, no other computer has been easier for me to rehabilitate then Macintoshes. As I have written elsewhere in these pages, the end result of these interventions has been a personal surplus of machines. I've rescued a number of PCs as well; I'm using one now, in fact (a Compaq Deskpro moving along at 233mHz). Just seeing machines that are still useful being disposed of bothers me.
But what bothers me more is the monopoly one company enjoys, and of course I'm referring to Microsoft.
While they do not manufacture computers per se, they control the lion's share of the market, on both the OS and application levels. Competitors are there, but the average PC buyer is deliberately kept in the dark, it seems, either by design or disregard. The alternative OS community still has a way to go, though some headway is being had in the area of applications. Alternatives do exist, however, beyond the hardware level.
Still, it is hard to avoid using something from the Colossus of Redmond. Right now, as I write this, the fact that this machine uses Windows 98SE is hard to avoid. However, I'm not using IE to get to the net, I'm using Mozilla (One blow against the Empire!). This is a personal rebellion. The pervasiveness of this one company into computer users lives seems to me to be endemic of our society. In short, if it works, even if it is all over the place, don't fix it. Just get in line.
That said, I've decided to truly limit my intake of Microsoft wherever possible. For now, this machine has to be the exception, since my fastest working Mac is only 120mHz and isn't that good online (that being my 5260). For real productivity, I am making a real concerted effort to stick to my non-MS apps. For instance, I use Nisus Writer and Compact for general word procssing jobs. These are more than adequate for the task. They are also free and can run on all of my Macs, though right now they live only on my PB540c. For most lighter writing jobs, I use TexEdit Plus. I have PageMaker and QuarkXpress if I need to do real publishing.
For spreadsheets, there are a number of free programs out there, both abandonware and genuine alternatives. At this time, there really isn't much need for one in my life. More important to me right now are astronomy applications, and a quick search on Google will turn up several freeware programs as well as shareware. Anything else I need can be found outside of MS, of course, but those are the most important.
Why do this at all? My first computer of any appreciable power was a PC running Ms-DOS; it would be a few years before I finally lucked into a Lisa and my first taste of the golden Apple. My place of work is strictly a Windows operation. There is no escaping the powerful presence of Microsoft. Even in the field of writing, the default standard is MS Word. For me, as it is for many Mac and *nix users, it's freedom of choice. We deliberately choose a road less travelled, for many reasons. For myself, there are multiple reasons, but each one of those reasons makes a statement.
The one Windows PC that I plan to use beyond this shared desktop, a laptop, runs StarOffice as part of this statement. Incidentally, there is one other application on this machine that was distributed by Microsoft that I play with quite a bit; Space Simulator. But it was written by the Bruce Artwick Organization and is a DOS program. It was abandoned by Gates & Co. shortly after its introduction. That in itself says something.
There is one computer in my collection, though, that will be hard to use MS-less, and that is my Tandy Model 102. The OS, if you want to call it that, is from Microsoft, and it's firmware. At least it's small and not so obtrusive. Even now, that MS flag on the "Start" button is annoying me...