Information Technology

To provide some background to this article:
Having been involved in the Computer Industry since the 1970's, I witnessed first hand the evolution of computing since the industry was about 15 years old. Much has changed, from Scientist in white coats entering climate controlled computer rooms holding the Mainframe and its peripheral devices through an airlock with tacky mats to wrist watches and cell phones with more memory and processing power than the first Mainframe I worked on, which was an ICL 1903a running George III, and NO screens.
I remember the plethora of proprietary PCs and their unique operating systems, before the advent of Microsoft. Halcyon days indeed.

Follow up:

It was IBM that instigated the creation of Microsoft when it was searching for a suitable operating system for their new PC, the intention being to standardize the growing micro market, and largely succeeding in so doing. Yet another example of IBM leading the market from the back. MS-DOS developed and interest increased, then they introduced Windows, a graphical user interface that dramatically improved the user experience, not unlike X-windows on unix systems. The introduction of Windows 95 was, in my opinion, the beginning of the end for Microsoft. The Techheads were replaced with Sales and Marketing and MS became M$.
It is well known that the recent release of Windows Vista could require you to scrap your hardware and buy a completely new PC, as much legacy hardware is not supported by Vista. What I had forgotten was that Windows XP also had the same issues with some existing hardware. One might expect the pattern to continue with the upcoming Windows 7. Almost all commercial software is licensed in some way or another, meaning that you are not buying the OS but buying a license to use it. Sometime in the first half of 2009, Microsoft will be cutting support for XP. What should you do after that? Microsoft would encourage you to upgrade to Vista, and potentially have to buy new hardware, which in effect is not an upgrade as the new PC will have Vista already installed.
An alternate, more palatable, option might be to investigate the open source community. OpenSuse 11 is a distribution of Linux which can be downloaded and installed for free, has an on-line repository, so if you need a new application you look through the catalog, click and you are good to go. It is possible, if you have a little extra disk space, to install Suse alongside XP and have a dual boot machine. I might add at this point that it does not work the other way around, i.e. XP will wipe out any other OS in its way. Microsoft OS's do not play well with others.
I suggest y'all take a look at Linux, and particularly OpenSuse, now, rather than wait until you are left with no choice but to try and upgrade to Vista, fail and have to buy a new PC with another copy of Vista, and don't think that M$ will refund you for the failed upgrade. You will experience a learning curve no matter which way you fly, why not learn something that works.