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I'm not a boomer, but I grew up with pocket calculators -- used them in school. I was also exposed to computers in high school -- writing and running programs written in BASIC. I don't remember much except I didn't demonstrate an aptitude for programming.

[caption id="attachment_8651" align="alignright" width="106"] The classic 1984 Mac calculator DA stayed virtually unchanged until 2002.[/caption]

By the time I picked up the thread of computers again in the 1980s, every desktop system I saw was graphical. By the late 1980s all desktop operating system had a calculator desk accessory -- it was like the one-celled organism of computer programs. It's fair to say the Mac's calculator desk accessory set the bar for everyone else.

[caption id="attachment_8657" align="alignleft" width="118"] Palm Treo 680 smart phone from the Late Pleistocene -- 2004.[/caption]

If the personal computers of the mid-1980s were the writing on the wall for pocket calculators then the cell phones of the late-1990s were "The End." PDAs like the Palm Pilot telegraphed the ending by the mid-1990s. Ironically they were also killed by cell phones.

Pocket calculators still barely survive because, a) boomers who grew up with them still survive, and, b) they can do math but they can't do Facebook -- many teachers bar cell phones with their built in calculators because they can, at the very least, distract students. Click the photos to enlarge them.

Ubuntu, trying hard not to look like the GNU/Linux of old, gives it's users a single graphical pipeline to install software over the Internet, called the Ubuntu Software Centre. But under the candy coating of the Unity graphical interface, all the old ways of installing software still work, and many would argue they still work much better than the user friendly, lumbering Software Centre  -- I say it's good to have choices. One benefit of understanding the various methods, is that it gives you the freedom to install most any Linux software, not just the wares in the Software Centre.

[caption id="attachment_1816" align="alignnone" width="497"] Things sure aren't going swimmingly for Windows 8. Click the image to enlarge it.[/caption]

Microsoft has been cast as the more conventional, IBM-esque, company, and Apple the maverick innovator, yet Microsoft's Windows OS has developed in fits and starts, while Apple's OS has, superficially, at least, followed a smooth evolution. Why is that?