The beginning of this was the Macintosh SE which introduced me to computer use in or about 1987.

For me, then, the database program in Appleworks was the most valuable element of the machine and its software. Despite the passage of time I have not found a database program as useful as that, despite its limitations, which were obvious.

Those limitations brought me to think about relational databases; in short, to look into the world of mathematicians and nerds, a place for which I was and am constitutionally unsuited. (Ten plus fifteen is twenty-six, right?).

Bill Gates of Microsoft owned or controlled the alternative machine. For me, it was’nt at the races.

So, now Bill Gates has retired. I endorse his future plans; I decry his past. Without him the better system, the Mac, would be everywhere.

Everywhere would have the benefits of an aesthetic and economical approach to computing. Unlike Bill Gates’ system, one would not encounter a “counter-intuitive� element in an interface.

Which is not to say that native wit is everything in the learning of a Mac program; it is not.

But in Bill Gates’ system it would have been an impossibility to use Pagemeker to publish a book, as I have done, with the program written in Italian for the Italian market.

Ciao, Bill.