Computing through the years

Underneath all the websites and the businesses, there’s a simpler, more constant thread: a kid who could never leave the computer itself alone. Not just what you build on it — the desktop, the OS, the shell, the wallpaper, the icons. This is that thread, recovered from old backups and a few surviving screenshots.

The Windows years — beta builds and a skinned shell

It started as a power-user obsession with Windows. I was beta-testing Windows XP while it was still “Codename Whistler” — that review and the XP-styled site that hosted it are their own exhibit.

Then came Longhorn. Long before Vista shipped, I got hold of a leaked early Longhorn build, ran it, and wrote it up — the Longhorn Review, screenshots and all. This is the actual desktop, captured on my machine in 2002:

And here’s the very-2002 part: a Windows XP “Luna” Explorer window, browsing the folder of Longhorn screenshots I’d taken — you can spot my own superterran- branded custom desktop in the thumbnails. I screenshotted everything.

That Longhorn look became the aesthetic I chased for years — the leaked “Bliss”-style Longhorn wallpapers, the glass and the auroras, on every monitor I owned:

The skinning went deep — LiteStep shells and WindowBlinds/Royale themes tearing the Windows UI apart and rebuilding it (those hunts have their own LiteStep and Royale notes). Everything got edited in the tool of the era, Jasc Paint Shop Pro 7:

The Mac years — “in love with Apple again”

By the late 2000s the obsession switched teams. A 2008 blog post of mine is literally titled “I’m in love with Apple again,” and it stuck: the Fun Sun Studio / 131 Digital shop ran on in-house Mac OS X Xserve hardware, and for years the daily driver was a Mac. The power-user energy didn’t go away — it just moved to a nicer-looking dock.

The Linux years — and back to tinkering

Eventually the tinkering won out completely and I landed on Linux. By 2015 I was living in a dual-monitor Linux desktop:

That’s where it still is today — the current machine runs Bazzite (a Fedora Linux gaming/dev image), booting straight into Steam Big Picture but doubling as a containerized dev box. Twenty-some years later, I’m still skinning the shell and screenshotting the desktop. Some things don’t change.

Provenance

Recovered from personal backups: the 2002 Longhorn Review screenshot set, a Longhorn-era wallpaper, a 2015 Linux desktop capture, and the 2008 blog post. Raw files live in the private archive.