Removing Hype of Email Clients

Over the decades I have used many Email clients, starting in the early 90's with "text based" ones in a pure SCO Xenix/Unix environment.
At the office I have used Novell Groupwise, MS Outlook as well as Lotus Notes, whilst at home its Eudora and Thunderbird that I have used extensively. Over the years I have tested many more, some were truly terrible.
Why something so simple as an email client still causes so many a user "distress", is still a mystery to me. We put a man on a moon in 1969, yet still can't seem to get a truly great email client.

In the work environment, the Lotus Notes client was the most unintuitive and painful interface I ever used. Whilst the Lotus Domino server was very robust (more so than MS Exchange in my experience), it was the Lotus client that was its great weakness!
Novell Groupwise was intuitive and easy to use, but somehow never managed to beat the success of Microsoft once Novell's fortune started to decline.
MS Outlook was to be the most popular in global use, but for me, whilst the Outlook client was OK, I cannot say the same for the Exchange server. I found it to be susceptible to corruption and even temperamental at times.

For home use, I was to use Eudora for 20 years before migrating to Mozilla's Thunderbird.
I did mess around with Pegasus for a while, and mention it as it was certainly was one of the better clients that I experimented with. Outlook Express was a total non-starter for me. Not at all robust, thus lacking stability in my opinion!

BUT Eudora (first developed in 1988) was truly the best mail client I can honestly say I ever used. It was always very popular with Power Users (Mac and Windows), this as it was highly customizable & flexible. Sadly Eudora was eventually to be dumped by its owner Qualcomm (in 2006), and without ongoing improvements, began to face compatibility issues, specifically its support for character encoding. To this day I am yet to see an email client that has as much WOW factor as Eudora. Even Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak stated in 2009 (to Lifehacker) that be believed that Eudora was the most important productivity tool he had!
Whilst I use Thunderbird daily (I really don't like Browser based email, and prefer to often work off-line), still miss what I consider to have been the best email client EVER!

Removing the Smoke & Mirrors

Sadly within the IT Industry there is far too much emphasis on "Smoke and Mirrors" and not enough on plain and simple truth! This is nothing new, in fact its been around since the beginning of the computing industry.....software and hardware. There appears to be no single cause or reason for this phenomenon, but I have seen this first-hand on far too many occasions. The best way to explain this is to provide examples and what to look out for:

I must start out by saying that in my experience IT Vendors (typically the large multinational ones) don't set out to deceive or blatantly mislead their customers. More often it's an over enthusiastic (or desperate) employee who steps out of line. The Global IT Giants usually have very rigid and specific requirements that all employees must follow. Luckily this "usually" guarantees the customer some level of protection!
Many years ago I was at a meeting with a certain IT "Giant" at one of their facilities in Hawthorne, New York - They were keen to show me the depth of their product and services offering.  After an hour I responded to this small group of managers (we were seated in a meeting room) about a certain set of issues I could, and was willing, to explore with them, only to be shocked by the only Senior Executive present, who immediately shot back at me, saying that "they truly suck at doing that", and that although they can do it, would prefer for us not to use them for that specific project. He would rather engage with us on other areas (of our business) where he felt they had better strengths. It was a breath of fresh air....and something I remember being blown away by hearing such straight talk. Indeed they were very direct, honest and it really helped build a relationship that was to last for many years to come. I wish more companies could have been like that. Sadly it was not to be.

1.  The Y2K Bandwagon (or rather Fiasco as I would call it).
Biggest example of mass deception, illusion and even fraud (in some cases) I may add, that I have witnessed.  The shear allure of milking clients ad nauseam for consulting fees fed what was to be a frenzy of "Fear & Threat".  The reality was that most of these consulting firms (some quite large too), had almost zero skill on this subject and were often simply sending in low level audit staff to perform totally absurd tasks that added no value and did not really address the real issues at all.
At the time, I was responsible for IT systems and infrastructure as well as our manufacturing systems environment, where we had a large installed base of PLC's and other complex systems within all of our factories spread across a number of countries. It was not rocket science for Y2K issues on these PLC's to be tested by simply disabling the Lithium Iron batteries from PLC's and thus getting the date to reset back to the factory default and establishing what this time effect would have on the actual live systems (many were linked to databases). Of course, as expected the PLC's default date had no effect whatsoever....and months later we simply removed (for a day) all the Lithium Batteries during a normal routine maintenance weekend. Case solved. Y2K had no impact at all.
Yet every single one of the so called "Consultants" quoted us well into six figures to audit, test and modify (yes...they actually tried to feed us this nonsense too) our existing manufacturing infrastructure. Of course the board were concerned, but luckily they listened to what I had to say, and was able to prove to them the reality as well as hype....and of course not a minute of downtime occurred on the 1 January 2000.  Not a single manufacturing company I knew had issues either..... just that many of them had been ripped off.....with the only comfort being a letter written by consultants to their board telling them how well prepared they would be.....Oh....and that the invoice was in the mail!
We often hear the joke that the definition of a consultant is someone who steals your watch and then bills you so that they can tell you the time. In the Y2K Fiasco.... this sadly turned out to be true! My view of that period was that the majority of Consulting Firms simply did not seem able to turn away from the "pigs trough" that overnight had become available, and easily succumbed to this temptation that they would later regret!
One would have thought that lessons would have been learnt, but sadly, only 18 years later, a new 2038 "bug" drama is already starting to take hold.....and some are trying to fool the next generation of so called "experts" all over again.

2.  Vertical Industry Portals (All part of the DOT.COM bubble)!
During the height of the DOT.COM bubble my employer was being pressured by a "solutions company" who had already approached many of our global competitors and had convinced them to invest outrageous amounts into a new partnership that would own a Vertical Industry Portal that, besides other functionality, was going to "dominate and control" the supply of a certain natural "commodity", essential in our manufacturing process. They had all the details allegedly worked out, and how they were going to squeeze the suppliers. The portal owners would in effect dominate almost all global purchasing power.
It looked so easy and simple, specially in this DOT.COM era when there was more fear of being left out rather than of joining in on this new Internet wave. I was concerned as it really looked too simplistic and lacking in any real detail. The investment they were demanding was truly massive.
Thanks to the good folk from one the the leading global Research and Advisory firms, they agreed to meet with us and discuss our concerns. They said very little during that short meeting, but at the end of the session (mostly them listening, and trying to understand our business) said one thing: "We don't have all the answers for now, but we would strongly suggest that you SIT ON YOUR HANDS FOR NOW, AND DO NOTHING".
Thank heavens that is exactly what we did. We landed up being one of the very few companies in our market sector that did not get caught out in this "scheme". Our competitors lost many millions and the portal never even was able to go live. Its entire assumption was based on the belief that suppliers could easily be "squashed". This by a software house who never really understood our business at all....and as it turned out, the Vertical Portal business either!

I must add that it was not only the software industry who tried to climb onto this bandwagon of hype.  Some of the so called Global Auditing/Accounting Firms were just as bad. They also carried out tactics of fear into many a boardroom and caused much panic without any real experience or knowledge. For them, it was simply the eager desire to sell consulting services at any cost lest they miss out on the new boom!

3. Cyber Security Hype.
I am not going to say too much except that no matter what you do and no mater whose solution you use or buy, there IS NO SUCH THING AS A 100% SECURE SOLUTION.
The best option is to apply common sense, best practice, and not cut any corners.
Don't fall into the trap of trusting only in an auditors checklist too. Its a false sense of security.
Sadly, if someone wants access to your data badly enough, either a Crime Syndicate, or a State Player.... there is no perfect solution! So take all those promises and guarantees from snake-oil salesmen with a pinch of salt. Its not worth the paper its printed on. You can have the best Intrusion Detection technology in the world....only to have the "hacker" gain access to your network from the inside. That is the methodology they will probably use anyway.
It reminds me of a certain company who only a year ago were promising that their product was "The World's Most Secure" email server. This claim was blown to pieces after the BBC commissioned two security researchers in the UK to examine this claim. Turned out that the "solution" was nothing more than a compromised Rasberry Pi based device with a litany of serious flaws. The device was found to be easily hackable giving away full Read, Write and Delete access without too much of a fuss.

4. A list of more "Smoke & Mirrors" witnessed over many years:

• Telecommunication Companies who provide Service Level Agreements (SLA's) where the agreement did more harm than good. They try to lock you in for far too long and then to add insult to injury, ignore faults in order to focus rather on reducing downtime penalties. 
• Outsourcing - Initiated simply to avoid any in-house responsibility, and lands up being a never ending Nightmare. Sadly far too many outsourcing companies lack effective communication skills and avoid any form of meticulously detailed contracts. The customer is often to blame too, this as they don't conduct a proper vetting process either. Some of the largest IT disasters (most expensive ones too) I ever saw where due to poorly thought out and inadequately skilled outsourcing projects.
• Believing that only the largest ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software vendors can provide your company with a solution because of their shear size and brand recognition. Warning: Tread with GREAT caution because I have seen highly nimble, flexible and very profitable companies reduced to what can only be called a train wreck, having lost most of those competitive advantages and now find themselves constrained, restricted and unable to return to their former glory.   
• Allowing a Software Solution company anywhere near an HR department - Why HR folk seem to lack any form of Strategy or Leadership I don't know, but keeping them away from software salesmen will save you a small fortune and a huge headache  - Enough Said!!

Removing the Cobwebs

For those who spent many decades in the IT Industry, they will have vivid memories of particular software, hardware, services & publications that were icons of the day, yet over time have disappeared or became irrelevant.
I'm Removing the Cobwebs.....so here is a trip down memory lane:

Byte Magazine
Can only be described as the Must Read computer publication of the early PC era. It started out in September 1975 and finally ended its print edition in July 1998. If you worked in the computer industry (specially during the late 70's and 80's), this really was THE most sought after publication.
Unlike most magazines of the time, Byte covered ALL aspects of the "small computer & software" industry and was not specific to only Mac, or DOS users. It was written in a style that provided in-depth and technical detail too. 
One memorable column was "Chaos Manor", written by the late Jerry Pournelle who was always very popular and had a huge following with power users.                                                                                                                      

Xenix
In the early 1970's Bell Labs (AT&T) developed Unix but did not sell the product to end users, preferring instead to license it to other vendors.  In the late 1970's Microsoft bough a license from AT&T, and in 1980 announced that it would provide a version for 16 bit microcomputers. Because they did did not own the rights to the Unix name, they called it Xenix.

Microsoft only sold it to OEM's and not directly to end users. In 1987, after SCO (Santa Cruz Operation) had ported Xenix to the Intel 80386 processor, SCO took ownership of Xenix, with Microsoft owning 25% of the company. In 1989 SCO released SCO Unix, and Xenix started to fade away, its last release was to be in 1991. In the early years of the Internet, many will remember SCO Xenix for it's built-in TCP/IP protocol, something that even Microsoft Windows did not have (until much later with Windows 95) without resorting to 3rd party products (see Trumpet Winsock, below).  My first internet email I ever sent was using SCO (in pure text mode). This was back in 1991.

MS-DOS
Microsoft Disk Operating System - Started its life as 86-DOS (By Seattle Computer Products) and was written by Tim Paterson. It was completed in only 6 weeks, designed to be a clone of Digital Research's CP/M and first shipped in August 1980.  In May 1981, Microsoft hired Tim Paterson, this as they needed an operating system for the IBM Personal Computer. Two months later, Microsoft bought 86-DOS for $75000 and renamed it MS-DOS. Microsoft was to license this to IBM, who in 1981 offered it as PC DOS, specifically on the very first IBM PC.
Within a year Microsoft was to license it to over 70 companies.  The rest they say is history with the last retail version (6.22) being released in 1994.

For the MS-DOS "expert", the Must Have technical publication of the 1980's was "MS-DOS Bible", written by Steven Simrin and published by The Wait Group. There were to be many editions of this, and I still have the Fourth Edition that was released for MS-DOS 5. Below is an earlier edition.

Larry Lounge Lizard
Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards was a graphic adventure game for MS-DOS released in 1987 by Sierra. It became legendary, even by those who would seldom if ever admit to playing computer games. Despite no advertising at all, within a year over 250 000 copies had been sold and it was a commercial success despite being widely pirated. In all, combined sales of the Larry Series surpassed 1.4 million copies. In 1991 PC Format magazine listed it in the top 50 best computer games of all time.

Trumpet Winsock
Was one of the very first (and most popular) implementations of the Windows Socket API that enabled Windows 3 to have TCP/IP network connectivity. It was written by an Australian, Peter Tattam in the early 1990's. As amazing as it seems, Microsoft had no support for the TCP/IP protocol stack at the time. In all the early editions of MS Windows, if you wanted access to the Internet, Trumpet Winsock was not only a vital necessity, it was legendary.
The world owes a great gratitude to Peter Tattam, who received almost nothing in return for this great effort as Trumpet Winsock was mostly either given away or used as shareware.

Gopher
Before HTTP (Browser Protocol) became legendary, The Gopher Protocol was used for the distribution, searching & retrieving of documents on the early internet. It is now commonly recognized as the predecessor of the World Wide Web.  If you used the Internet in late 1990 or 1991, you certainly would have used a Gopher client.

NCSA Mosiac Browser
Mosaic was the browser that popularized the World Wide Web. Mosiac was developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and was released in 1993. It was officially discontinued in 1997. Netscape Navigator was later developed (using many of the original NCSA authors). Later still, Mozilla Firefox would use its initial code. But it was the Mosiac Browser that popularized and made the Web what it is today.

WinVN (Usenet News Reader)
In the 1990's Usenet had become the place to be for discussions on almost any possible topic.  It was in many ways the perfect Bulletin Board and the range of topics was HUGE!  Sadly, by the early 2000's it started to die a slow death... even before the advent of Social Media. But then fast-forward 20 years and it appears that nostalgia and the efficiency of a simple and fast text based service has become popular again. New News Servers seem to be springing up all over again. Back in the day I found the WinVN Reader to be the most efficient and stable Reader out there. Best of all one did not need to do an install either as there was always a Zipped version available. Amazingly, after all these years, I am happily back using WinVN again (only software out of the entire list, above) as it still is a great piece of software, and still receiving version updates!

Edit: All of the above old software with the exception of WinVN have been "abandoned" by their developers, but luckily can still be found in a large database at: vetusware.com

Ultimate Predictions

Many years ago on a lengthy business trip to the USA, I was pleased to get the opportunity to spend an entire day of meetings at Sun Microsystems in Palo Alto, California. Late that same afternoon after the last meeting, they proudly showed me around the facility and I got to see some of the amazing activity taking place in those various divisions and labs. I was really impressed with what I saw and developed a respect for their dedication and technical prowess.

I must add that I was not a customer of Sun Microsystems, nor had I really ever made any serious attempts to get to understand their product range (both Hardware and Software). But it was an opportunity to get to see what they were doing and what their strengths and weaknesses were. This at the end of the Internet Bubble era where they had been riding an exuberant wave.

What this all has to do with "Ultimate Predictions" is that whilst I was fascinated and impressed with almost every aspect of their business.... it was immediately clear to me that there was not a single product or solution that I would be able to really seriously consider buying.
They had an advanced Thin Client Solution (Sun Ray), the SPARC range of Computer Workstations and Servers, and of course, the popular Solaris (Unix Operating System). BUT each and every one of their products were overpriced and in my opinion, going to be cumbersome to deploy. This in an era when standard Intel based server hardware was reliable, cheap, powerful and easy to deploy.  I should have seen the writing on the wall..... it really was a great company with great products but totally unfit for the era were hardware had simply become a commodity item. The rest as they say is history, and Sun Microsystems is no more. What little is left today sits within Oracle Corporation who bought the company back in 2010. I should have predicted the demise of this once great company!

So what should one be able to predict about the period ahead - Lets say 5 years from now?

1. IBM
"Big Blue" as it is known, has already dumped its PC and Intel Server hardware business (sold off to Lenovo), let alone its exit from the Chip, Printer, Hard Drive business etc. As for software, it still owns the fading Lotus Notes/Domino software unit, though none of its development is done in-house anymore. Besides, software is fast becoming a commodity business too, so ultimately IBM is really a consulting / services firm with still some Big Iron hardware on offer.  But here again, services have become a dog-eat-dog business with margins cut to the bone.
Will IBM survive? Yes.... it still has life left in it...but will it still be "Big Blue"? I certainly doubt it.....more likely it will become "Little Blue", a company a fraction of the size and depth as we know it today and one more focused on consulting, and far less dependent on hardware and services where is has been unable to maintain market share in recent years.
One of the largest investors in IBM stock, Warren Buffett (from Berkshire Hathaway) recently dumped his entire IBM holding (of over 10 Billion US$) having given up on any hope of seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. Its a disturbing vote of no confidence in the company and its management!  

 
2. HPE (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
Now completely divorced from HP's PC and Printer company, HPE is a smaller entity focused on Servers, Storage, Networking, Consulting and Services. It also has exited its Enterprise Services division, selling it to CSS (Computer Sciences Corporation).
HPE has some fatal shortcomings in my opinion. Firstly, it does not really have a Cloud Network of its own. This in an era when the bulk of its customers are migrating to the Cloud, no longer wanting to invest in their own servers and networking infrastructure.
Problem is that the real money now is in the Cloud, and HPE are simply not there. Second, with the removal of the PC and Printer business into HP Inc, HPE is unable to compete on the client side and has no presence in the consumer space . Thirdly, unlike IBM, is not at all a player in the integrated software space....and in reality, never has been.
So with limited potential for any serious growth going forward, its doubtful that HPE can be anything other than a "Mini IBM" with current revenues and profits only a third of that of IBM.
The problem they face is not an immediate one, but rather a medium to long term one.... can they survive?
Probably only as a small Niche player.... if at all!

3. DELL
In many ways, Dell has taken a very different path to that of HP. HP had scaled down by removing itself from the PC and printer part of the business. Dell did the opposite and scaled up by making the massive acquisition of storage giant, EMC. Also, Dell is a privately held company, so very much free to take the long term view and do as they wish. It allows them to execute without bothering about quarterly deadlines.
But due to the acquisitions, the company now faces a mountain of debt considered to be in the region of about $50 Billion....and interest rates are now no longer low! They may well find itself having to go public again! The merger and product integration with EMC has not really gone that smoothly, and confusion still reigns, but Dell also has ownership of VMWare.... its the secret sauce, along with a its successful founding CEO, that should keep Dell going for a long time.

4. Lenovo
Lenovo is the only Chinese Headquartered giant in the PC world (and also very active in the Server/Datacenter & Smartphone market). Its profits have in recent times declined resulting in the company being dropped from Hong Kong's benchmark index. Much of their misfortune appears to be due to the poor performance of their mobile products division.
Having bought the PC and later, the xSeries Server business from IBM, it still maintains a secondary HQ in the USA and has a true global footprint, operating directly in some 60 countries. This is a difficult company to read..... and with good reason. The truth is that with the Chinese Academy of Sciences as its largest shareholder, it is in reality a "State Assisted" enterprise, though Lenovo always denies this. The reality is that it will never be allowed to fail nor to lack the resources or funding to make future strategic acquisitions should the opportunities arise!

Edit: On 1 November 2021, Dell spun off VMware into a separate independent business. The VMware business no longer seen as strategic asset to Dell in an era of outsourcing servers to the cloud. They intend using the funds to draw down on their large debt burden instead. If this is a strategic blunder... it will soon reveal itself!

Ultimate Losers & Lemons

Anyone who has worked with Technology for even a short period of time would have encountered a fair number of "Losers & Lemons". For some of us, providing a huge list of these would not take too much of an effort. Sadly, some of these products started out their lives as very decent and successful solutions (the first three listed below are good examples of this), but failed to take note of customer and market changes, let alone their competitors, who would eventually eat their lunch.  Here is my short list, in no particular order:

Netscape

This web browser was founded in 1994 in Silicon Valley and dominated (90%) the browser sector. In a now famous antitrust lawsuit, it won against Microsoft, with implications that still influence the industry. While Netscape won the battle, it eventually was to lose the browser war — But not before AOL bought it for $4.2 billion. 

Novell NetWare

Novell's File and Print services used Novell DOS (formerly DR-DOS) as a boot loader. This was similar to MS-DOS, but came from the acquisition of Digital Research in 1991.
Novell did very well in the 1980s. It vastly expanded its market share and by 1990 had an almost monopolistic position in this sector for any business requiring a network.
With this market leadership, Novell began to acquire and build services on top of its NetWare operating platform. These services extended NetWare's capabilities with such products as GroupWise.
In 1995, Microsoft was including network capabilities within all their own platforms, and led to a steep decline in Novell's market share. By 1999, Novell had lost the battle, with Microsoft now dominating print and file services. 

Alta Vista

This pre-Google era Search Engine was founded in 1995 and dominated the market for many years. No one seems to know why such a good product ended up being so poorly neglected and lacking in vision.

It had started its life as part of  Digital Equipment Cprporation (DEC) and had already indexed the entire web, cached it, and had a dominant brand recognition. But no one at Alta Vista seems to have figured how to monetize search engines, and its owner at the time, Compaq, lacked the vision. Alta Vista would eventually be owned by Yahoo who officially killed it off in 2013.

Lotus Notes

Launched in 1989 it suffered from being rather sluggish, lacking in features, unstable, and with poor mobile support.  Yet amazingly (and with massive support from its owner IBM), became one of the largest e-mail clients in the world with over 100 million licenses sold.
As a one time user of Notes myself, I am honestly amazed that it still survives to this day. Recently IBM handed over all future development (Notes as well as Domino) to HCL Technologies of India, so maybe an exit is already in the making. Clearly this client software, should have been permanently retired decades ago!    

Microsoft Windows ME, Vista & 8

All of the above three Microsoft OS versions could clearly be defined as total failures. Many corporate customers refused to deploy them, and they were to have rather short shelf lives as Microsoft clamored to replace them. Luckily Windows XP, 7 & 10 were to restore customers confidence, though not before Apple was to take full advantage of these lemons and take market share, even within the corporate sector where they had never really succeeded before. Microsoft seldom really seems to want to listen to their customers, and with the growth in Mobile Technology (See Below: They missed the boat completely) seem destined to be a far less significant force in a sector it once dominated.

Windows Phone

In 2010, three years after the launch of the 1st Apple iPhone, and two years after the 1st Android devices, Microsoft launched Windows Phone 7. This proved to be a very costly delay, this as most developers and consumers were already fully committed to the iOS and Android ecosystems.
To make matters worse, in 2014, in a desperate bid to reverse their mobile "misfortunes", Microsoft acquired Nokia's handset unit which would ultimately result in billions of dollars in writeoffs only a year later.
Due to the total lack of consumer demand, in 2017 Microsoft announced the discontinuation of any new development. This was to be the final nail in the coffin for Windows Phone. Subsequently Microsoft sold the Nokia handset business to a Finnish company called HMD Global Oy in 2015 and the Nokia brand has made a strong return to the market using Android technology exclusively.

Google Glass

Few gadgets were received with as much buzz as Google Glass, the "smart-spectacles" that Google unveiled in 2012.  Google had ensured that this would be the most-hyped gadget launch of all time. But all for naught: The product had to be shelved just three years later in 2015.
What went wrong? Its high price tag ($1,500) and complete failure to ensure privacy kept it from going mainstream. Also, this product made it very easy to secretly record video, which prompted many businesses, bars & restaurants etc. to ban the gadget.  Also, wearing the product made one look quite ridicules and quickly gave rise to the term “Glasshole”. 
Google (and others) learnt a valuable lessons about wearable technology: Nobody likes to be recorded and monitored without their knowledge!

Ultimate Freebies!

They say there is no such thing as a "Free Lunch".  But then I often hear people say "The Best Things in Life are Free". Luckily for everyone, when it comes to software, its true..... some of the best software out there really is Free!

Home users really need not fork out for good software. Freeware and Open Source software are available all over the Web..... one simply needs to do a little homework. Here are just a few of the better "gems" to be found out there:

LibreOffice: This Office Suite started its life as StarWriter back in 1985. Later it would change its name to StarOffice. In 1989 it became freeware and within a year was acquired by Sun Microsystems who had decided that it was far cheaper to use StarOffice than MSOffice. In 2010 Oracle Corporation bought out Sun Microsystems and renamed StarOffice as Oracle Open Office. In that same year LibreOffice was formed as a derivative"fork" of OpenOffice, this as there was much concern and unhappiness about Oracle taking ownership of the product. Since then LibreOffice has become a huge success and by far the largest Open Source Office Suite available today. About 10 million users have already downloaded LibreOffice.

LibreOffice is very easy to use and has extensive file support, including importing and exporting to almost every edition of MS Office too!

Thunderbird: This easy to use email client was developed by the Mozilla Foundation (same folk who developed the Firefox browser - see below). It is provided for free as Open Source software. Like Firefox, Thunderbird too can be expanded by using add-ons such as a Language Translator or Google Calendar etc. Thunderbird is a popular, secure and highly expandable email client.

FireFox: A highly popular Free, Open Source Web Browser that is from the Mozilla Foundation. Its strong feature is that it offers the flexibility of a huge range of add-ons including ones such as "Facebook Container" that isolates your Facebook activity from the rest of your web activity in order to prevent Facebook from tracking you from outside of the Facebook website. There are many other very useful add-ons such as "uBlock Origin" & "NoScript" etc. Personally, I don't trust the the standard built-in browsers, nor those from the Google's of this world as they certainly have a vested interest in accessing your browsing history for advertising purposes. Firefox has shown itself to be far more circumspect!

  
LastPass: A Password Management Service that is easy to install, as well as incorporating a web service.  Basically LastPass is Packed with features to automatically fill in passwords and access the passwords from anywhere. In a world where we all have far too many accounts and services we need to access, a secure and encrypted Password manager is a necessity.

Gramps: Highly acclaimed Open Source Genealogy (Family Tree) software that is intuitive for hobbyists and feature-complete for professional genealogists. It is a community project, created, developed and governed by genealogists.

MalwareBytes:  Spyware, Adware & Malware scanner.  Although the Free version of MalwareBytes does not offer real-time live protection, it does provide an excellent scanner and remover of malware.
Making the effort to run a MalwareBytes scan from time to time is going to be well worth the effort, specially in an era where PUP's (Potentially Unwanted Programs) are often unknowingly installed, often hidden within legitimate software too! An Anti-Virus solution will usually never find these unwanted pieces of code that have the potential to flood your PC with adverts and other unwanted "gumph"! 

Avast: Excellent Free Antivirus software. Avast is very light on system resources and the only free antivirus solution that gives the user the option to customize the installation, so that you can install only the "protection modules" you really want. Its detection capability is highly rated and includes a rescue disk capability.

Update: I have recently migrated from Avast to Avira Antivirus. Not because Avast was not performing, but rather due to the fact that Avast was alleged to be sharing (selling) customer data to 3rd parties! Avira is also a very resource light solution with a solid reputation.

My Most Memorable PC Utilities

When I first started working for a global  computer manufacturer in the 80's, Software Utilities really were the vital tools that became your most important accessories! These now obsolete MS-DOS tools were the very heartbeat of my daily existence. Here are some of my favorites with screen images for those who have forgotten, or wish to see what they looked like:

Low Level Format:  Much of the time setting up the first generation of XT (and even later the 2nd generation AT) PC's revolved around installing and configration of the hard drives. I spent a lot of time working with Seagate ST225 MFM hard drives back then. I even worked on older 10 MB Shugart drives, but it was Seagate 20MB drives that had started to dominate the industry by then (Many vendors have since disappeared: Anyone remember Conner, Maxtor, Hitachi, Quantum, Fujitsu etc.?).   The point though, is that Disk Utilities both within MS-DOS as well as 3rd party, were vital tools that were used daily.

 
With these 20MB drives (yes, Mega...not Giga), one had to use the debug command followed by g=c800:5 followed by FDISK and then the FORMAT commands.  This was always painfully slow and cumbersome...but was an absolute necessity, and always worked.

Norton Utilities: First came out in 1982. It was a complete suite designed to help analyze, configure, optimize and maintain a MS-DOS based computer. It very quickly became the Gold Standard!
Norton Utilities was eventually sold to Symantec who have kept the trademark brand.

Norton Disk Doctor was legendary.... compulsory for every Techie!

OnTrack Disk Manager: Popular in the 1980's for self installing hard drives.

PC Tools: Another popular suit of software for MS-DOS that first came out in 1986. PC Tools was also eventually bought out by Symantec but was killed off as a brand.

LapLink: Proprietary Utility software that was developed in the late 1980's to synchronize PC's using serial and parallel cables. The parallel cables were much faster.

 

PCAnywhere: A suite of computer programs which allowed a user on a computer to connect to another PC running the PCAnywhere host if both were connected to the network, and the password was known. It was released (for MS-DOS) in 1986

All of these were popular too:

Speedstor: Another popular Disk Utility used to Low Level Format Hard Drives.

Spinrite: A Utility to Diagnose, Repair and Rejuvenate Hard Drives

Speed / Speed Test: Landmark CPU speed test.

Xtree / Xtree Gold: A File manager first launched in 1985.

CopyWrite:  Created by Quaid Software for making legal backup copies of a protected program.

Quaid Analyzer: Also from Quaid Software. It was a tool for the diagnosis of programs at the level of machine language and interrupt service calls.

Fast forward three decades, and I still use utilities, but very few 3rd party ones are really needed anymore. One of these I use regularly and is worthy of mention:

CCleaner: Safe way to ensure removal of unwanted "gumph", unwanted built-in Microsoft Apps, as well a very decent Registry Cleaner too!

Edit: Many of the old Utilities have been "abandoned" by their developers, but luckily can still be found in a large database at: vetusware.com

My Most Memorable WAN

Over many decades I have worked with many WAN (Wide Area Network) vendors and Equipment Manufacturers. Some of the most interesting and brightest people I have ever met, I found working in this sector.
Sadly very few of these companies still exist today, this as they were ultimately bought out and disappeared into the void of larger conglomerates. Many of those large corporate entities have themselves long disappeared too (anyone remember Nortel, Newbridge, Wellfleet, Cabletron, 3COM, SynOptics, Ascend, Bay Networks & Ungermann-Bass etc. ?).

In 1992 I started looking at the possibility of integrating Voice and Data. Back then, many folk thought I was crazy trying to go down this path. This in an era of separate routers and multiplexers.
My research led me to a company called Micom Communications Corporation. Based in Simi Valley (outside of Los Angeles). They really were developing leading edge Network Integration Technology.

In early 1993 I went to visit Micom and was truly blown away at what they were able to demonstrate, even though their product (Micom Marathon 10K) was still in beta testing at the time. But for me, it was a no brainer...this product would pay for itself in 12 months.....so took a gamble, and bought a decent sized Marathon network from them. It was still undergoing beta testing at that time too.

In 1993 the marathon network went live and it was huge success. It paid for itself in less than a year and in 1995 I returned to Micom, this time to expand the system to enable full mesh (redundant) networking. In 1995 the upgrade was completed.
So successful was this Micom technology, that when it was finally replaced (+7 years later), the new networking supplier (the world's no 1 vendor, I may add) was unable to deliver anything like the voice quality we had been using for all those years....and eventually gave up trying to "fix" these issues and we simply had to suffer with an inferior voice solution!

Very little is ever mentioned about Micom Communications Corp today. In reality, it met its demise in 1996 when it was bought out by Nortel, and integrated into the Nortel Passport range of products. Nortel itself was to spectacularly implode in 2009 when it went bankrupt.

I was very fortunate to have stumbled upon this company and had had the opportunity to really get to know their equipment very well. This well before the era of Voice over IP and what was to become REAL Network Integration.

My Most Memorable Computers

I have worked in the IT industry for many decades, but started messing around with computers whilst studying Electrical Engineering (Light Current) in 1978. Back then I would spend countless days and nights programming in BASIC!
This Blog is about the PC's I landed up holding onto and enjoyed the most.

I bought my first computer in 1980. It was a Sharp MZ-80K.

Those were the days before the IBM PC or Microsoft's DOS.....and a mouse was still a rodent! Only the the most diehard or foolish of folk actually bought these! I was one of them. It had a Zilog Z80 compatible CPU. It had no language in ROM, and BASIC had to be loaded from the built-in tape. For more technical detail, you can find it all here:

Sharp MZ-80K

In the early 1980's I worked in Telecommunications for a few years before leaving to focus exclusivity on Unix Mini Computers. I worked for a Circuit Board Design company using CAD/CAM systems manufactured by a company called Scientific Calculations (later to become a division of Harris Corp).

In 1987 I moved to an IT Manufacturing and Services company and focused on PC's and PC Networking (Novell). I would spend a marvelous 6 years working for this company. Everything they focused on was quality built. It was during this period that staff were given an opportunity to buy PC's at a discount. I did not hesitate and in 1989 bought an Olivetti M290.

It used an Intel 80286 CPU (16 Bit) and MS-DOS 3.3a: You can find more detail here:
http://mastodonpc.tripod.com/personal/m290.html

In 1993 I moved to a Multinational Manufacturing company where I was to spend the next few decades working as an IT Executive. In 2005 I bought an IBM ThinkCentre 8084 PC with an Intel  Pentium 4 CPU. I used it with Windows XP.

In 2010 I bought a Lenovo SL510 Thinkpad with Windows 7. I was to use a number of other Lenovo Notebooks during this period too including the compact X series (mostly an X61s).

This year (2018) I have another Lenovo Notebook. This time an IdeaPad 320 with an Intel i5 CPU.

Since 1987 I have never deviated from using Intel/Microsoft based PC solutions. I have never owned an Apple PC nor for that matter an Apple Smartphone (I use Android based hardware, currently with version 8.1).

My view of Technology is that it should always be Functional and Reliable! I have seen many manufacturers come and go.... in fact very few are still around from when I first started working in this industry. (Anyone remember AST, Compaq, DEC, Sun Microsystems, Olivetti, Control Data Corp, Data General, Silicon Graphics, Zenith  etc. ?). Most of them disappeared or were bought out, not because they made poor products, but rather because of corporate greed and/or poor decision making by their Executives. Some of the best products I worked with fell victim to this!