Try to guess how many times I've had to remove Symantec shit from a computer - try! It's a fucking ordeal - shit keeps popping up - I half expected to get spam reminding me how stupid I was to remove Norton Utility (singular) from a machine.

Yes, at one time it was Norton Utilities - two of them - sd and the one that issued ANSI.SYS commands. An essential utility in the days of EGA. What was it called? sa? Screen Attributes? White on blue on an IBM AT with an Enhanced Color Display was a state-of-the-art PC when I had one at work. Plus terminals to UNIX - and math to program - heaven :)

I also had a spiffy grey Wyse terminal. All I want for Christmas is a green VT! (Regressing even farther, the ultimate green-screen experience is still the high-persistence green phosphors of the original IBM Personal Computer Display. Once VGA rolled along, you could have secondary monochrome video card to hook up to the IBMPCD and run dual console-head, or as I did, run Windows 3.1 or OS/2 on the retrospectively crappy graphics monitor and have a DOS box open on the green screen. This was a great setup for debugging Borland C code with Turbo Debugger. The code would walk by on the green screen and the high persistence phosphors would leave trails of the instruction pointer - a kind of unintentional trippy smooth scrolling.)

Right! And the IBM was faultless - but the reddest red I ever remember seeing in those early days was on the Compaq Deskpro 386. Unfortunately the green was garish. The IBM equipment was always the best. Unlike HP, this is true today as well.

I was so lucky in the early PC days to have the best equipment to work with.