In all of the speculative fiction I’ve ever read in which there are computers, there are very few times when anyone guesses that, at this stage of the game, it is not hardware manufacturers who differentiate between computers, but operating systems. When someone asks about your computer, that is usually what they mean. It is a strange state of affairs, that’s for darn sure – to be concerned with the software run at the lowest level on your hardware, rather than the hardware itself.