UC Berkeley is the birthplace of BSD Unix, a variation of which formed the original foundation of Apple’s OS X operating system for the Macintosh (and now the iPhone).
So it was very strange to be talking to the girl at the service counter in the Haas School of Business computer center and be told that I could not connect to any of the printers from a Macintosh: the computer center only supported Windows. This was notwithstanding the fact that the Mac is one of the most popular student computers out there.
Fortunately, I was all ready for this answer. So I whipped out my MacBook (that was pre-MacBook Pro upgrade) and asked the girl:”So which Windows? XP or Vista?” And my mouse cursor was hovering excitedly between the Windows Vista or XP icons on my desktop.
“I have both Vista and XP,” I insisted, to the bafflement of the girl who probably had never heard of virtualization.
When she was finally convinced that I could magically transform a pedestrian MacBook to a Windows PC, she gave me a flyer with full instructions on how to connect (via Windows) to one of the printers in the computer center.
That was certainly a liberating experience: thanks to virtualization, I was no longer limited by my choice of operating system.