JOHN HARRIS wonders how he changed from cyber trailblaizer to technical timidity.

It's hard to remember when the joy went out of computing.

It was after the Internet became commonplace, but before Microsoft rolled out Windows XP to an underwhelmed public in 2003.

I started reflecting on the when the fun disappeared from computing last week after I saw people queuing to buy Australia's first iPhone.

To ‘fess up, I didn't see these ardent consumers in person: I read about them in the newspaper the next morning while eating breakfast.

It seems a long time ago that a computer - and the iPhone is just a computer that makes calls - generated such a fuss.

But technology was once an area of great excitement. From the first time I got my hands on a keyboard, I felt like I was carving my way through the binary frontier.

It probably helped that I read William Gibson's pioneering cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which was a dazzling dash through the cyberian world where hackers sliced through the ice of computer defences with virtual weaponry and caffeine-fuelled wits.

A bit like entering the Grand Prix with a dodgem, I plunged into this computer revolution with a 286 Amstrad computer that had one megabyte of RAM and a 40-meg hard disk drive.

Running MS DOS and a putative version of Windows, this primitive PC allowed me to type stories and file them to a computer magazine in Melbourne using a 2400 bits per second dial-up modem.

Although it sounds about as exciting as shovelling sand today,  this was regarded as on the technical bleeding edge in the 1980s.

More importantly, it was a buzz. I would eagerly await each new version of software that came out, installed it immediately and relished every incremental improvement it delivered.

The 1990s was a brilliant rollercoaster ride of IT excitement, starting with Windows 3, followed by the commercialisation of the Internet, the release of Windows 95, the explosion of the World Wide Web and concluding with the release of Windows 2000, which was both easy to use and reliable.

But by the time Windows XP was released three years later, I was over the novelty of new software. It was more than a year before I upgraded my computers to the new operating system.

Today I actually resist new software: I have a Fujitsu Tablet PC that runs Windows Vista, but don't want to install it on any PCs at work because it will unleash an expensive avalanche of upgrade costs.

My technical timidity even extends to core business software, like the ACT! database and the TImeslips time-tracking program, I only upgrade every second or third version - usually when the developer threatens to withdraw support from my old version.

These days, the only programs that get updated consistently are freeware from the Internet and the MYOB accounting program - to make sure I don't miss out on a tax cut!

I think the fun disappeared when the risks began outweighing the rewards.

Upgrading software often causes more headaches than it solves. Most improvements are relatively minor but the disruption of a clumsy upgrade can foul up a whole day or longer.

Like a house of cards, one wrong move - or flaky piece of software - can cause the whole lot to come tumbling down.

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