I allowed three months for Evil: OctOgre, NoRemember and DisMember, 1986. I started on schedule. But as it happened, I had gotten crowded in my computer, so was expanding my system's capacity. I doubled its memory to 512 K, and its storage to 20 MB. Don't worry about the figures if you are not into computers; just accept that they are solid ones in the middle range of such things. But we discovered that my operating system could not address either of these new totals. I could not use much more than I had before—unless I changed operating systems.

Back in the fourth novel of this series I discussed the two major operating systems this computer can use. One I likened to an old retired seaman, Captain Manager, known colloquially as CP/M, who maintained a sixteen-storey (as he spells it) apartment building, each floor of which could house a nice apartment complex. He called the occupants "users" and provided well for their individual tastes, as long as they paid their rentals. The other I likened to a somewhat prim lady, Ms Dos, also called MS-DOS, who distrusted apartment buildings and preferred to maintain an intricate garden through which passed many paths. People could reside along these paths, each having his own personal access and directory of his flowers. I happened to be with the Captain, and did not try Ms Dos because she lacked a feature I liked, called MAINT, that made file housekeeping easy.

But now it was tune to make the change, because while the Captain had not renovated his building in years and refused to cater to my need for greater memory and storage, Ms Dos promised to be more accommodating. So, not without trepidation, I moved out of my comfortable apartments on the lower floors and went to the Garden. My wife and daughters, satisfied with the building, remained on their upper storeys; they had no large files to process.

Thus I left my family behind, though my wife did keep a certain eye on me from the window. Ms Dos, though prim by day, seems young and healthy; you never can tell.

But you don't just step from one operating system to another. Ms Dos and the Captain hardly recognized each other's programs. I had to get new software to function in the Garden. That proved to be more complicated than anticipated, and it was one of the things that slowed progress on this novel. For this is my first novel on DOS, and all the tribulations of learning occurred here.