Do not adjust your television set; Or should that be computer? Right now, it looks as if the geeks have won, or are at least winning. Computers and the Internet are a significant part of people's daily lives, and a whole generation is growing up using e-mail and instant messages instead of chatting with their friends for hours on the telephone. Then again, maybe the geeks haven't won. Maybe it is just that computers have become part of our lives, made friendlier by the selfsame geeks.

Let's turn back the clock to 1983. It is the beginning of the personal computer revolution. Computers are making the transition from being solely the domain of big companies, academics, and hobbyists to being accessible to those not heavily steeped in the ways of computerdom. "A computer in every house," as the slogan goes. Upstart companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Lotus, and Commodore arise to snatch pieces of the nascent PC market away from such well established companies as IBM.

Now fast forward to 1993. While computer use in homes and businesses is steadily rising, the computer companies have locked horns in a fierce battle to the death. Apple seems near death, while Microsoft is ascendent, the newest version of their best-selling operating system, Windows 95, is eagerly anticipated as the best thing for computers since, well, the previous version of Windows. More and more people have started to discover "that Internet thing," using services such as AOL and Compuserve to exchange mail and files.

Now let's return to the present. The information revolution is in full swing, Apple's star is rising, and Microsoft is bogged down in almost endless legal battles with the U.S. Government, and Windows 2000 is starting to look like Windows 2002. The Internet is an integral part of modern culture; parents and kids surf the Web and e-mail people the world over equally from work, school, and home. Any company that's anything is on the Web -- and if it has a .com in its name, you can bet it will make quick millions on the stock market. You can shop for groceries, buy stocks, read the newspaper, and do almost anything else on the Web. We even have a movie entitled You've Got Mail, and no, it doesn't have anything to do with the Post Office or disgruntled postal workers.

And what is being hailed by many industry pundits as the powerful, easy to use successor to Microsoft Windows? Linux? Isn't that really Unix, renowned for being next to impossible to use for anyone but the most skilled computer gurus? Well, sort of. Linux, originally developed in 1991 by a Finnish grad student named Linus Torvalds, looks like Unix under the hood, but in the first half of this year, two Windows-like interfaces were developed, named GNOME and KDE by their acronym-loving developers, which rival Windows in many aspects, and even surpass it in some. Actually, Unix is popping up all over the place these days. Most of the servers that make the Internet work run variants of Unix, and most modern operating systems, such as BeOS and the next generation of Apple's operating system, are based on Unix under the hood.

Okay, you say, but what will this do for me? While Linux is technically superior to Windows, the general consensus is that it's still not quite ready for the average user. Linux does not have quite the software selection yet that Windows does, although such consumer products as CorelOffice 2000 will soon be able to run under Linux and some other worthy alternatives, such as Applixware and StarOffice, exist. Most importantly, Linux continues to have a dearth of games, although such luminaries as Quake 3 and Civilization III are planned to work with Linux.

But wait, Linux was developed by a grad student, right? So then who makes it now? The amazing thing about Linux, what some would say its beauty, is that it was developed by people all over the world, in their spare time. This happened because Linux is part of a growing category of software called variously "free software" (as in, "free speech", not "free bread") or "open source software," since the source code of the program (the file full of almost unintelligible gibberish that programmers somehow transform into the programs you use) is freely distributable and can be used by programmers the world over.

Wait a sec, this was done by computer programmers in their spare time? Do we really want to trust our information lifeline to a hobby? While Linux started out as a hobby, established companies such as Netscape and such rising stars as Red Hat Software, which is attracting millions of dollars in investment, employ an increasing number of programmers working on free software. The argument has been made that open-source software is actually preferable to proprietary software made by such companies as Microsoft because of the way it is developed. More programmers mean more people able to find and fix problems with your programs, and since the source code is freely available, you can be sure that the program will stay free.

Okay, so if the software is really free, how do the companies make money? First of all, the software isn't "free" in every sense of the word; it's perfectly legal and ethical to charge for such services as distributing. But then how does Red Hat manage to make money by selling CDs for $80 that contain an entire operating system and all the programs the user needs which could be downloaded for free off of the Internet? The answer -- by selling services. For $80, you get the convenience of not having to wait endless hours for your software to download, nicely printed manuals that are better at explaining how to install and take care of Linux than most resources you'll find, and friendly technical support. Open-source companies make money by selling distribution and support, just like Web sites like Yahoo! make money by selling advertisements.

Higher quality software at lower prices is not the only benefit of open-source software. One of the greatest, but often overlooked, strengths of open-source is the freedom it gives you, the computer user. To survive, a software company must eliminate its competitors, a situation which results in two or three companies battling for control of the market for one category, say spreadsheets, which limits the choices of programs you can get. Also, as companies add features to their programs to entice you to buy the latest version, the programs end up doing tasks that are usually considered part of a different genre of program. For example, in the latest versions of Microsoft Excel, each spreadsheet cell can almost be used as its own word processing document! Instead of ending up with just a few monolithic programs, the great variety of open-source programs let you choose the specific program that is right for your needs. Besides letting you configure your computer the way you want, the interface under Linux is very customizable, so you can make Linux look like Windows 98, a Macintosh computer, or almost anything else you want. As the adherents of the open-source programming language Perl, considered by most to be the "glue that holds the Web together," like to say, "There Is More Than One Way To Do It."

If you take a good, deep look at the Web, you will notice that it is really based on openness. Almost everything is open, from the servers that send you Web pages to the protocols used to send the data (which if they were owned by one company, would mean a drastic change in the way the Web works -- that company could get to decide who gets a Web page and who does not). Also, the way the Web works mirrors the traditional American freedoms of speech and liberty: You can go almost anywhere you want, say whatever you want, publish whatever you want, be with whomever you want, and other people can do the same back to you. And the more the Web creeps into our lives, the more freedom we'll have to do and be what we want.

So let's take a peek through our telescope to the year 2006. Computers are almost everywhere -- in your office, in your home, in your car, in the mall -- all connected together in a web of fiber optic cable, wireless technology, and satellites. These computers run fast and smoothly, since they aren't weighed down by tons of unnecessary features, and have some features we would find amazing -- perhaps accurate speech recognition and intelligent agents that could get you concert tickets or plan a vacation for you. And instead of being controlled by these machines and their producers, you will be in control of the computer, and it will be able to do whatever you want it to do. Call it crazy, revolutionary even, but it just might happen.