>behave that way? I do see good things about windows. It has brought a lot
>more people into contact with each other, people who can't drive a computer
>themselves. It has opened computing up to the ordinary man and woman.
Yeah, Windows has its good points. However, Microsoft tout most of them as
'new' features, despite the fact that most of it is old hat. Personally I like
Active Desktop, but I'm not sure if that's a MS idea or not... but DOS was
bought, Windows copied, Multiplan/Excel copied off a copy (1-2-3 was a clone -
but it's more famous than VisiCalc), NT is half OS/2 - although to be fair MS
did write most of V1 - I daren't think where they got XENIX from. IE contains
a line (at least 1, 2 and 3 did) to say that it is based on NCSA Mosaic... And
as for opening up computing for non-techies... Wasn't the PC originally
developed as a niche product by techies for techies? Putting a 'novice's' UI
on a techie product is not going to make it a novice's system - you need to
start from scratch, not say 'right, we'll hide DOS behind a boot-logo and hook
into it so that if Windows fails to boot for some reason nothing will be able
to access LFNs - and then we'll hook our software into windows so that the
customer has less choice - and then for a grand finale we'll make sure it's so
buggy and Joe-friendly the average power-user will be so infuriated by it
they'll turn to a minority OS and be part of a group we can laugh at and call
'some UNIX guys''.
>Mr. Gates was raised common, poor maybe, though I'm not sure about that, and
he
>used his talents, skills and wit to become wealthy and powerful.
Common? Not very... He was better off than most of his peers - private
school, access to a computer terminal - he spent his lunchtimes playing
tic-tac-toe with the teletypewriter, even though computer time was seriously
expensive. His first success was when he sold a BASIC interpreter to Altair.
At first his company just wrote BASICs for PCs - and then IBM asked him for an
OS because Dr. Kildall was out flying instead of talking to the suits. So MS
outsourced a DOS to go with their ROM BASIC. Then they started to get ideas.
Now they prefer to watch what you're doing with their software and make damn
sure you can't choose any other company's products without being marked as an
outcast by someone.
Regards, Home page: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Horizon/8786
Ben A L Jemmett ICQ: 9848866 JGSD e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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