On 18 May 2016 at 21:40, Fred Cisin <[email protected]> wrote: > But, "Moore's Law" held that it wouldn't be much longer. > Just one doubling of the speed of the Lisa's hardware would have been enough > to silence the speed complaints.
A general point, really. One of Microsoft's strokes of brilliance was selectively exploiting this. I think maybe it learned it from the 80286 OS/2 1.x débacle. NT 3.1 was brilliant if a bit bulky and unoptimised. Fair enough, it was a v1.0 OS. It was way way WAY too heavy for the average 1993 PC, but power users played, partly 'cos it fixed serious problems with Windows 3.1. (You could run a Win3.1 16-bit app in its own memory space & thus slightly get round Win3.1's terrible low resource limitations. Source: my customers did it, and paid GBP 5K for a PC to run it on for that reason.) NT 3.5 fixed some of that and now the PC was £3.5K or so. NT 3.51 was pretty good and now the PC was £2.5-£2K -- in other words, accessible to a high-end power user. The Win3 UI kept the proles away -- they wanted the friendlier Win95. NT 4 brought the UI, and now, a plain vanilla high-end PC could run it. The cycle sort of repeated with XP and Vista -- they were aimed a bit above the vanilla cheapo turn-of-the-century PC and its successor. The market caught up as they matured. Selectively aiming a bit ahead of where the ordinary PC was allowed MS to refine the OSes in public, so they were ready for prime-time by the time that the market had caught up. IBM, OTOH, aimed at the thousands of boxes /it had already sold/ and so totally torpedoed its own product. -- Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: [email protected] • GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: [email protected] • Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) • +420 702 829 053 (ČR)
