For the general stuff I know about, I am in 100% agreement with you.
The industry in general, and that competition being a good thing to
sharpen all involved. But now the market has one big fat over
bloated giant, and it is hurting all.
Yes Apple did make quite a few blunders. Fortunately perhaps some of
that is turning around. I hope at least that it is.
The stuff about dos I can't say much about that because didn't have
computer then. First machine was a Windows box. That was primarily
because everybody else I knew were running Windows except one other
blind guy who ran a Mac. It was sort of a 51% verses 49% decision.
So when that machine bought the farm, I decided to go with a Mac. If
this machine makes it past June it will have lasted longer than the
old box, and with fewer major repairs as well. Fortunately some of
the repairs on the old box were under the builder's guarantee, so he
had to eat it, not me. But there were later ones as well.
The only thing we've had to do with this machine is to replace
keyboard. Not a Mac problem though, a feeline problem. Cat likes to
try to stand on the keyboard.
On Mar 18, 2006, at 8:09 AM, Bruce Bailey wrote:
<rant>
It is not just screen readers that have been a relative disappointment
over the past twenty years. I remember in 1988 (or so) being so
excited about the possibility about the future of the computers. When
talking about DOS one sometimes had to be specific if you were talking
IBM PC-DOS, MS-DOS, or DR DOS. There were two or three excellent
multitasking programs, like QEMM and Desq View. Vendors where
regularly writing elaborate batch files to emulate menus, but my
favorite tended to be Shell from the WordPerfect Corp. I still know
people who use PE from that era and I almost don't blame them since I
still don't have a text editor I like as well as that one. DOS ruled,
but it was clear the future was GUI, and there were lots of contenders
there, a few I have forgotten the names of. There was GEM that
shipped with Aldus PageMaker. Acrobat Reader came bundled with
another. There was OS/2. Sun Solaris, BE OS, and NeXT were all under
development, but not by those names, and I never got close to them,
but there were stories. The GUIs that ran on IBM clones all were
quite poor, Windows 2.0 arguably the worse, so I was happy to stick
with the DOS offerings which were fast and clean. It was about that
time that I got the chance to go work at a university which was
heavily Mac oriented. I finally understood how a GUI could actually
be useful.
It was about that time that Microsoft began their slow but inevitable
domination of the PC industry. Industry jumped liked lemming on
Windows 3x because it was so much more useable for noobs who mostly
just needed eye candy menu to launch one or two programs. Apple made
misstep after misstep during this time. Windows wasn't close to the
Mac OS until the end of 1995, but the writing was on the wall by then.
http://www.macobserver.com/appledeathknell/
My mother thinks Gates is a hero for making computers easy to use and
bringing them to the masses. I blame Gate for stagnating our industry
so much that I believe we are about ten years behind where we would be
with robust competition. If it were not for Apple and OS X raising
the bar, things would be worse.
The only surprise in all that time was the Web, which is quite nice,
but I grew up on the Jetsons. I was promised flying cars and robots.
I would trade Google for Rosie any day.
</rant>
