a good one Doc. This would clear out all the misconceptions of all the
Windoze diehards that Microsoft started out all the technologies we know
today. It is also a welcome refresher for some of us who has been around
longer (in age, I mean) than most... hehehehe... :)
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Pablo Manalastas
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2001 12:34 PM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [plug] Microsoft and Email
I am editing a computer textbook series which is currently being
written by various authors (The textbooks are for grade school and high
school). One grade school author said,
"It was around 1994 when email was introduced, through the efforts
of companies such as <b>Bill Gates' Microsoft</b> and
<b>Netscape</b>".
And here is my reaction:
======== Start of reaction ======
... I have to correct the above misconception -- not to put
down <author>, but to straighten the facts for everyone.
Here are the facts:
The Unix operating system was written at AT&T System Labs in the late
60s (1965+) by the group of Kernighan, Pike, and Ritchie.
The University of California at Berkeley was given a copy of the Unix
source code, at which Bill Joy (not Bill Gates), then a young
faculty at Berkeley, happily hacked away. Bill Joy's group introduced
many enhancements to Unix and came out with a version of Unix called
BSD, the Berkeley System Distribution. The Department of Defense (of
the U.S.) liked BSD so much that they commissioned Bill Joy's group
to work on the BSD networking features. TCP/IP networking was then added
to BSD and the Internet was born (early 70s). Shortly afterwards, a
graduate student, Eric Allman, wrote the mail transport agent (a program
running over TCP/IP) called Sendmail, and e-mail was born. In all of
these activities, Microsoft did not play a part -- it was not even
born yet.
In the middle 80s, IBM bought into Intel, and IBM had an oversupply
of Intel 8088 chips, which IBM made into the IBM/PC. They commissioned
Bill Gates, a computer-hacker/college-drop-out/young-millionaire, who
earned his first million selling "Microsoft CP/M cards" and "AppleBasic"
to Apple II personal computer users, to write an operating system for
the IBM/PC, and PC/DOS was born. Bill Gates knew that PC/DOS was
not friendly enough, since it did not have the graphical user interface
(GUI) that the new MacIntosh Apples had, and so he hired people to write
Microsoft Windows, which combined the functionality of PC/DOS and the
friendliness of the MacIntosh GUI. At that time, Windows (version 3.0)
did not even have networking, because Bill Gates has not yet realized
that the Internet existed!
To cut the long story short, <b>Microsoft did not introduce e-mail</b>.
Today, its contributions to the e-mail community are: (1) Microsoft
Exchange,
a mail transport agent which can not beat Sendmail because the latter
has been around for so long and has been used by so many that most of
its bugs have been cleaned out. (2) Microsoft Outlook, an integrated
mail reader which is reasonably good.
==== End of reaction ====
PMana
_
Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at
http://plug.linux.org.ph
To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
_
Philippine Linux Users Group. Web site and archives at http://plug.linux.org.ph
To leave: send "unsubscribe" in the body to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To subscribe to the Linux Newbies' List: send "subscribe" in the body to
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
