Note: [OT] tag added to the subject line.
"Steven Pierce" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Bill Ward wrote:
>
> >Jon, I'm sorry to say, but we do owe Microsoft a few (positive) things:
>
> >The machine on your desk wouldn't exist if not for the
> >foundations built on MS-DOS. Sure, I know, you run Linux
> >now... but the machine is based on commodity parts that
> >were produced to run an OS championed by IBM for he
> >business world. Intel designed those parts, but if
> >Microsoft hadn't had an OS to run the system on, in all
> >likelihood, the use "critical mass" required to lower the
> >prices down to the current levels, and raise the
> >performance to these current levels, would not have
> >existed. I'm not saying Gates invented DOS (he didn't);
> >I'm not saying that he invented the killer app(again, he
> >didn't. Visicalc did); I'm not saying he invented the
> >PC(IBM, Intel, etc.). But his company was critical in
> >those early stages. Without him, we might be using TR-DOS,
> >CP/M, or some other legacy OS as the "mainstream" OS, and
> >saturation would be a lot less.
You seem to be laboring under the odd misaprehension that
MS-DOS was an improvement over those old "legacy" systems
like CP/M. MS-DOS did have some unixy features hacked in,
like pipes and hierarchial directories, (though unlike in
Unix, they never seemed to work very well). On the other
hand, CP/M had a few clues about device independance. Have
you ever *used* CP/M? It was okay.
It *is* possible that if IBM had gone with Digital Research
and CP/M the world would be different... for example, CP/M
ran on different hardware (like Zilog chips), and we might
not have ended up with an Intel hegemony.
You seem to think that this would be a bad thing, that
competition in hardware design would lead to higher prices?
This strikes me as really bizarre reasoning.
(I *could* think of positive things that MS has done... for
example, their windowing system was less dogmatic about
forcing you to use the mouse all the time, so now I can use
an imitation like icewm -- an excellent window manager
that gives me the option of ignoring the mouse most of the
time.)
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