Richard Travers wrote:
In article<[email protected]>,
James Knott<[email protected]> wrote:
Or is the BSOD just a myth that I've personally experienced?
I often wonder. It is certainly something that I have never experienced. And
I have been working on Microsoft systems since the early days of the IBM PC.
Consider yourself lucky
Interesting to see your tirade on Microsoft's business practices (no
argument there), but no mention of IBM's pivotal role in Microsoft's
success.
R
When the IBM PC first came out, it was planned to have 3 operating
systems available. Those were PC-DOS, CP/M-86 and pCode. I have no
idea what happened to pCode, but for whatever reason, CP/M wound up
being more expensive than PC-DOS. As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft
sold DOS to IBM, before they even owned it and what they did eventually
own was little more than a hardware development system that was
significantly inferior to CP/M. (BTW, some of the CP/M code found it's
way into DOS). As PC-DOS on IBM computers & MS-DOS on the clones became
the dominant OS (Bill Gates' mother was friends with an IBM exec, which
may have contributed to this). Then when Windows came out, MS started
bundling it with DOS. Later, they started making the demands on
computer manufactures that made it all but impossible for competing OSs
to succeed. This is all well documented, including in several court
cases that MS lost. So we have a situation today where most consumers
a) are denied a choice and b) don't even know they're denied a choice.
It's so bad that, several years ago, someone tried telling me that it
was illegal for a computer to be sold without Windows!
Bottom line, I don't think it was IBM's intent to have one company
dominate the software market, as they were trying to avoid any possible
anti-trust accusations, having been through that already with their big
systems.
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