Some M$ history...

[Tassidar]

So you're with I am Penguin then?

Remember that today's freedom fighters can well become tomorrow's tyrants. If you doubt that, look at Mugabe, the Bolsheviks or possibly even the ANC.

 

[rwenzori]

So you're with I am Penguin then?

Try reading the last bit of what I posted, Mr. Defensive!

 

[Claymore]

I read that it ran well. That was in review magazines of the time.
People were raving about it, like they're raving about 7 now.

Hmmm. I ran it, and I used it to run Lotus Notes on. I got a lot of practice using it and installing it. And it was a slow dog. Enormously stable, sure, but hardly any native apps, and really crap hardware support.

At work on WORKSTATIONS. I said AT HOME. The first NT to appear at home was XP. Prior to that it was the dos shell called Win9x. Come on Claymore,
I'm not dense. I know what I'm talking about.

Er...I worked for the MS distributor 15 years ago. I was there. I used NT at home, and I knew others who did too. Yes, it was a minority compared to Win9x, but then, even in the corporate world, NT was primarily used on workstations, not servers. I still have home-user customers running Windows 2000 at home.

OS/2 I read was superior to Win95 in the kernel and have virtually no 16bit elements. It was way above Win95. Win95 was an improvement over 3.11 but
when one app died your whole system became unstable.

True. Win95 did run 32-bit apps though, and they did have much better memory protection than the 16-bit apps.

At the end we had a Word Processor which couldn't even copy/paste a block of text more than 2 pages without messing up the formatting - early Word versions until late 90s.

I must admit, I never had those issues, and I'm no fan of Word. The competition were caught flat-footed though, as you mentioned, and never recovered.

 

[PeterCH]

Hmmm. I ran it, and I used it to run Lotus Notes on. I got a lot of practice using it and installing it. And it was a slow dog. Enormously stable, sure, but hardly any native apps, and really crap hardware support.

We can thank M$ for that, hence my whole diatribe . MS destroyed OS/2 in an unfair fashion which led to less native app support. OS/2 did run Win16 apps though, some said better than Win 95.

Er...I worked for the MS distributor 15 years ago. I was there. I used NT at home, and I knew others who did too. Yes, it was a minority compared to Win9x, but then, even in the corporate world, NT was primarily used on workstations, not servers. I still have home-user customers running Windows 2000 at home.

You were special, as you pointed out. NT was not marketed nor intended for the home market - the likes of Pentium Pros and PIIs at home. I never saw it in stores either. It was a joke though in the beginning, my father worked on Unix and CATIA (and other) systems back in those days from the 80s onwards in leading companies in SA. Windows NT mentions would draw snickering from around.

True. Win95 did run 32-bit apps though, and they did have much better memory protection than the 16-bit apps.

Yeah which still crashed. When a 32 bit app died, your whole system became unstable, this was only fixed with NT and XP. I used NT at university.

I must admit, I never had those issues, and I'm no fan of Word. The competition were caught flat-footed though, as you mentioned, and never recovered.

MS played some dirty tricks there, they pretended to continue development for OS2 with version 1 of MS OFFICE for OS/2 then as the competitors turned to write softs for OS/2 they pulled out of both MS Office for OS/2 and OS/2 itself. The competitors took a long time to realise what MS had done and by the time AmiPro and WP ran on Windoze, MS Office had an advantage.
MS also used various undocumented system calls to speed up MS OFFICE.

Look MS wasn't no Pol Pot or Red Communist dictatorship but do read about all of this. These and similar tactics got MS into trouble later and even now.

Some people also suggest that MS made computers cheap. I disagree, maybe initially, and maybe IBM would have done with OS/2 what MS did with Windows 3.1/95/etc., but that's because prices of all electronics dropped - we now have cheap CD players, DVD players, MP3 players etc - all without MS interference or the interference of other monopolies. Look at the DVD spec. Everyone after licensing from the DVD Consortium could produce a DVD Player, from th expensive Nakamichis, to Denons, to NADs, to Sony's to now Sansuis et al.
See how cheap DVD players are now the software which operates them?
So cheap the old dinosaurs had to intro a new wrapper format - called BD.
The H264.AVC technology in that is not new with BD, was around before.

 

[Picard]

The problem with Gates and his empire is that he didn't really come up with anything special himself, he borrowed or stole or dominated. That sums up his success really.

Most research and development builds off the backs of previous research and development. There's nothing unworthy about it.

 

[.Froot.]

I did a case study on M$ in my first year of study.... I still carry the pain of having to know it all