Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Michael Heiming]

In comp.os.linux.misc Peter T. Breuer <ptb at oboe.it.uc3m.es>:
> In comp.os.linux.misc Jeroen Wenting <jwenting at hornet dot demon dot nl> wrote:
>> Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful 
>> than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb 
>> mainframe terminals.

> Uh - when microsoft produced dos 1.0, or whatever it was, I was sitting
> at my Sun 360 workstation (with 4M of RAM, later upgraded to 8M),
> running SunOS 3.8 or thereabouts.

> And a mean game of tetris it played too. Chess wasn't worth the
> humiliation at level 5.

> I believe every researcher in britain got one as a matter of course, but
> they only replaced the perq machines that everyone had had to put up
> with before then.  The vaxen running hpux or so were plentiful too, and
> had fine monitors, tending more to the PC shape.  We'd made our own word
> processor machines and spreadsheet automatons before that.  It didn't
> take that many components, just a good engineer and a room full of
> lackeys with soddering irons.  The BBC were selling kits too (what were
> they?  Ataris?), not that I ever fell for that.

Yep, Atari 400/800, Atari ST/etc, Commodore VC20/C64, there were
quite some systems much more stable/powerful then anything M$ had
to offer.

> Maybe five years earlier I'd designed and built my own computer from
> scratch using the MC 6802 chip as processor.  Somebody really should
> have told me about assembler - I wrote in machine code, flashing the
> code into prom with a 100ms pulse from a 16V battery.  Goodness knows
> how much memory I had ...  maybe a few KB.

> I think the Suns were abut $30000 each when they first appeared, but
> prices dropped rapidly so that  after maybe three years the standard
> price was about $8000. PCs had appeared and came in at about $4000, if I
> recall right, so there was a price differential but it wasn't huge,
> especially when a Sun could support a whole research team via vt100
> lines, and a PC was a one-person job, thanks to the o/s.

The only thing positive about M$ entering the market, probably
due to their ineffective programming style they pushed Intel into
producing pretty fast while cheapo CPUs. Ironically exactly this
is the key to Linux/*BSD success in the unix server market. ;)

-- 
Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94)
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#bofh excuse 387: Your computer's union contract is set to
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