Microsoft Hatred FAQ

[Peter T. Breuer]

In comp.os.linux.misc Jeroen Wenting <jwenting at hornet dot demon dot nl> wrote:

> "Peter T. Breuer" <ptb at oboe.it.uc3m.es> wrote in message 
> news:t3k623-c5c.ln1 at news.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 how many people who now have $500 PCs ($200 of which is the cost of the 
> OS) would have been able to afford those?

Well, I almost bought my Sun workstation after three years, as it had
depreciated to nearly nothing in value! As I recall, it would have been
about 2000 pounds then if I had decided to buy it. That was a bit more than
the price of a new 286 at that point. But it had scsi disks! And 8M of
ram instead of just 640KB! And a huge monitor (what were those sun
monitor sizes?) instead of a tichy 640x480 PC screen.

If I recall right, the first computer I bought (after the Sun)
was an 8088 "portable".  I sold it off almost at once in favour of a
386sx20 portable with 1MB of ram and 20MB of disk which cost more than
1000 pounds sterling. I was able to run linux on that machine, after 
upping its memory to 3MB.

Peter