3 ms·

I don't disagree with any of what he says. But he only includes the negative things they did. It's also worth remembering that ms also helped democratise comput

I don't disagree with any of what he says. But he only includes the negative things they did. It's also worth remembering that ms also helped democratise computing. In the late eighties, early nineties Unix was an ivory tower. Only large organisations could afford it. Apple was expensive and closed. Windows was cheap and open. It worked with every kind of hardware and peripheral. And with dev tools like VB a lot of software was written and systems built for people that otherwise would just have had to stick with paper.

oldcynic 8y ago
> ms also helped democratise computing I find that laughable. Their client and processor licensing model is of the Oracle school. Large OEM's are still paying the MS tax on machines supplied are they not? (MS get fee on every OEM machine sold regardless of whether it includes Windows. Buy a Dell Linux laptop and MS still get their $x) > Unix was an ivory tower Hmm. What of BSD+FreeBSD? Hell even MS Xenix ran on 10x the range of machines that Windows did. Late 80s, early 90s folks like Sequent were charging a bomb because they included 4 or 8 processors and gobs of memory (for the time). Sun and SGI charged a fortune because 50% of the machine cost was the graphics and IO, and a net stack that worked. A Sun lunchbox wasn't that much more than an equivalent spec PC of the time but gave SCSI and networking. None of that plug and pray or fucking around with INT settings in BIOS, driver settings or it suddenly developing amnesia. SunOS (usually) just worked, Windows usually didn't until Win2k finally arrived and you could actually have uptime over a daily reboot. The expensive stuff in the Unix world was where there was no comparison in teh PC world or you scaled up. Multi processors, Sun pizza boxes where 50% of the cost was the top end graphics (always buy the flight sim CD when speccing that one), 100+ serial ports, racks full of USR Couriers etc. NT didn't scale (see Hotmail and the infamous scaling demo scam). > Windows was cheap and open It was neither. I'm not going to reopen VB memories. :)

oldcynic 8y ago

> ms also helped democratise computing I find that laughable. Their client and processor licensing model is of the Oracle school. Large OEM's are still paying the MS tax on machines supplied are they not? (MS get fee on every OEM machine sold regardless of whether it includes Windows. Buy a Dell Linux laptop and MS still get their $x) > Unix was an ivory tower Hmm. What of BSD+FreeBSD? Hell even MS Xenix ran on 10x the range of machines that Windows did. Late 80s, early 90s folks like Sequent were charging a bomb because they included 4 or 8 processors and gobs of memory (for the time). Sun and SGI charged a fortune because 50% of the machine cost was the graphics and IO, and a net stack that worked. A Sun lunchbox wasn't that much more than an equivalent spec PC of the time but gave SCSI and networking. None of that plug and pray or fucking around with INT settings in BIOS, driver settings or it suddenly developing amnesia. SunOS (usually) just worked, Windows usually didn't until Win2k finally arrived and you could actually have uptime over a daily reboot. The expensive stuff in the Unix world was where there was no comparison in teh PC world or you scaled up. Multi processors, Sun pizza boxes where 50% of the cost was the top end graphics (always buy the flight sim CD when speccing that one), 100+ serial ports, racks full of USR Couriers etc. NT didn't scale (see Hotmail and the infamous scaling demo scam). > Windows was cheap and open It was neither. I'm not going to reopen VB memories. :)