> 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

> 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. :)