3 ms·

i think that was a hidden cost in the decrease of computer hardware price. it's hard to know what would've happened without microsoft though. whether it would b

i think that was a hidden cost in the decrease of computer hardware price. it's hard to know what would've happened without microsoft though. whether it would be we all used expensive hardware like macs and amigas (or ibm) or whether something like linux or a different ibm os would have become the huge thing. it was great how we could build our own inexpensive system, or buy an inexpensive ibm-compatible someone else made. i have felt grateful to microsoft for that but maybe i'm wrong and it would just be another company that ibm chose.

Spooky23 7y ago
Cheaper was better... even with Microsoft murdering the competition, the old school companies never saw the error of their ways and kept selling stuff at a premium. We’d be discussing this on a Prodigy forum if the incumbents had their way.
ncmncm 7y ago
Yes, I'm afraid you are wrong. OS/2, for example, ran on the same machines as W95, and was fully modern. It was easy to keep an OS/2 system running for months without a crash. But few would develop for it, because few had it. People paid absolutely through the nose for all the effort needed to keep anything working at all. Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. Consider all the Free Software we use today, that just works without attention, year after year. People had to pay high prices for Windows software because it took so much effort to get it to work at all, and to keep working when the tide changed.
- gmueckl 7y ago
  OS/2 had comsistently higher hardware requirements than MS DOS and Windows. Mainly the memory usage was way higher. This was the price you had to pay for the better system design. The MS system software of that era is a prime example of how worse is better for software products.
- twoelfer 7y ago
  Sorry, but from my experience, this is not true. I did have several machines Running w95 and I did try to run OS/2 on them. It would boot but it would not run fast enough to work with it. W95, on the same hardware, worked quite well and responsive.
- nootropicat 7y ago
  >Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. How? Defragmenting is needed because random access on hdd is much, much slower than sequential. It's not something the os or fs can fix.
  - asymptotically2 7y ago
    ext4 places files further apart on disk so fragmentation happens much less often.
- squarefoot 7y ago
  I used OS2 a lot, both version 2.1 and later Warp 3 back then. While it was really powerful (not to mention a lot more stable) compared to Windows 95, it was also heavier and slower. IBM advertised Warp 3 as something that could run in 4 MB or RAM; that was no different from Microsoft stating 20 years later that Vista could run in a half GB RAM. Yes, the system loads, but you sadly can't do much with it save for looking at the shiny icons and enjoying the sound of the hard drive constantly spinning. Unfortunately back then RAM modules were so expensive that being forced to upgrade to 8 MB to have an usable system would make a difference, so although once upgraded the RAM OS/2 could become a huge step forward from windows, most people simply wouldn't spent that money.
  - rasz 7y ago
    4MB was ~$150 in 1994, less than cheapest 486 processor/cheapest CDROM drive/around 14.4 modem or 16bit sound card price etc. Whole 486 systems started around $1.2K, Pentium ones at $2K, 8MB was standard lowest Ram offered. $150 wasnt the end of the world.

Spooky23 7y ago

Cheaper was better... even with Microsoft murdering the competition, the old school companies never saw the error of their ways and kept selling stuff at a premium. We’d be discussing this on a Prodigy forum if the incumbents had their way.

ncmncm 7y ago

Yes, I'm afraid you are wrong. OS/2, for example, ran on the same machines as W95, and was fully modern. It was easy to keep an OS/2 system running for months without a crash. But few would develop for it, because few had it. People paid absolutely through the nose for all the effort needed to keep anything working at all. Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. Consider all the Free Software we use today, that just works without attention, year after year. People had to pay high prices for Windows software because it took so much effort to get it to work at all, and to keep working when the tide changed.

gmueckl 7y ago
OS/2 had comsistently higher hardware requirements than MS DOS and Windows. Mainly the memory usage was way higher. This was the price you had to pay for the better system design. The MS system software of that era is a prime example of how worse is better for software products.
twoelfer 7y ago
Sorry, but from my experience, this is not true. I did have several machines Running w95 and I did try to run OS/2 on them. It would boot but it would not run fast enough to work with it. W95, on the same hardware, worked quite well and responsive.
nootropicat 7y ago
>Disk de-fragmenting, for example, was a Windows-only phenomenon. How? Defragmenting is needed because random access on hdd is much, much slower than sequential. It's not something the os or fs can fix.
- asymptotically2 7y ago
  ext4 places files further apart on disk so fragmentation happens much less often.
squarefoot 7y ago
I used OS2 a lot, both version 2.1 and later Warp 3 back then. While it was really powerful (not to mention a lot more stable) compared to Windows 95, it was also heavier and slower. IBM advertised Warp 3 as something that could run in 4 MB or RAM; that was no different from Microsoft stating 20 years later that Vista could run in a half GB RAM. Yes, the system loads, but you sadly can't do much with it save for looking at the shiny icons and enjoying the sound of the hard drive constantly spinning. Unfortunately back then RAM modules were so expensive that being forced to upgrade to 8 MB to have an usable system would make a difference, so although once upgraded the RAM OS/2 could become a huge step forward from windows, most people simply wouldn't spent that money.
- rasz 7y ago
  4MB was ~$150 in 1994, less than cheapest 486 processor/cheapest CDROM drive/around 14.4 modem or 16bit sound card price etc. Whole 486 systems started around $1.2K, Pentium ones at $2K, 8MB was standard lowest Ram offered. $150 wasnt the end of the world.