> Microsoft was directly responsible for a two-decade regression of progress in software system design. People did buy the products rather than better stuff. H

> Microsoft was directly responsible for a two-decade regression of progress in software system design. People did buy the products rather than better stuff. However there were monopolist practices that stopped that and monopolist practices are hard to spot when there is hype and a new industry people know nothing about. If you are trying to play catch up to get on board this tech train you don't know that it's a con. I believe Microsoft's 'regression of progress' goes further back. BASIC is the real culprit. Nobody needed line numbers and goto statements, yet hobby and home computers from the 8 bit era were invariably burdened with lousy variants of MicroSoft BASIC. Including the Commodore things, even if they did not say Microsoft on boot up, they were. Fundamentally there was open source ethos at the computer club of lore, where it all started. Bill Gates cloned Basic from the PDP-11 he had access to then made people pay for it rather than just copy it. He kind of invented the notion of software piracy being evil and morally wrong. The UK home computing scene had BBC BASIC and Sinclair BASIC that were not directly derived from Microsoft's effort. The Sinclair contrivance was a super cheap BASIC hat needed the funny keyboard mappings, the BBC BASIC was actually a decent real programming language rather than just the lame Microsoft idea of what BASIC should be. The only BASIC most users knew was 'LOAD""' followed by a press of the cassette play button to load a game. MS-DOS was acquired and repurposed, sold to IBM with BASIC doing the groundwork - Bill Gates did not have an OS before then. So computing was half way there towards being open source before Bill Gates ruined it by making people pay for his clone of PDP-11 BASIC. Computers were also fundamentally networked before MS-DOS came along. Bill Gates kept it as personal computing, fleece everyone rather than share resources.