7 ms·

Something else that's mentioned less than the hardware side is AmigaDOS and AmigaShell, which were considerably more sophisticated than MS-DOS, and closer to Un

Something else that's mentioned less than the hardware side is AmigaDOS and AmigaShell, which were considerably more sophisticated than MS-DOS, and closer to Unix in power (e.g. scripting, pipes, etc.). The fate of Amiga is so infuriating. It's mind-boggling to think how Microsoft was able to dominate for so long with clearly inferior technology, while vastly superior tech (NeXT, Amiga, BeOS) lost out. There are many such unhappy stories, and I often think about the millions of hours spent on building tech that should have conquered the world, but didn't. The macOS platform is a rare incidence of something (NeXT) eventually winning out, but the Amiga was a different kind of dead end.

kstrauser 6y ago
My first Linux box felt pretty comfortable after cutting my teeth on an Amiga's shell, which was largely inspired by Unix and still similar enough in concepts to make the transition easy.
nwah1 6y ago
macOS may have technical advantages, though less and less over time. But it always had a dramatically more restrictive business model from the very beginning. This is what made it unattractive to business and continues to make it unattractive to many. The restrictiveness of Apple is likely an advantage for novice mobile users, and other vendors copied it.
- jolux 6y ago
  You say it's unattractive to business and yet MacBook seems to be the single most popular brand of laptop at most tech companies these days.
  - hguant 6y ago
    Maybe the most visible brand, among web-dev, but HP, Lenovo, and Dell own the business/enterprise laptop market in a big way.
    - jolux 6y ago
      I'm aware, I'm a full-time Windows developer.
  - eitland 6y ago
    Around here it is a mix. Macs aren't extremely popular (3 - 5 of 20 or something) and Linux have quickly become more common and seems to be eating into the Windows marketshare.
    - cookiengineer 6y ago
      Every time there's a huge media article about a newly discovered tracking mechanism in Windows 10, you can immediately see the posts of newcomer questions in Linux specific areas. A lot of people seem to have switched to Ubuntu or Arch due to Windows 10 tracking. And these are also non-technical people that have no idea what they are doing, which is kinda awesome. I always love when using Linux gets a bit easier to use as a Desktop for the wider audience.
  - vkazanov 6y ago
    50/50 with Linux among developers in the case of my company. In my team there are like 4 Dells and only 1 Mac.
  - ksk 6y ago
    Software developers are a tiny fraction of business users. In our industry - vaccines - most people use Windows laptops to get work done. Execs do use Apple stuff, but they're not doing the actual ground-level work, so its probably the same everywhere. Apple hardware is expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and difficult to service due to its flawed design (everything is soldered, no easy access to components, no third party repair, no access to parts, generates lots of e-waste, etc). The OS also is not capable enough to be easily administered by IT.
radmuzom 6y ago
On Microsoft dominating - because developers don’t matter, users do. None of these superior technology would be willing to make an exception in the kernel so that SimCity can run (look up the story from Raymond Chen if you are not familiar). Linux found considerably more success in servers as the users themselves are “developer like”.
- vvanders 6y ago
  For those curious about the story https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii... is a great read with other useful tidbits as well.
  - zaphirplane 6y ago
    There is something to be said about the 2 companies mentioned other that MS, that did the right backwards compatible thing, transmeta and paymybills one is bust and the other doesn’t show up the the 1 page of a search.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      > the other doesn’t show up the the 1 page of a search. It merged with PayTrust, which was acquired by Metavante, who then sold the customers to Intuit. All this happened in the early 2000s. More recently it seems that Intuit sold Paytrust back to Metavante. It's still operating a service at Paytrust.com.
- solidsnack9000 6y ago
  Closest thing I can find is from Joel Spolsky: I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...
edgyquant 6y ago
My grampa gave me my first pc and it had a cli I learned and then years later when I was introduced to Linux I just had an intuition for the basic commands and usage, I haven’t been able to track down what that PC was (it was cli only but could load games from floppy’s). I think it may have been an Amiga (this was in 98 but the pc was a decade+ old at the time.)
icedchai 6y ago
I was an Amiga user for most of the late 80's and early 90's. The hardware didn't change much over the years. Software wise, OS 2.0 was a huge upgrade, but hardware wise, it felt like little changed until AGA. AGA machines (1200/4000) were too little, too late. If the had come out in 1990 instead of 1993, it might've been enough of a lead. Maybe in an alternate universe where the A3000 had AGA.
- jacobush 6y ago
  AGA was the only significant hardware revision. They should have ditched m68k too. I loved it, but with 68040 and 486, the writing was on the wall for everyone to see. By the time of Pentium, the writing was on the wall, the floors, the windows, the ceiling, the windows. Yes, 68060 held a candle against early Pentium but it was not intended as a Personal Computer CPU, more "fast embedded". The Amiga OS was great. No memory protection, but Win 3.1 had none, DOS had none, Win 95 had some but it somehow crashed relentlessly anyway. It took years for them to discover that it had a max uptime of 48 days because of a timer running out of bits. AGA could and should have been incrementally upgraded with more modes, ever keeping backwards compatibility. (Like AGA did with the original chipset.) They could have sold Amigas on PCI boards, with a cheap 68000 to boot legacy Amiga OS until the transition was complete with emulation or whatever, and using the PC x86 for games code. So many possibilities, but R&D was on a shoestring budget. The "game console like" conformity was the strength and ultimately the downfall of the platform, but not because that's bad inherently, but because the revisions stopped coming. The original PS2 was compatible with the PS1, and the original PS3 was compatible with the PS2. The iPhone also shows the strength of vertical integration, Commodore had a great chess board opening but traded all its pieces for nothing, except in the end, pork for the CEO and board.
int_19h 6y ago
If you think about it, the triumph of "good enough in the right place at the right time" describes most of history of computing. Unix was that, as well, compared to many of its contemporary OSes. C was several steps back from the state of the art in PLs. Java, JavaScript, PHP... the list goes on and on.
- wikibob 6y ago
  “C was several steps back from the state of the art in PLs” This very accurately describes Go
  - gumby 6y ago
    > This very accurately describes Go ...and was a deliberate design objective made by an ex bell labs guy.
  - teleforce 6y ago
    C was designed to fill its main purpose in writing portable OS in a higher level language, and given that majority of the today's world's OS is written in C, is the testament of its success. It is interesting to note that while Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson are involved in initial Go language design, C was largely Dennis Ritchie's baby and his got a complete PhD thesis on programming language design meaning that he basically aware of the state-of-the-art of programming languages design at that time. The main argument of several steps back is probably about the lack of the functional language aspects like closure and this feature probably at the very bottom of the programming language features list that you want to have in porting OS, given the computer systems CPU and memory limit at the time. The other is object oriented, but you can perform object oriented programming in C inside the kernel just fine but not as gung-ho as things like the multiple inheritance nonsense [1]. Jury is still out on Go. The fact that Kubernetes is very popular for the cloud now does not mean it will be as successful as 50 years of C. Someone somewhere will probably come up with better Kubernetes alternatives soon that uses different languages. To be relevant in today and in the future, Go needs to adopt generics and its designers are well aware of the deficiency of not having generics for current Go implementation. [1]https://lwn.net/Articles/444910/ https://lwn.net/Articles/444910/
hvidgaard 6y ago
The PC was an open free specification, so the hardware was cheaper. I think that was the main driver behind the PC winning, not Microsoft..
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Only thanks to Compaq, that wasn't part of IBM plans.
ksk 6y ago
Maybe its only clear to you. I don't see what is "clearly inferior" about Microsoft tech. It is reliable and rock solid and has worked for our industry very well (vaccines).
- atombender 6y ago
  I'm of couse referring to the periods when Amiga and Apple competed with MS-DOS and Windows, which were vastly inferior technologically.

kstrauser 6y ago

My first Linux box felt pretty comfortable after cutting my teeth on an Amiga's shell, which was largely inspired by Unix and still similar enough in concepts to make the transition easy.

nwah1 6y ago

macOS may have technical advantages, though less and less over time. But it always had a dramatically more restrictive business model from the very beginning. This is what made it unattractive to business and continues to make it unattractive to many. The restrictiveness of Apple is likely an advantage for novice mobile users, and other vendors copied it.

jolux 6y ago
You say it's unattractive to business and yet MacBook seems to be the single most popular brand of laptop at most tech companies these days.
- hguant 6y ago
  Maybe the most visible brand, among web-dev, but HP, Lenovo, and Dell own the business/enterprise laptop market in a big way.
  - jolux 6y ago
    I'm aware, I'm a full-time Windows developer.
- eitland 6y ago
  Around here it is a mix. Macs aren't extremely popular (3 - 5 of 20 or something) and Linux have quickly become more common and seems to be eating into the Windows marketshare.
  - cookiengineer 6y ago
    Every time there's a huge media article about a newly discovered tracking mechanism in Windows 10, you can immediately see the posts of newcomer questions in Linux specific areas. A lot of people seem to have switched to Ubuntu or Arch due to Windows 10 tracking. And these are also non-technical people that have no idea what they are doing, which is kinda awesome. I always love when using Linux gets a bit easier to use as a Desktop for the wider audience.
- vkazanov 6y ago
  50/50 with Linux among developers in the case of my company. In my team there are like 4 Dells and only 1 Mac.
- ksk 6y ago
  Software developers are a tiny fraction of business users. In our industry - vaccines - most people use Windows laptops to get work done. Execs do use Apple stuff, but they're not doing the actual ground-level work, so its probably the same everywhere. Apple hardware is expensive to buy, expensive to maintain, and difficult to service due to its flawed design (everything is soldered, no easy access to components, no third party repair, no access to parts, generates lots of e-waste, etc). The OS also is not capable enough to be easily administered by IT.

radmuzom 6y ago

On Microsoft dominating - because developers don’t matter, users do. None of these superior technology would be willing to make an exception in the kernel so that SimCity can run (look up the story from Raymond Chen if you are not familiar). Linux found considerably more success in servers as the users themselves are “developer like”.

vvanders 6y ago
For those curious about the story https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii-chicken-and-egg-problems/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/05/24/strategy-letter-ii... is a great read with other useful tidbits as well.
- zaphirplane 6y ago
  There is something to be said about the 2 companies mentioned other that MS, that did the right backwards compatible thing, transmeta and paymybills one is bust and the other doesn’t show up the the 1 page of a search.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    > the other doesn’t show up the the 1 page of a search. It merged with PayTrust, which was acquired by Metavante, who then sold the customers to Intuit. All this happened in the early 2000s. More recently it seems that Intuit sold Paytrust back to Metavante. It's still operating a service at Paytrust.com.
solidsnack9000 6y ago
Closest thing I can find is from Joel Spolsky: I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

edgyquant 6y ago

My grampa gave me my first pc and it had a cli I learned and then years later when I was introduced to Linux I just had an intuition for the basic commands and usage, I haven’t been able to track down what that PC was (it was cli only but could load games from floppy’s). I think it may have been an Amiga (this was in 98 but the pc was a decade+ old at the time.)

icedchai 6y ago

I was an Amiga user for most of the late 80's and early 90's. The hardware didn't change much over the years. Software wise, OS 2.0 was a huge upgrade, but hardware wise, it felt like little changed until AGA. AGA machines (1200/4000) were too little, too late. If the had come out in 1990 instead of 1993, it might've been enough of a lead. Maybe in an alternate universe where the A3000 had AGA.

jacobush 6y ago
AGA was the only significant hardware revision. They should have ditched m68k too. I loved it, but with 68040 and 486, the writing was on the wall for everyone to see. By the time of Pentium, the writing was on the wall, the floors, the windows, the ceiling, the windows. Yes, 68060 held a candle against early Pentium but it was not intended as a Personal Computer CPU, more "fast embedded". The Amiga OS was great. No memory protection, but Win 3.1 had none, DOS had none, Win 95 had some but it somehow crashed relentlessly anyway. It took years for them to discover that it had a max uptime of 48 days because of a timer running out of bits. AGA could and should have been incrementally upgraded with more modes, ever keeping backwards compatibility. (Like AGA did with the original chipset.) They could have sold Amigas on PCI boards, with a cheap 68000 to boot legacy Amiga OS until the transition was complete with emulation or whatever, and using the PC x86 for games code. So many possibilities, but R&D was on a shoestring budget. The "game console like" conformity was the strength and ultimately the downfall of the platform, but not because that's bad inherently, but because the revisions stopped coming. The original PS2 was compatible with the PS1, and the original PS3 was compatible with the PS2. The iPhone also shows the strength of vertical integration, Commodore had a great chess board opening but traded all its pieces for nothing, except in the end, pork for the CEO and board.

int_19h 6y ago

If you think about it, the triumph of "good enough in the right place at the right time" describes most of history of computing. Unix was that, as well, compared to many of its contemporary OSes. C was several steps back from the state of the art in PLs. Java, JavaScript, PHP... the list goes on and on.

wikibob 6y ago
“C was several steps back from the state of the art in PLs” This very accurately describes Go
- gumby 6y ago
  > This very accurately describes Go ...and was a deliberate design objective made by an ex bell labs guy.
- teleforce 6y ago
  C was designed to fill its main purpose in writing portable OS in a higher level language, and given that majority of the today's world's OS is written in C, is the testament of its success. It is interesting to note that while Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson are involved in initial Go language design, C was largely Dennis Ritchie's baby and his got a complete PhD thesis on programming language design meaning that he basically aware of the state-of-the-art of programming languages design at that time. The main argument of several steps back is probably about the lack of the functional language aspects like closure and this feature probably at the very bottom of the programming language features list that you want to have in porting OS, given the computer systems CPU and memory limit at the time. The other is object oriented, but you can perform object oriented programming in C inside the kernel just fine but not as gung-ho as things like the multiple inheritance nonsense [1]. Jury is still out on Go. The fact that Kubernetes is very popular for the cloud now does not mean it will be as successful as 50 years of C. Someone somewhere will probably come up with better Kubernetes alternatives soon that uses different languages. To be relevant in today and in the future, Go needs to adopt generics and its designers are well aware of the deficiency of not having generics for current Go implementation. [1]https://lwn.net/Articles/444910/ https://lwn.net/Articles/444910/

hvidgaard 6y ago

The PC was an open free specification, so the hardware was cheaper. I think that was the main driver behind the PC winning, not Microsoft..

pjmlp 6y ago
Only thanks to Compaq, that wasn't part of IBM plans.

ksk 6y ago

Maybe its only clear to you. I don't see what is "clearly inferior" about Microsoft tech. It is reliable and rock solid and has worked for our industry very well (vaccines).

atombender 6y ago
I'm of couse referring to the periods when Amiga and Apple competed with MS-DOS and Windows, which were vastly inferior technologically.