5 ms·

"To put this discussion into perspective, when it occurred in 1992, the 386 was the dominating chip and the 486 had not come out on the market. Microsoft was st

by ayrx 12y ago

"To put this discussion into perspective, when it occurred in 1992, the 386 was the dominating chip and the 486 had not come out on the market. Microsoft was still a small company selling DOS and Word for DOS. Lotus 123 ruled the spreadsheet space and WordPerfect the word processing market. DBASE was the dominant database vendor and many companies that are household names today--Netscape, Yahoo, Excite--simply did not exist." Funny how another 15 years changes things. I wonder how many people will remember Netscape in a few years. I have never heard of Excite before this. Yahoo is just about the furthest thing from people's mind nowadays when talking about technology companies.

deleted 12y ago
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sdrothrock 12y ago
> Yahoo is just about the furthest thing from people's mind nowadays when talking about technology companies. Yahoo is actually very, very dominant here in Japan. There's even a (popular) Yahoo ISP. I probably know more Japanese people with Yahoo e-mail addresses than I do Japanese people with gmail addresses.
- TorKlingberg 12y ago
  Yes Yahoo Japan is very big, but it is mostly separate from Yahoo.com.
- eloisant 12y ago
  That's a join venture dominated by Softbank (that's also a cell phone operator, and owner of Sprint). Yahoo Inc. only holds 35% of it, and licences his name to this separate company. User accounts are separate too, if you create an account everywhere in the world but Japan it's a @yahoo.com account, but in Japan it's @yahoo.co.jp.
raldi 12y ago
Microsoft was a huge, powerful, feared company in 1992.
InclinedPlane 12y ago
To add a small quibble here, Microsoft was not a "small company" in 1992. They were one of the most well known and most successful software companies in the world. But they were not nearly as large nor as dominant as they would become in the late '90s, though the entire industry grew enormously in that time frame as well.
- HillRat 12y ago
  To be slightly more specific, MSFT had a market cap of $23 billion and had just shipped Windows 3.1. It was so much in the zeitgeist that Doug Copeland would set a novel there a few years later. In any case, there wasn't any reason not to see microkernels as the only viable way forward, especially given the multitude of competing Unix variants that had grown to unwieldy, multi-mega-SLOC monsters. The future seemed to be with lightweight, microkernel OSes like QNX, the UNICOS update, HURD (seriously, it was a thing back then!) and improved Mach and Chorus versions. The idea of writing a Unix-like as anything other than a toy seemed absurd. History is a very hard thing to predict in advance.

by ayrx 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

sdrothrock 12y ago

> Yahoo is just about the furthest thing from people's mind nowadays when talking about technology companies. Yahoo is actually very, very dominant here in Japan. There's even a (popular) Yahoo ISP. I probably know more Japanese people with Yahoo e-mail addresses than I do Japanese people with gmail addresses.

TorKlingberg 12y ago
Yes Yahoo Japan is very big, but it is mostly separate from Yahoo.com.
eloisant 12y ago
That's a join venture dominated by Softbank (that's also a cell phone operator, and owner of Sprint). Yahoo Inc. only holds 35% of it, and licences his name to this separate company. User accounts are separate too, if you create an account everywhere in the world but Japan it's a @yahoo.com account, but in Japan it's @yahoo.co.jp.

raldi 12y ago

Microsoft was a huge, powerful, feared company in 1992.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

To add a small quibble here, Microsoft was not a "small company" in 1992. They were one of the most well known and most successful software companies in the world. But they were not nearly as large nor as dominant as they would become in the late '90s, though the entire industry grew enormously in that time frame as well.

HillRat 12y ago
To be slightly more specific, MSFT had a market cap of $23 billion and had just shipped Windows 3.1. It was so much in the zeitgeist that Doug Copeland would set a novel there a few years later. In any case, there wasn't any reason not to see microkernels as the only viable way forward, especially given the multitude of competing Unix variants that had grown to unwieldy, multi-mega-SLOC monsters. The future seemed to be with lightweight, microkernel OSes like QNX, the UNICOS update, HURD (seriously, it was a thing back then!) and improved Mach and Chorus versions. The idea of writing a Unix-like as anything other than a toy seemed absurd. History is a very hard thing to predict in advance.