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I'm not so sure about a standard OS, but I am pretty sure we'd have a standard set of API's and a standard binary format. (Or at least OS's that tolerated multiple API's and binary formats)

-Mike

Reply to
MSCHAEF.COM
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In article , Bruce Barnett wrote: ...

They were already dropping without Microsoft's influence. Just as a data point, an Apple ][ running something like Bank Street Writer or Appleworks was significantly less than $5K even in the early-mid 80's. Microsoft's only role in the Apple ][ machines was as a supplier of AppleSoft BASIC. (When the Apple's license for AppleSoft expired, Microsoft then took the license renewal fee out of Apple's hide...)

Prior to all this, CP/M machines running things like WordStar were much less costly than more institutional word processors, even back in the

70's. The big driving force of all of this downward movement in price is cheaper hardware and consequently larger markets (with less money to spend individually, I suspect).

-Mike

Reply to
MSCHAEF.COM

Rarely is anything all bad or all good. The point is that we inarguably have, for better or worse, like it or not, what amounts to a "standard" for which programmers can write and be assured that their code will run on most of the personal computers in the world, thereby greatly increasing chances of success; and driver standards that pretty well insure OS, hardware, and peripheral compatibility for those personal computers.

The latter should be readily obvious to anyone who lived through the times when that was not the case, but is a fact that seems to be ignored in favor of the knee-jerk bashing mentality.

I am far from being an apologist for any big corporation, but as I said, rarely is anything all bad, as most of the knee-jerk, perspective challenged bashers would have you believe.

Reply to
Swingman

You left out "compatible and interchangeable" to describe the hardware, and a ubiquitous OS, love it or hate it, without which none of it would have happened when it did.

Reply to
Swingman

Unix.

Reply to
Mike Marlow

Well, hardly ... :)

Reply to
Duane Bozarth

Dave Hinz wrote: ...

I think you have the primary cause/effect backwards here...software always expands to fill/overtax the available hardware...not that there isn't impetus to create new hardware to solve larger problems, but the problems existed first. What was/is practical to solve simply moves up based on the presently available hardware. The explosion of the wasting of CPU cycles for nonproductive computing is a new phenomenon brought on by the advent of cheap processors and large memories.

If one hasn't worked in an environment where 1 or 2 kwords of memory was still unimaginably large, it's hard to relate to today's environment.

Reply to
Duane Bozarth

Man, I miss Interleaf. I _still_ haven't found a drawing package that is as usable as frames within an interleaf document. Pointers would be most welcome. Wish I still had a copy, now that I have the hardware.

Well, I think MS does deserve _some_ credit for increasing demand for bigger/faster/cheaper hardware. Their bloat makes my next hard drive purchase cheaper, y'know?

Dave Hinz

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Sure, it's called Unix. Everything except Windows uses it.

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Could be. I'm _trying_ to give MS the benefit of the doubt on something just to see what it's like, but frankly, I'm not real good at it.

Well...each Mac OSX dot-rev I've installed has _improved_ performance on the same hardware, so I'm not sure "every/all" appies, but I see your point.

Yes. Back in the day, every byte counted, literally. Hell, I'd use . instead of 0 when possible, because . is a single-precision zero, while 0 too two bytes. Start a loop at zero, not one, because it has to count past that anyway and cycles are time. "Tokenize" your BASIC instructions so they don't have to be detokenized at runtime. Ah, the fun.

"Yeah, let's just load this 25MB DLL so we have the value of PI in case we might want it" type stuff, yes. Drives me nuts when I see crap like that.

Dave "We wore an onion on our belt, as was the style at the time" Hinz

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Right, there are mainframe computers these days as well, but...can you name a current major computing platform that isn't Unix, other than Windows?

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Stratus' VOS. Though last I heard Stratus was considering a Linux port. Not sure if they made that decision or not.

Reply to
Morris Dovey

Dunno, I'm not familiar with it at all. We've got a Linux partition on our IBM mainframe, which 5 years ago would have been unthinkable.

Reply to
Dave Hinz

In article , Dave Hinz wrote: ...

For some definition of the word "major", these come to mind:

  • PalmOS
  • J2ME
  • Brew
  • Nintendo GameCube
  • Nindendo Gameboy (Advance, SP, etc.)
  • Sony Playstation, Playstation 2

All of these have millions of units shipped, and markets that are in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions. None are Unix-based. None are Windows-based.

-Mike

Reply to
MSCHAEF.COM

Tandem. Used largely for mission-critical applications where downtime is intolerable, such as most of the world's major stock exchanges, a substantial fraction of telephone switching equipment and ATM networks, and an awful lot of hospitals. Spent over 20 years of my IS career working with Tandem equipment. MAN! but it's nice to work on a machine that never goes down.

-- Regards, Doug Miller (alphageek at milmac dot com)

Nobody ever left footprints in the sands of time by sitting on his butt. And who wants to leave buttprints in the sands of time?

Reply to
Doug Miller

Those things pre-date Microsoft. The Apple ][ is probably the first mainstream example in the PC field. IBM System/360 is probably the first example in computing, in general.

Microsoft, however, has been the best advocate of this strategy and by far the biggest beneficiary.

-Mike

Reply to
MSCHAEF.COM

OK, that one I'll go with.

Not familiar with these.

Not sure if I'd call these "computing platforms". Sure, they're computers, but the primary purpose isn't computing, it's gaming. My microwave as a CPU in it as well...

Right. This also doesn't address the embedded computing in an amazing nubmer of devices (cars, appliances, sewing machines, etc etc etc), but even those you'll find a lot of 'doze and Unix in.

Reply to
Dave Hinz

I know what you mean there. But, I notice that

formatting link
forwards to compaq.com where it 404's. Are they still around, or did HP kill them off, or ???

Dave

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Excuse please, but who wrote Applesoft?

Reply to
Dave Hinz

Thirty years later! Damn, you guys are really fanatics about lin/u/nix.

I liked the OS2 that I had on a bunch of monitors at the prisons, myself.

Reply to
George

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