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And while windows XP is processor greedy, the benchmark for good performance in XP was surpassed a while back.

I was actually writing a Slashdot submission some time ago that dealt with "minimum requirements" and how they are determined in the software industry. For instance, for Windows XP Microsoft states as the requirements "PC with 300 megahertz (MHz) or higher processor clock speed recommended; 233-MHz minimum required". I offer up the opinion that they pulled these numbers out of their ass, and that is the general routine of the software industry in general. While items such as memory or hard drive space can be actually metered and truly quoted on in minimum configurations (recommended becomes more of a suggestion as it is completely subjective: If you're willing to tolerate endless paging, Windows NT 4.0 will run on, and was originally specified as for, 12MB. If Microsoft re-released Windows NT 4.0 pre SP1 today, they'd claim that it required a minimum of 128MB, and a 300Mhz+ processor). I believe that software manufacturers simply find the middle to low end in the current marketplace and stick that on their box with the hopes that more detailed "requirements" makes it appear that the QA department did a better job, when all it's really doing is needlessly muddling and implying metrics that don't actually exist. Minimum CPU requirements for non-realtime applications are a farce.

Why do I bring up XP? Firstly, I've found XP to actually be significantly less demanding than Windows 2000 (for instance startup times have dropped dramatically as they optimized the kernel and ancilliary code). Windows 2000 specifies a "minimum" processor of a 133Mhz Pentium, yet Windows XP specifies that you need a 233Mhz or higher processor. Why the jump of 100Mhz? Does it latently consume more resources? Checking my CPU meter I can see that it generally sits at 0%. Compare this to Windows NT 4.0, to which XP still shares a tremendous lineage (one can still run virtually all current software on an NT 4.0 machine) which only requires a 486 33Mhz. Claims that XP is a CPU hog are ridiculous: While it can be demanding from a video perspective if you have the "effects" on, and you should have lots of memory, it would likely run perfectly fine on a Pentium Pro 60Mhz, presuming you had the required memory.

Why do I say this little rant? Because I truly was interested some time back about the engineering foundation for determining and quoting on minimum, recommended, and optimal configurations, and how they are derived.

BAH! You kids and your fancy editors.

In my day we used edlin AND WE LIKED IT!

MS has roots in Linux, just like almost every other software shop that's still alive.

I think you mean Unix, they had their own flavor of Unix once, XENIX. But NT/2000/XP aren't derived from this, they get their Unix like properties via their VMS heritage.

Doh!!!~!! Here's the Xenix link I tried to include in the last post. Not sure how that broke. Hopefully, this one wont...

The thought of GNU licensing may gave Microsoft a bad case of the hives, but interestingly enough at one point they had their own Redmond-grown version of UNIX known as Xenix . It even ran on 386s back in the day.

But I believe that it was out at about the same time that Linux was just getting off the ground and of course MS wanted money for their wares...so Xenix, as I understand it, died a very quiet death...

According to this the original announcement was made November, 1983 (11/10/1983, I believe) for Microsoft Windows, however, the first commercial release wasn't until November, 1985. E.g. no one had seen it yet.

According to this X, as an asynchronous immediate graphics windowing achictecture was born May 1984. The first public release was September, 1985, 3 months before the release of Microsoft Windows.

Reguardless, the point is valid: X is not an imitation of Microsoft's Windows. I'm sorry to say I didn't check my facts first. I actually picked up the 1989 from Microsoft's splashscreen at boot (it says Copyright 1989-1998, since I used Windows 98 still). And Microsoft Windows didn't see much popularity until 3.0 started to roll around.

According to this the original announcement was made November, 1983 (11/10/1983, I believe) for Microsoft Windows, however, the first commercial release wasn't until November, 1985. E.g. no one had seen it yet.

According to this X, as an asynchronous immediate graphics windowing achictecture was born May 1984. The first public release was September, 1985, 3 months before the release of Microsoft Windows.

Reguardless, the point is valid: X is not an imitation of Microsoft's Windows. I'm sorry to say I didn't check my facts first. I actually picked up the 1989 from Microsoft's splashscreen at boot (it says Copyright 1989-1998, since I used Windows 98 still). And Microsoft Windows didn't see much popularity until 3.0 started to roll around.

According to X.org, the first commercial release of the X-windows system was back in 1986. This was part of MIT's Project Athena which began in May 1983.

According to this page, Microsoft Windows 1.0 was released November 1985. It was announced in November 1983, clearly as a response to Apple's Macintosh OS.

However, according to the Wikipedia, Xerox Parc codified the WIMP paradigm (where the W stands for Windows) for their Xerox Star system released in 1981.

So, depending on how you slice it, the concept of 'windows' clearly predates MS's work on Windows and the term X-Windows refers to a product which was virtually the same age as the MS product.

That's all I got from googling around for 20 minutes. I Am Not A Historian.

• http://www.computerhope.com/help/cpu.htm#05
• http://www.tridwr.demon.co.uk/acorn/processors.htm l
• http://www.mackido.com/History/brief_history.html

Well MS-Dos 1.0 was created in 1981, and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, so I'd say UNIX hasn't come as far or as fast as it could have.

The real question then might be: Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?

Well MS-Dos 1.0 was created in 1981, and Windows 1.0 was released in 1985, so I'd say UNIX hasn't come as far or as fast as it could have.

The real question then might be: Who fell asleep and let Bill take over the world?

Name me one area in which microsoft has led the way

The Intellimouse isn't all that inovative. The only difference between it and older optical mice is that the camera is better and doesn't require a special pattern to read, which I put down to simple advances in camera technology. This describes such mice.

Actually I think you might be incorrect... bernoulli carts used to use a similar system, iirc, in which the spinning of the disc was stablized the by literal bernoulli effect created.

Better description from here

The Bernoulli drive was named after a Swiss scientist who discovered the principle of aerodynamic lift. The principal characteristic of a Bernoulli drive is that the flexible disk floats between the read/write heads, so there is no actual contact between the disk and the heads. With this principal the Bernoulli drive is less susceptible to head crashes.