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Windows 98 is not hardware. USB is hardware. iMac is hardware.

The person you are responding to is exactly correct. The iMac came without traditional ports, and companies actually started making products for it.

Just because Windows 98 supported USB didn't mean that PCs actually came with USB ports at that time. Even after USB exploded, USB ports were still unlikely to be found on PC until 2000 or so. (Or they'd be on motherboards, but not actually hooked up to anything, or relegated to a slot in the back, etc.)

That is the story of USB. There was a period where no one had ever heard of USB, and then a period where products showed up all over the place that were supposedly supported by Mac and Windows 98, but no PC owner actually was able to use them because none of them actually had USB ports, or they didn't work right, or they were on NT or 95. Whereas iMac owners were forced to use them. (And the iMac was insanely popular, BTW.) And then, bang, suddenly PC owners were using USB too.

If you weren't there, don't comment. Those of us who were remember it fairly clearly. And everyone knew it at the time.

Of course, USB probably would have caught on anyway, eventually.

Enterprise and business software used far more draconian DRM in the 80's than games.

Lotus 1-2-3 (that was the example I was looking for before) used to force a single install from a set of floppies. It basically invalidated a physical set of floppies that *you owned*.

Reference

Anyways, I'm just saying that sofware companies have been leaving bits of their software over your data. They've been doing it with floppies and hard drives since those existed.

Remember a little insignificant software company named Quarterdeck Office Systems? I worked there for four years in the early Nineties. One of its products was called Sidebar, which was an "icon dock" that included icons for certain basic system functions as well as duplicates of all the app icons in Program Manager. It also allowed iconified subfolders to be created, etc. This would have been about '93 or '94, and even (IIRC) predated Windows 95.

I think that might count as prior evidence.

Patents in general are probably dumb and counter-productive to the claimed desired effect, but software patents require a descriptive adjective that even moronic doesn't quite address.

You're obviously too young to remember when IBM was *the* dominant IT company. Everything they produced turned up in datacenters at some point, and I worked for management that was "Big Blue, through and through".

IBM made these machines called "Mainframes", as well as "Midrange" and "Mini" computers. These were the 360s, the 390s etc on the high end, the 400s on the midrange, and the RISC/6000 and such on the mini set. They even produced microcomputers, which today we call PCs. IBM compatible got that name for a reason - it meant that a "clone" was 100% compatible with IBM or Tandy microcomputers. This was important, because "no-one got fired for buying IBM". A common saying back in the 70s and 80s.

IBM took it in the shorts, faced huge fines, and changed into a pretty cool company. MS is now in that same position that IBM was when the clones came... the difference is that IBM was (at the time) ignorant of how big an opportunity they were missing. They saw microcomputers as nothing more than enhanced terminals and small business machines. Toys, really. Anybody that mattered used mainframes or AS/400s. Their big rival was Digital Electronic Corp (DEC), and so they never assumed that Microsoft was leading the charge against the computer room based machines.

Well, here we are, 30 years later, and MS shot several bullets into IBMs head. Now, IBM isn't even the right choice very often, unlike MS. MS however, is also facing a sharp decline, as Apple, Sun, Redhat and legions of others are waiting to dethrone them.

This year - I spec'd and configured millions in new hardware - moving our flagship systems to Linux. Not a penny of that money went with MS, and even Sun lost out. Our end users and IT are even buying themselves Apple machines, running OSX. Even our lowliest end users are deciding that they don't want to use Windows anymore, and they are taking it upon themselves to move (since IT hasn't forced them to toe the line).

That's what the line means, and that's why it is being applied ironically to Microsoft.

Here's some links if you're interested
http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/000345.h tml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_System/2
http://www.zisman.ca/Articles/2006/Biv876.html
http://e-pix.com/CPUWARS/cpuwars.html

-WS

Sucked like a Dyson on steroids.

Here is a review of XTGWin, and here are the XTG Fanpages.

--jeffk++

There was more to DOS 6.2 than a fix of the DoubleSpace app. 6.2 was the first DOS version to introduce Scandisk, the F8 step-through feature, and a lot of improvments to things like Defrag, HIMEM, and various utilites. And interestingly enough, according to http://www.zisman.ca/Articles/1993/DOS62.html">thi s old article, DOS 6.2 was available for free if you subscribed to CompuServe. Now granted that's not exactly totally free, and perhaps MS never did/pulled the download after that article was published, but if they did indeed offer it as a CompuServe download that was pretty forward thinking for 1993.

Remember when Excel used to ship with its own Windows shell, before Windows was available?

Sure. And I remember when Samna Ami did the same thing for word processors -- long before Microsoft. And even though Ami Pro was a *way* better word processor than Microsoft Word, where is it now?

Not bundled with your computer, that's where -- and that is the "innovation" that Microsoft shows, and why they beat the competition. They simply leverage one strong market position into another.

As a lot of people have pointed out, it is not true.
It reminded about the program doublespace that came together with DOS 6.0. It would look what files where not or less used and archived them.

The archived files were zipped (or something like it) and put together. It took lesser space and could double the amount of space on your harddrive.

At least that is how I remember it. Memory is kind of fuzzy right now.

More info can be found on the net. Just search google for more info. Even back the M$ was stealing stuff. Who would have known?

First of all, blocking ability to install doesn't mean jack if they still have the ability to run any application they want. Locked down the shell pretty good with poledit?(hah!)

Apparently, you've never used POLEDIT.

Taken from http://www.zisman.ca/poledit/:

[quote]
Only run allowed Windows applications--if you really want to control what users have access to, this is for you! You add (one at a time) the applications that allowable, and all others won't run... it's not clear, however, how you add an application--none are listed, by default, and there's no browse button. Besides, if an application doesn't show up in the Start Menu, and you've turned off access to the Run command, and perhaps to some of the drives (using TweakUI), is anyone really going to access other applications?
[/quote]

In other words, they can be restricted to not have the ability to click any file and run anything they want.