Slashdot Mirror
Linux in a World Where Windows 3.0 Never Happened
covertbadger writes "Larry Osterman said farewell yesterday to David Weise, the developer he credits with getting applications to run in protected mode on Windows 3.0, which led directly to Microsoft choosing to push Windows instead of OS/2. Today he speculates on what the IT world would be like if Weise had never completed this work. Windows 95 would never have existed, OS/2 would be the de facto standard, and IBM would never have put weight behind Linux because it had its own operating system to push."
IBM evil (again) and no Linux? I think you're going to blow a lot of /.'s minds.
And we would still be on OS 8 right now, waiting until 2006 for OS 9.
So all those college-age kids with their DOS computers would still be using DOS.
Microsoft would have ruled the roost.
Nothing is different than it is now.
Rube Goldberg would have been proud of that article.
- Tony
Clearly, in this scenario,
over time OpenVMS would become the defacto standard
on all macs, and BSD would still be dead, of course.
Where Old Biff steals the DeLorean and gives the Sports Almanac to young Biff? Then Doc and Marty come back to a hellish timeline where Biff is a billionaire.
:)
I think something like that happened, where old Bill goes back in time and gives young Bill some tips on how to get lucky in the IT world, plus some source code for Windows 3.0. And we're living in the nightmarish timeline that was created.
Only Doc and Marty can save us now. Or Linux. Whichever does it first
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Actually, just having a degree doesn't make you an engineer. Passing your EIT is the first step to that path. "MSCE" is a disgusting use of the word engineer to anybody who is a real engineer.
Maybe they'd call it Gnome, or something like that.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
maybe microsoft would have adopted linux, maybe we'd have to come up with clever icons for ibm, and be talking about the big blue screen of death. microsoft's control lay ints api's and doc formats. without that control, eventually, they'd have to split from ibm.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Therefore, due to the increased number of blue radiation given off by windows machines, there has been an exponential increase in short wavelength, high energy electromagnetic radiation - which of course has been linked to skin cancer.
I thought Engineer was a term applied to people who ran trains, not something to be passed around like a slide rule or a mechanical pencil.
Damn you pointyheaded nerds for stealing our label! =)
>When David got in the next day (at around 8AM), >he saw that his machine had crashed, so he knew >that Steve had come by and seen it. Golly, the world's first ever UAE (what GPFs were called when Windows was young and people didn't even dare to dream of BSODs) and Steve got to see it personally. I hope he gets to personally see all the results from me hitting "Send Error Report" half a dozen times a day. Ian
Then this would beget violent OS Wars, in which many many secondary heroes, like Ant Man, Scarlet Witch, Iron Man and Bruce Perens would be annihilated by enemies unknown.
In the end, only Captain America, Wolverine, Spider-Man and Dr. Strange would survive, only to discover their true enemy: a parallel universe Bill Gates, bringing with him Ultra Dimensional Windows Mega Super XP Hyperforce Go 5.4 with him.
Mwahahahahaha!
Vincent J. Murphy
Spandex Justice
And I've been thanking Linus Torvalds for all of these years???
Dave Weise... You 'da man!!!
Which OS would evil Spock use?
MOS/2 - Moustache OS/2, of course.
If 'buts' and 'ors' were filthy whores...I'm still working on this one.
What the space ship had never crashed in Rosewell and we never reversed engineered all this nifty technology.
What if Spider-Man saved Gwen Stacy?
What if Spider-Man never married Mary Jane?
What if the all new X-Men died on their first mission?
What if the X-Men lost Inferno?
What if Commodore hadn't killed the Amiga market?
Aww, sounds like somebody wasted a load of time and money on a fancy EIT certification! How cute. I work among hundred of software and hardware engineers, and I've never met anyone who cared about EIT. But by all means, toot your own horn :)
What it all these nerds had girlfriends? /. would not have existed!
Since Slashdot rejected my submission, enjoy: http://www.divisiontwo.com/articles/MacMini2.html
Wow, I was about to mod this whole thread "Offtopic," but you managed to draw a connection between Third Reich historical speculation and Linus Torvalds. Sir, I salute you!
If Windows 3.0 never happened, we wouldn't have funny Flash animations like this:
http://tinyurl.com/44te2
Keep your eyes to the sky.
"proprietary Gnu license"
Well-played, sir, well-played. I admire the constructor of a good troll, and it's so rare to actually see one these days.