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The 'DOS Ain't Done 'til Lotus Won't Run' Myth
Otter writes "We've all heard the story of Microsoft's battle cry of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". Adam Barr investigates the myth, interviewing various Microsoft and Lotus old-timers (including Mitch Kapor), and finds no basis for its legitimacy or any case of 1-2-3 actually not running. Whom to blame for Lotus Notes is not discussed."
How can this be? Does that mean my whole life as a MS-bashing Slashdotter is nothing but... nothing?!? Well, I'm sure "DOS Ain't Done til Linux Won't Run"!!
On a more serious note though, the first reply in the article says it all.
Microsoft is a for-profit company, so it will do anything to make a profit. If billions of people are rushing out to buy Longhorn so that they can play Tux Racer, Microsoft will make sure "Longhorn ain't done til Tux Racer run".
It's also interesting to see from one of the comments:
Well, I submitted this to Slashdot. (And even added an Obligatory Stupid Inflammatory Remark at the end!) I have a pretty dismal track record of accepted submissions, though, and this one isn't likely to change it.
COME ON!! People are making fun of us!!!!!
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
From the article:
And there was an incident in the early pre-release days of NT where our boot sector code broke multi-boot with OS/2; in that case, despite claims of outrage from the Blue Ninja Clan, it was simply that we had never tested that configuration; once we heard about the bug, we fixed it and added it to our test mix.
This made me laugh; Windows installation has never been shy about overwriting LILO (and later GRUB), and the Linux user base has to be roughly as large as OS/2's was in its heyday. But hey, all's fair.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
... was invented by Ray Ozzie who modeled it after the PLATO system at the University of Illinois.
For a long time (ca. 1990s), it was considered superior to Microsoft Exchange, until the Internet came along (i.e. became popular) and everything changed.
Notes was actually quite a clever piece of software during its heyday. No one else could do replication at the time. The only thing that people hated about it was its price: it cost too much for what it did.
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There were quite a number in the '90s who wouldn't upgrade to Windows 3.10 or 95 because, heck, they didn't see a need.
Didn't see a need? There WASN'T a need. 3.1 moved with the speed and grace of a wounded elephant in quicksand, while DOS spun like a top. It was the new apps (and lack of support for the old) that drove users onto Windows, not any virtues of the OS.
And Agenda!! Does anyone remember Lotus Agenda (a DOS app)? The PIM of the Gods! The most amazing open-ended information manager ever created, yet never to be seen or even re-envisioned again, like some kind of super-advanced crystal-technology from Lost Atlantis! Lotus replaced it with the cartoonish Organizer for Windows, and Life Turned a Page.
Am I a neo-luddite because I prefer to work in Xterm over pointing and clicking? Do I lose Geek Points for using fluxbox instead of KDE?
I agree. I was at Lotus for quite a while starting in 1983. In the early days (1-2-3 v1 and v2, and MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x), Lotus and Microsoft were quite friendly, and we had NDA access to a lot of stuff from Microsoft, including MD-DOS releases. [I also saw early releases of Windows 1.x documentation and remember thinking how pathetic it was next to Inside Macintosh -- but that's a whole other story...]
Anyway... In the spirit of this "friendly" cooperation, I remember attending technical presentations from Microsoft about OS/2 Presentation Manager and how important it was for us to architect our applications in anticipation of OS/2 so we'd be ready when it hit the street; and feeling like we'd been had when Microsoft switched their emphasis from OS/2 to Windows 3.x, and had their applications all ready to go while Lotus was invested heavily in an OS/2 suite.
From that point forward, 1-2-3 was on the ropes vs. Excel and it seemed like every OS move by Microsoft with Windows kept us off-balance; there was also the issue that the Excel developers seemed way better informed about developing for Windows 3.x than the rest of us. There was wide speculation that Microsoft was publishing and encouraging the use of APIs that their application developers did not use. It was (and is) easily believable that there was a philosophy of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
On another, contrary, note, I also remember (later) a page 1 Wall Street Journal article about the development of Windows NT under Dave Cutler. IIRC, one of the points made in the article was that NT had a huge team of developers (50?) adding code to NT that was conditional on the application being run; i.e., "if the current application is PhotoShop, perform this operation this way" for compatibility. It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...
Actually the Luddites had a rather bad press. The original Luddites weren't fanatical anti-progress thugs, they were actually rather discriminating in what they did and didn't smash up - their beef wasn't with machinery itself, but actually with the working practices associated with the machinery, which was replacing skilled manual labour with cheaper, less-skilled labour where people were being forced to work harder, to produce more goods for less pay.
There were occasions when Luddites smashed frames in one part of a mill, but left alone identical frames in the same building - because one set of frames was owned by a boss who was driving down workers wages and conditions, and the other wasn't.
What I'm trying to say was that Luddites were just picky and choosy about how they adopted new technology, rather like the way you imagine yourself to be...
I'd be rather proud if someone called me a neo-luddite.
"Windows installation has never been shy about overwriting LILO (and later GRUB)..."
/boot partition for Linux. I may additionally write another instance of the stage one loader to the MBR for my convenience. But I'm not surprised if something else blows it away. If that happens, I set the primary partition to my Linux loader partition. That then boots fine, and I can then re-write my favored MBR.
For a rare change, this isn't Microsoft's fault. To the best of my knowledge, every "install" program for every version of DOS, Windows-as-an-OS, or OS/2 writes a new MBR (Maser Boot Record). The MBR was never, ever intended to contain an OS-specific boot loader. It contains the partition table, and the code to find the active partition and boot the PBR (Partition Boot Record). It has been that way since IBM and Microsoft created the IBM-PC hard disk MBR table format in the 1980's.
It is Linux (or rather, LILO, GRUB, and the like) that are doing something completely non-standard by installing application-specific software into the MBR. Granted, the IBM-PC platform is a collection of hacks and limitations, so doing something non-standard is often the only way to accomplish something, but that doesn't mean you can expect your non-standard approach to work for every situation.
When I install LILO or GRUB, I install it to the PBR of a primary partition, the way the PC spec says to. I usually use the same partition as my root and/or
Now, Microsoft could make things easier by updating their current (or next) installer to detect an existing MBR and offer the opportunity to leave it alone. Of course, questions like that would prolly just confuse the vast majority of their customer base. More importantly, Microsoft has shown over and over again that they're rather anti-social, so I would hardly expect them to go out of their way to support the non-standard behavior of their competition!
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