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Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson
avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."
This article has a confusing title, given that dominance of the Cairo graphics library these days.
Daniel Eran has been spamming uk.comp.sys.mac for weeks now, ignoring every polite request for him to stop. He shows no sign of engaging with the group (beyond calling us "a hateful bunch of queens"), just spams links to his blog against charter and then swans off again.
Daniel Eran. Just Say No.
Cheers,
Ian
Article rambles all over the place, seems more to be pleading for reader to look at previous articles by author rather than make its higly convoluted point. Reads like a lot of sour grapes about historical irrelevance so I assume the author is just looking for hits by trying to be inflamatory.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.
6 /s04_01.htm
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/i38
4.1.1 Systems Flags
The systems flags of the EFLAGS register control I/O, maskable interrupts, debugging, task switching, and enabling of virtual 8086 execution in a protected, multitasking environment. These flags are highlighted in Figure 4-1 .
NT (Nested Task, bit 14)
The processor uses the nested task flag to control chaining of interrupted and called tasks. NT influences the operation of the IRET instruction .
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
If an individual has a message they feel is important that they want to get out, I don't see an issue with posting a reference or two. Flooding a board is another story.
...and flooding is what's taking place. Yes, a post such as "here's a new and interesting Apple-related blog, please come and have a look" would have gone down fine. Instead we get every single article he writes for this blog being dumped as a rhetorical question into a group which specifically forbids advertising, and then he never engages in any discussion regarding it. The regulars of the group have all asked him to stop. He just totally disregards us.
Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?
Advertising revenue. He's abusing a community discussion group to take every opportunity to dump links to his advert revenue-driven blog. The group does not exist for his enrichment, as we say on there: uk.comp.sys.mac.adverts is thataway -->.
Cheers,
Ian
Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry.
Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.
1990-1995: Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo
Along with Ashton-Tate and Lotus Development, Microsoft was considered one of the Big Three software developers of the 80s. Apple courted all three to develop software for its new Macintosh.
Ashton-Tate managed to run itself out of business, and Lotus was eventually bought up by IBM in 1995, leaving Microsoft as one of the largest and most influential developers of desktop applications.
Microsoft's position as a vendor for both DOS and office applications gave it certain advantages over its rivals, particularly when Windows 95 appeared and obsolesced not just previous versions of DOS and Windows, but also competing developers' existing applications, including DOS standards WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.
Rapid advancements in technology created a wildly chaotic market, where simple announcements of future plans could trump real products. Given the prevalence of misinformation wars in the tech industry, it's no surprise that Microsoft applied its vast market power to become one of the most notorious sources of FUD and vaporware.
Innovations in Vaporware
Previous articles have considered Microsoft's vaporware attacks on QuickTime and the Newton and PenPoint OS.
While many companies in the competitive tech field announced products they were ultimately unable to deliver, Microsoft applied an innovative, two handed approach to playing the vaporware game.
Rather than just bluffing its hand like other companies, Microsoft played the game with a set of cards in one hand, while waving the illusion of another set of cards in the other hand. The fake set of cards were highly distracting because they looked like a much better hand than anyone else could possibly have.
Standing around the card table were a number of analysts who all expressed how impressed they were by the cards Microsoft waved in the air, and made regular remarks about how foolish it would be for anyone else to stay in the game. The worst part was that many of those analysts could see Microsoft's real hand, and knew the company was bluffing.
Microsoft's NT Plans Prior to Cairo
In 1991, Apple was releasing the Mac System 7 and Tim Berners-Lee was using his NeXT to build the world's first web server and browser.
PCs were still using the character based DOS in a slightly faster version than was released a decade earlier in 1981, although Windows 3.0 was beginning to provide DOS PC users with a rough approximation of Apple's graphical desktop.
After witnessing sales of Windows 3.0 take off, Microsoft began its schism with IBM over OS/2 3.0 development. Microsoft's new plan involved an entirely new operating system based on its contributions to OS/2; the new OS was referred to as Windows NT.
Unlike the existing DOS based Windows 3.0, NT aimed at being entirely new and modern in every respect, untied to DOS or to the existing x86 PC architecture.
Microsoft initially targeted NT to run on the i860, Intel's new 64-bit RISC processor that was supposed to usher in the future. The i860 was a modern design and carried none of the legacy baggage of the standard x86 based PC.
It included graphics acceleration features similar in principle to the forthcoming PowerPC Altivec and Pentium MMX; those features resulted in the i860 being used by NeXT to power its high end NeXTDimension video card.
Unfortunately, the i860 didn't work out for Microsoft. All that remained from its efforts to build a new operating system based on the processor was the i860's code name: N10, which is widely repeated to be the meaning of NT. Of course, Microsoft and IBM had also long referred to OS/2 3.0 as "NT," for new technology, so the idea behind the i860 as the source of NT's name might be historical revisionism.
No Operating System Experience
Microsoft struggled with the complex reality of building its own operating system without IBM. Up to that point, Microsoft had only been delivering tepid updates to MS-DOS, which it had licensed from a small
The Borg Cube bearing the Microsoft logo, destroying Earth, with flames reaching up from off-frame image just screams professionalism. I will take anything this site says very seriously.
Please give me back the 10 minutes reading that article took me. I am by no means a historian of the computing era, but I lived through those years reading computer magazines and programming the things, so I have no problem seeing bullshit presented as history when I encounter it. That guy is such a flaming Apple apologist, he can't even get his head around the fact that despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001) before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same. Apple nearly died waiting for its vapourware before it bought NeXT. And Microsoft got into that game late, too, and I mean really late. It was implemented in Unix and other systems in the 1970s. He forgot to mention Windows 3.1, which was one of the most important Windows releases ever, because it proved to the world that Windows could succeed. WordPerfect thought it couldn't, and died. Most sat on the fence for Windows 3.0, because while it was pretty, it was horribly unstable and lacking in essential OS features.
This has always been the way with Microsoft. They'll happily deny there's anything wrong with a product, no matter how much evidence exists that there is. The *only* thing that will move them to act is the prospect of losing market share to a better product.
Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?
Why do you think SPAM implies commercial benefit? One of the earliest spammers was an 'evanglist' - sending out generic jesus-freak messages.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Win32 contained lots of changes compared to Win16. Threads, overlapping I/O, lots of new controls, additions to GDI, long file names, pipes for IPC. It might seem like a joke, but access violations really had a greater chance of not taking the full machine down in Win95, versus Win 3.1.
And of course, a full driver model for all devices, with the Registry (yuck) to track the config. Yep, you could do anything in a VXD in 3.1, but there was no real structure to it. 32 bit disk I/O wasn't present in the original 3.1 either, so the difference is greater if we compare 3.1 versus 95, or the very last releases of 3.11 WfW versus 95.
Some of their achievements include:
- An OS with a driver framework written in a dynamic, object-oriented language (Objective-C), making it very easy to write drivers for.
- The first Rapid Application Development system.
- The first web browser was written on one of their systems.
- A very powerful and flexible web development environment.
- EOF, a transparent object-relational mapping a decade or so before Ruby-on-Rails made the idea popular.
And lots of others. In the early '90s, they worked with Sun to create a standard to sit on top of POSIX and provide a portable way of writing GUI programs. Sun eventually dropped it, but the GNU project has an implementation, and it's the standard way of developing software on OS X (the latest version of the NeXT operating system, renamed after Apple bought NeXT).I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Being a monopoly is NOT illegal. It is leveraging the monopoly in an anti-competitive manner that is illegal.
Items 1, 2 and 4 on your list are just good business sense. Monopoly or not.
But "3. Working with third parties to offer incentives to provide your product solely." is illegal. If you leave off the word "solely" its ok, but when your "incentives" come off like strong-arm bullying, and the "solely" provision is the primary objective, that is anti-competitive. That is also what Microsoft was (repeatedly) found guilty of.
And from what I've seen and heard of Vista, application of the other three items is questionable.