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Bill Gates Talk From 1989 Surfaces
70sstar writes "A 1-1/2 hour recording of Bill Gates addressing a crowd of university students in 1989 was recently found and digitized, and has been circulating in some IRC channels for the past few weeks. The speech has found a permanent home on the web page of the University of Waterloo CS Club, where the talk is reported to have taken place. Gates covers the past, present, and future of computing as of 1989. While the former two might be of interest to tech historians, the real fascination is Gates's prediction of computing yet to come. Like the now-legendary '640k' remark, some of his comments are almost laughably off-target ('OS/2 is the way of the future!'). And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development. All in all, a fascinating talk from one of the most powerful speakers in CS and IT."
You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2, and the only reason they diverged is because of a fight between IBM and MS?
Microsofts part of O/S 2 became windows NT though, surely? Thus making his comment correct.
To the computer enthusiasts of the time, it would have been even more laughable had Bill Gates said "in the next two decades, Microsoft software will completely destroy OS/2, will render Apple a shell of its former self by stealing all its innovations, and will demand 1 GB of RAM." So even if he had his world domination plans set in 1989, he couldn't exactly let the world know without being laughed at.
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
The CSC has said if there are any problems with the servers, they are available at 519 888 4567 x33870 or the sysadmin's cell phone at 519 721 1714.
Don't interfere with Bill-Bashing!
Is there a transcript anywhere? Or at least a summary? I don't have the time to listen to an hour and a half mp3.
I really do only need 640k. As long as I can play Scramble on my Vic 20 I'll be happy for life.
Task Mangler
Like the now-legendary '640k' remark
A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark", because he never said it.
Nobody can ever cite a source for this alleged quote, and in the absence of such a source, you have to take his word for it. It's impossible to prove a negative; that's how urban legends start in the first place.
(If he did say it, don't you think someone would have figured out the where and when?)
Most geeks' dress sense hasn't changed much since 1989 ;)
Errr, and that would be what?
Oh yeah, now I remember.
That would be the 'remark' that was never made.
640K debunkings of this urban rumor should be enough for anyone.
What kind of business are you in?
We predict the future. The best way to predict the future... is to invent it.
-X-Files
...for Duke Nukem Forever.
1-1/2 hour = 30 minutes
Oh wait...
I think that's the name of his book he published back in the early 90s. Pretty much he predicted the past decade perfectly. I don't know if predicted is the right word since it's his products that he was saying would come out in the next ten years. I guess he's just a really bright guy with a strong ability to estimate the market and development time (Zune not withstanding). He was only off on hardware. He over estimated somethings (credit card sized pocket PCs as powerful as a tower) and underestimated (sheer volume of online gaming)
You have to admit that it's easier to predict the future when you're the one making it... :]
That said, the places where he was wrong are more interesting to me. I wonder what Microsoft's business plan was had IBM taken over with OS/2 instead of them?
I was a fledgling member of the CSC at Waterloo, and I recognize the members in the photos they showed. I also remember attending this talk with a front row seat. I was sort of unimpressed because he didn't discuss anything that was new or that I didn't already know about.
Must be one of the perks of becoming the head of a monopoly powerful enough to dictate an entire market. He got to fulfill his own prophecies, whether they were good ideas or not.
.... you managed to look less geeky than whole group.
It says a lot about /. these days. During the days of Olsen, he started a re-write of VMS. It had such luminaries as Cutler and Bell on the team. When the company was bleeding, Olsen killed off this project and others. When Gates got wind of this, he approached Cutler (and others such as Grey and Bell), and convinced him to join him. One of the bigger issues was that he promised the core to the VMS folks. He would control the API and above. They would control the core.
ANd if that was not enough, back in 94, I even saw the code for NT (I worked at HP and a neighboring group were asked to port it to the pa-risc. ). I can tell you firsthand that it had NOTHING to do with OS2. If you looked at it, you knew it was dec derivitive. Even the comments said it all.
So how did you get modded up?
Nice to know that CS geeks can't spell 'seamless.'
.WAV available? This is a 20-something geek talking, not the London Symphony Orchestra.
In all seriousness, it sounds interesting, but I don't have 90 minutes to listen to someone talk. Anyone know if transcriptions are being worked on?
And why would they even bother to make a
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I bought a system preloaded with eComStation. I paid no Microsoft tax. All you have to do is support THE vendors of good quality products. Like buying high quality Snapper lawn movers instead the disposable Wal-Mart ones. Even quality suppliers can decide that a retailer is dragging them down.
(The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/102/open_snap
You can avoid the Microsoft tax too.
eComStation user group - http://www.os2voice.org/
eComStation - http://www.ecomstation.com/
eComStation preloaded
http://www.curtissystemssoftware.com/preloads.htm
From Chip Magazin 1/1990 (my re-translation from German):
"I think about Handwriting recognition. In two or three years, we may have computers without keyboards. In five or six years this will change, and voice recognition will reduce the importance of graphics."
"In five or six years, DOS [sales] will be overtaken by OS/2."
The he said he is personally using "a Mac II, a Compaq and a IBM" computer, as well as a "NEC-Ultralite".
" And yet, by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development."
Yeah? Gee, if he was once such a savant, what happened between then and his 1995 book "The Road Ahead" where he totally fails to "predict" the Internet and World Wide Web when it had already happened?
Sorry, but reciting some corrollary to Moore's Law does not count as accurate prophesy, 'chilling' or otherwise. It's just conventional wisdom
Cutler hated OS/2 with white hot, foaming at the mouth hatred that only Cutler is capable of. He even tried pretty hard to fight Gates' requirement that NT runs OS/2 as a subsystem (alongside POSIX and Windows).
you, sir, are hardcore
What legendary rock-n-roll song was used at the gala release celebration for OS/2? Oh, that's right, there was no celebration. OS/2's number one reason for failing was that IBM didn't make much of an effort to make it a success.
Usually that phrase would apply to a company that once had a major percentage of a market and holds it no longer. The Mac never had a big piece of the market and I'll bet that the Apple II had a much larger market share than the Mac has ever enjoyed.
The more important point is that Gates couldn't have significantly increased the number beyond 640K even if he wanted to do to the limitations of the processor and the need for address space to be reserved for other purposes. So anyone who mentions the "quote" to imply that Gates was an idiot for choosing the 640K limit is either ignorant or is deliberately attempting to mislead.
This limit is really more the responsiblity of Intel's for designing the world's ugliest processor architecture (now and forever) and IBM for choosing it.
The thing most people don't realize is that even the 1996 flavor of OS/2 Warp 4 is capable of running modern software like Firefox and OpenOffice, and it does so rather well on fairly limited hardware.
Windows has a hard time doing that these days, and Linux is travelling in that direction (at least in terms of the mainstream distros, which seem to have abandoned legacy hardware support for eye candy).
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
'OS/2 is the way of the future!'
He never really wanted to say that -- he felt like Windows was the way to go, but, his deal with IBM required him to imply that OS/2 was the overal better choice for the long term and for businesses, but that Windows was good for the moment for the average user.
Funny you should bring up the Road Ahead. Its interesting to compare the differences between the first and second editions of that book. The Internet "exists" in the second version.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
The 64 bit version of the OS currently max's out at a few terabytes.
Here, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/294418 is an overview of the address space and memory resources.
The chipsets for workstations and servers max out at 64 GB.
How long is it going to be before those chip sets support terabytes? I don't know, but it ain't happening soon.
Eventually the OS limit will go up, but can we say that it really matters right now?
Yup, the 64 bit OS only works on 64 bit hardware, but wha' da' want? Egg in your beer?
that large organizations will ever be able to right good software". This is from a year before I started CS as a major, as I write this in 2007, Microsoft is the largest software production bureaucracy, dwarfing even the mildot production facilities. Progress in automation over the last 10 years has been totally hardware driven. The state of software development is... so bad that if we have really reached the limit of Moore's law, computer operating systems in a 100 years will be indistinguishable from their current incarnations.
If you are thinking about entering a computer related field, I encourage you to get a degree in electrical engineering or some system related discipline - that will be much more likely to have a positive impact on the future of automation that going into software.
As is typical, I have lost my login to this site, when I upgraded my harddrive, so i am done here, good luck to you, if you majored in computer science you are gonna need it.
please type the word in this image: I have about 10 times now
He's the richest dude in the world and his OS is on almost every PC in the world, but let's laugh that he predicted something wrong in 1989! Hahaha, that totally evens things out.
Gee, I feel better for me now.
Is anyone else annoyed by his pronunciation of the word "processor"? It's more like "prosser", the way he says it. I wonder how he says the word "nuclear"...
I don't think so.
Life is a mystery. There is no point having a mystery if you are not curious.
Everyone cares about these fabulous corrections and technicalities. Keep it coming, it's really bitchin'.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
I'm top-posting this instead of replying to individual posts because there are just so many posts with one conspiracy theory or another. Microsoft tricked IBM into taking OS/2, Microsoft made Office 95 break OS/2, etc. etc.
I worked at Microsoft from 1990 to 1996, and during part of that time I worked on Microsoft Word. And I'm here to tell you: Microsoft really believed in OS/2, back in the day. They really thought it would be the future.
In 1990, I got an OS/2 machine on my desk, as did the other folks around me, because we all knew OS/2 was the future. The MS library had OS/2 machines for looking up books (and as far as I remember, the MS library had only OS/2 machines). And all the major MS apps were shipped for OS/2: Word, Excel, etc. (But they were also shipped for Windows. MS covered all the bets.)
Now, I was only a lowly developer, not a strategy architect, and I never ate lunch with Bill Gates, so it's possible there was some amazing subterfuge going on without me knowing. But I don't believe it.
Here is my summary of what happened, based on what I saw then, and on various articles I read in PC Week, Infoworld, etc.
Microsoft started developing Windows back in the 80's. The early Windows was a laughingstock in the industry: it was a primitive toy. Apple seriously jump-started their GUI efforts by building a closed platform and tailoring their GUI specifically for that platform; Microsoft was hobbled by the suckiness of the 8088 and awful graphics adapters like the CGA card. MS actually tried to get Windows to run on that sort of pathetic hardware. Windows 1.0 did run but no one wanted it.
MS doesn't give up easily. They kept plugging away at Windows, and it started to suck less, as the machines got more powerful. Also, IBM and Microsoft decided to cooperate on a new OS: OS/2.
Microsoft wanted to make OS/2 as compatible as possible with Windows, to make it easy to port applications. IBM wanted to make OS/2 "better" than Windows. (My memory is dim here, I don't remember specifically why it was better to be incompatible with Windows. Compatible with some graphics API that IBM already had?) So now, the plan was to sell Windows only until OS/2 conquered the world. But the Windows guys kept plugging away on Windows, even as the OS/2 guys did their thing.
Around the time I was hired, Microsoft and IBM were telling customers that basically if you have lame hardware, go ahead and run Windows on it, but if you have good hardware, you want OS/2 because that is the future. (IIRC the decision point was: if you have less than two megabytes of RAM, run Windows.)
Then, in 1990, Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0... and everyone, including Microsoft, was stunned by how well it sold. It flew off the shelves. Egghead (at the time, a successful brick-and-mortar chain of computer stores) sent trucks with ice cream over to Microsoft; along with everyone else, I had a free ice cream bar to celebrate the success of Windows 3.0.
The key feature was actually that it ran DOS apps very well. You could have multiple DOS shells open at the same time, and it would multitask them well (pre-emptive multitasking, even though Windows itself used round-robin multitasking for Windows apps at the time!). You could even have a DOS app crash, and your other DOS apps would keep running just fine. Compare with the "compatibility box" in OS/2, which was usually called the "Chernobyl Box" by geeks because a misbehaving DOS app could take down your whole machine. The Chernobyl Box could only run a single DOS app at a time.
Why? Why was Windows 3.0 better than OS/2? Because at the time OS/2 was written only to support the 286, and even if you ran it on a 386 it would just run in 286 mode. Windows 3.0 would only do the cool DOS app multitasking if you ran it on a 386. My understanding is that IBM promised, early on, that OS/2 would run great on a 286; and IBM felt it was seriously important to keep that promise. With hindsight, I
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
This isn't really true. The 1996 version of OS/2 didn't even support unicode. Luckily you can apply free fixpaks and TCPIP updates to bring it to a level where it does run Firefox (or in my case Seamonkey) and Openoffice.
So really what you should say is that the 96 version of OS/2 (and the '94 version) with free fixes applied will run most modern software.
At that the '96 version won't even recognize a modern hard drive until you update the ibms506 driver. Of course once updated it will work with all IDE systems including the newest SATA drives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Here's a picture from the interview:
0 .png
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/5850/gates90ot
The guy made some lucky/good decisions at the right time. It could have been anyone with half a clue about computers, but it was him.
;-)
Credit is due for his business skills he used to run with the break he got and make it the enormous success it is.
Of course, opportunity and a slice of luck crosses most peoples path now and then, he was smart enough to recognise it and had enough business savvy to not blow it.
Bottomline... Genius, prophet, guru programmer... NAH! Lucky Bastard! Yep
> A better description would have been the "mythical '640k' remark",
> because he never said it.
Quite so. The actual remark was made by Steve Jobs to Steve Wozniak regarding building a card to expand the Apple II's memory from the max possible on the motherboard of 48K to a full 64K (the "language card"). Jobs' statement "Who would ever want more than 48K?" has been misattributed and misquoted for years, as have many statements made by some that sound so much better coming from someone else. The answer was, almost everybody. When the IIe came out it had 64K on the board and could accept a second 64K card. The IIc came with two full 64K banks installed.
Jobs was frequently at odds with Wozniak over technical issues. Jobs wanted no more than 2 slots in the Apple II. Woz wanted 8 and put them in. Jobs argued against color. Woz put it in, first in blocky lo-res, then in an awesome hack that resulted in 16 color (including two blacks and two whites) hi-res. Other examples exist, but these two illustrate Jobs' penchant for one-upsmanship: When he built the first Mac, it had no color and no slots.
Jobs' quote was in many MOTD files during the late 70's and early 80's, until the misattributed Gates quote started replacing it.
One point Jobs didn't argue against was the inclusion of a programming language in ROM. He contracted out the creation of Applesoft in ROM. The result can be seen on the Apple II ROMs that say "Copyright 1981, Microsoft".
IIRC, the original quote was the subject of a trivia contest question in Softalk magazine.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
True. And it was IBM, and it really was called "OS/6." Around 1976 IBM came out with a series of console word processors using early ink jet technology. There were variations among the models, and they used 8" floppies. Very small video screens that could not display an entire line, with embedded commands.
They were very successful at the time, implementing the Selectric keyboard, which remains one of the best electric keyboards of all time. By the mid 80's however, they were dimming, and of course overtaken by PC's and early laserjets.
http://www.core77.com/corehome/story.kermit.jpg
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Bearing in mind that M$ software, services and support were far cheaper and of a much higher quality in those days. The manuals were excellent, tutorial disks were provided free etc. then the good people left and the ass wipe remained and basically M$ now reflects the morals, integrity and qualities of a typical failed jockstrap insurance salesman.
Those same qualities will of course bring about the fall of company from being a leader to a historical note in the evolution of computer technology.
I believe this http://www.absoft.com/Products/Compilers/C_C++/XLWhy wouldn't programmers use? IBM sells it like a freaking Z series mainframe compiler giving the job to a mainframe vendor. It is $500. Imagine the support you would get from IBM engineers when you complain about a games OpenGL code or surround sound not working right.
Lets speak about Java. If you get a free developer account from Apple you will understand the potential future problem of Java on PPC, I respect to NDA as an end user. IBM is famous for making massive performance and compatible Java virtual machines. I remember using IBM JVM on Windows for Opera and getting amazed. How hard it is to put an alternative Java VM for OSX/PPC? What happened to that easily installed, professionally written Windows JVM?
So, PowerPC with ages ahead of architecture abandoned by Apple and Intel/X86 became the monopoly on end user Desktop.
I flamed Intel decision a lot, I still don't like it but it is the reality. You can't do end user business with IBM.
(quad PPC970 here)
is right twice a day; Doesn't mean it's working.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
It's this kind of lack of foresight that made the whole x86 architectue crappy.
The question is not only what is realistic to do now and what would be not be possible to buy/build.
The question is, if this architecture hangs around for the next couple of decade what will you be happy to have taken account for ? What could be useful for future generations of machines ?
The 68k has been designed on purpose to have a clean architecture, that could easily evolve in future machine without needing hacks. (32 bits internal, even if first versions had 16bit bus. Flat memory addressing, etc.)
The x86 has been a long series of very short-sighted choice (because nobody tougth it could last) - like the "640k ought to be enough for everyone" (it was back then, it wasn't any more a couple of years later) or the ackward instruction set - and subsequent hacks to circumvent the limitations (the whole segmentation logic is a pain in the ass). Not to say about all legacy modes that current chips still drag around (your Core 2 is still binary compatible with 8088 code and assembly compatible with 8080 code). Intel has tried to restart something completly new and supposedly better with the Itanium, but it failed, mainly because of all this legacy. AMD was somewhat more successful with AMD64 (because it both has a nice new clean x86-64 extension and support for all the ackwrd legacy).
It's only sad that the x86 was chosen for the IBM PC, a computer whose architecture was subsequently opened and copied by numerous clones that IBM chose to tolerate, which made this architecture popular and made it evolve very quickly.
Whereas the 68k regularly ended up in very nice machines (Amiga, Macintosh, etc.) but whose parent company never accepted to open. And thus remained less popular (because of higher price and lower development by 3rd parties).
At least the 68k had much more success in video games (consoles and arcades. MegaDrive and NeoGeo if i have to only site two).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The basic CD should be a live CD allowing you to try out some of the basic features, such as openoffice and firefox without actually installing anything on your system. Once it is booted up, the actual installation process is done by clicking on the icon on the desktop, and allows you to graphically select your partition set up. Duel booting with your current OS is also pretty easy.
Imagine you have the only Mercedes-Benz dealership, every morning customers are lined up, check-books ready. Year after year. You are rich beyond imagination.
Then one day this fellow shows up with a Vespa and says, "You should sell these Vespa scooters too.."
What do you do..?
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
That's why there's an extension called PAE that enables the virtual memory address space to be extended to 36bits. And thus to support up to 16GB of address space, even if each segment was still limited to 4G memory pointers. (Just like, back then, the 286 supported 16MB address space, even if each segment was 16bit / 64k limited).
Linux supports it, Windows doesn't. It's pure Microsoft OS limitations.
And what people don't realise is, that you actually need it, even if you don't have more than 4GB.
For the virtual memory scheme to work well, you need to have an address space which is orders of magnitude higher than the actual memory (both physical and virtual) used.
It worked well when the 32bits architecture was introduced : a 386 could represent 32bits -> 4GB memory, but only mapped a dozen of megabytes on this space.
Now we reach limits of this. Which leads to fragmented memory allocation (you can't allocate xGB of memory for an application. Even if there's enough free memory, the virtual memory engine can't allocate a big enough contiguous address space to map that free memory on it) or unused memory block (the memory engine reserves 3GB of space for the softwares and 1GB for the system. If the system uses less memory, the unused memory can't get maped to another address).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
90 minutes ? That takes an hour to listen if you're slow, 30 minutes if you're in a hurry.
~40 minutes about optimum. Ofcourse if it was a video instead and it was closes captioned/subtitled (english or native), one could easily watch it in under 20 minutes.
All this ofcourse depends somewhat on the quality of your time stretching soft/hardware.
I'm sure all this hassle will really make gimp rock. i mean, if you can get away with the free nv drivers, you clearly aren't doing 3D, which suggests 2D (you referenced your interest in graphics above, right?), which suggests gimp, which even under reeeeediculous load, we're talking dozens of large raw files from your mid-range camera... how can you even pretend to need more than the 3 gigs?
;)
i've got a better idea- sober up, drop the gnu garbage and come back to the land of plenty... good strong drivers, photoshops and all the office you can eat. life sure is good here in reality
I have lived my life in understanding that unix never has been actually in any kind about security (As we understand and define it today). The fact that unix went multiuser early enough to be able to incorporate some basic necessity stuff to ensure that developing team is not bothered too loudly by users AND some 20+ year advantage over other operating systems on the market that have allowed to do one iteration or the other (and of course academic research), may allow one to perceive that unix is secure, but let's be honest - there never ever, up to quite recently (last decade or so), has been any actual effort to think about it or actually to develop unix so that it is Secure.
It works perfectly well, too. Even with 32 bit apps. I use it everyday.
Having to tweak a flag in file for which there isn't even a direct interface in the menu (not like Regedit) isn't exactly what I would call "out of the box". (Whereas, in linux, the installer is in charge of choosing the right kernel, without any interaction required from the user... unless the user choose on purpose to configure something else and switch to another kernel, as usual with Linux principle of choice).
Also, Windows only activates the support for PAE. Then it's up to the application to have AWE implemented to be able to take advantage of the wider address space. Only some memory intensive database application do it. It's not as if any application could be mapped to higher virtual addresses.
Calling windows "PAE supporting" is just calling DOS a full blown 32 bits OS just because a couple of games can use a DOS extender (CWSDPMI, DOS4GW, P/MODE, etc.).
Meanwhile, if 64G support is activated in Linux, any APP can take advantage of it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"most" not "all". as the parent said, there are special situations that can ask for huge amounts of ram. Multimedia like video or big databases are examples.
(Heck, even my 4 years old Athlon 64 has 3 sockets with 1 GB each, more than what non-server XP can handle).
They *are* unreasonable. Because :
- There are user that may need it. And there is widespread abundance of hardware that maxes Windows XP's 2GB/2GB memory address scheme.
- The additional address space is handled by the memory manager. Application shouldn't have to deal with that. (it's how it works in Linux case. But saddly it's the other way around in the PAE supporting Windowses - back to the old time of DOS-extenders !) It's completely arbitrary to restrict high memory addresses to only some variants of windows.
- and the most important part that all the poeple saying "64 bit is overkill" can't understand :
for good working of the virtual memory system, the total virtual space *must be order of magnitude higher* than the available memory (both physical and swap). Other wise you may run in the weird situation where an application (video, database, whatever) asks for 1GB RAM, there's available memory on the RAM sticks, but windows can't find a contiguous address range on which to map that memory and the allocation fails even if there's free memory.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Spot on. In addition, if Linus or some such had made a couple of conventional wisdom statements that stood up a decade down the line, it would be "brilliantly" or "insightfully"; since it's BG, it's "chillingly".
And the alternative is to break things every release? (a la Apple)
Sorry bud.
I assume your statement comes from a lack of knowledge.
The 'crappy' architecture of the 8086 was a direct result of making it compatible with the 8080 and the CP/M code that runs on it. CP/M was the leading operating system at the time. Converting CP/M to DOS applications took - if I remember correctly - only 1 byte to be changed in the executable.
IBM understood perfectly that the availability of software would make or break the IBM PC. For many vendors entering the PC market was easy as their software didn't take that many changes. Which is why PC sales soared and the Apple Mac became a niche market as their was not a lot of software available. As a result, we're stuck with the legacy structure of the 8080. Lack of foresight? Maybe, but IBM's goal was to make a machine that sells, not a machine that has a beautiful architecture.
I loved the 68000 - programming it was clean, and almost C-like, as compared to the bit f*ck hacking that you need to do on a 8086. Similar, the Amiga was a fun machine with -it its days- superior hardware and architecture compared to the PC. But it never got a decent market share.
Too bad IBM didn't choose the 68000? But then again, if the IBM PC project had failed because of incompatibility with existing hardware, we still might have been stuck with CP/M now, or be in a PC market with 25 different operating systems. The monoculture of IBM/Microsoft *did* allow for an explosive growth in the PC market which would undoubtely be a lot smaller without it.
>by and large, he had accurately, chillingly, prophesied an entire decade or two of software and hardware development.
It was a self fulfilling prophecy. As the head of microsoft he was in a position to make things happen the way
he wanted them to. He's no prophet.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Original Geek that is. One of the few.
One of the extremely few smart enough to get rich doing it.
Of that very small bunch, he did it the best.
Get over it, Bill is geekier and smarter than you.
Pwned.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
64GB should be enough for anyone....
:), I'll predict that AMD Opteron systems will include support for larger than 64GB memory first. With up to 64 CPU cores conceivable on their currently supported 8-way systems with the soon to be released Barcelona cores. 1GB of real RAM per core just is way too little.
Ok, with that out of the way
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
I just downloaded the mp3 onto my iPod and put the headphones on to listen. For a second I actually thought it was Kermit the frog talking. I'm not sure I can listen to all this.
Or maybe it's Robin, Kermit's nephew? Very weird.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
I'd sooner wear a corset and high heels than a suit and tie any day - they may be just as uncomfortable but at least they look stylish :-)
Xenu loves you!
Demonstrated motivation has an impact on whether the word "chillingly" is used. It has nothing to do with technical merit, it refers to someone we would rather not be so smart and insightful demonstrating those traits. The damage done to the computer industry by Microsoft was considerable, if you think about how things like standards were corrupted.
Windows 3.0 was, at the time, prettier than OS/2, friendlier than OS/2, nimbler than OS/2, ran on small configurations than OS/2, was more compatible than OS/2... and shipped with about a dozen nice little applets like Windows Write that OS/2 didn't ship with. ToolBook, too, if I remember correctly.
The applets, are for me, the proof. If Microsoft believed OS/2 was the future, why couldn't it spare a few developers to put some of the trimmings on it that would make it appeal to non-corporate users?
Microsoft devoted what must have been significant resources to making Windows 3.0 more appealing than OS/2. Why should it have been "stunned" when it sold better than OS/2?
Maybe the parts of the company that were working on OS/2 believed it was the future, when the higher-ups had really placed their bets somewhere else. Things like that happen in big companies.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Aaaaaaaw!! I liked OS/2 2.2! With neko the cat and much more stability than windoze on my system at least. I still don't regret the £100 or so i paid for it. Sigh. Them were't days.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
I don't really understand what you mean by "Windows has a hard time doing that these days" is "that" supposed to be "running modern software like Firefox and OpenOffice"? If so what do you mean it has a "hard time doing" this very common task? Do you mean windows 3.1 has a hard time doing it? Because that I would believe...the idea that Windows XP is so technologically primitive that it cannot even run the software that was designed for it--to me seems absurd.
http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
> some of his comments are almost laughably off-target ('OS/2 is the way of the future!').
And by "laughably off-target", you of course mean "astoundingly on-target". He wasn't out from under the wing of IBM at the time. That IBM might shrug him off and "do the OS themselves" was not an unassailably improbable concept. So continue sucking up to IBM until, like the proverbial frog in a pot of water, it doesn't recognize the water has gotten too warm.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm pretty sure that's wrong.
As I understand it, Windows XP Pro (32-bit) can actually address more than 4 GB of RAM, provided you use PAE. I know Windows Server can certainly address 4 GB of RAM and more.
I suspect your information is based on a misunderstanding of the user/kernel memory split. The NT memory manager splits the virtual address space into a kernel portion and a user portion. The kernel portion is the same for every process; the userland portion is unique to every process. All the kernel stuff (code, kernel data tables, buffers, cache, etc.) go in the kernel portion.
By default, the split is 50/50, with 2 GB for the kernel and 2 GB for userland. There is a BOOT.INI switch,
More information:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/291988
http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2004/08
It may be worth noting that the Linux kernel does not work this way, so the issue does not exist on Linux.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Thanks,
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm just adding this comment aimed to a few of you who already know about my being the originator of Imitation Energy and the engines I made in 2003 & 2005 (car engine runs on compressed air + steam using gravity-inertia for recycled air compression aka "outside energy source" and the back-to-back waterwheel system uses a "dry stream" of metal balls). Some of you may be thinking that since my engines have not "taken off" like Bill Gates took off with computing, that somehow my engines must not be so great.
The Bill Gates-Microsoft Success Story has made it possible for the entire world to "speak" one language, the language of computers. This one language has been the enabling power for the merchants that "sit on many waters in bed with Great Babylon" to become unified on a multinational ("many waters") scale as foretold in the Bible, Chapters 17 & 18. Another term for this happening we now call "globalization". Merchants all over realized this computing was their path to the golden goose. I'm not here saying Bill Gates is evil or anything that grandiose or outrageous, just that Gates was a tool and good tools cost money, so he had to become rich from the Merchants (Employers/Corporations). Nor is it Bill Gates fault that the military and NASA pay him big bucks, enough that what he makes off consumers is doubled. He gets it from our taxes supporting the military that buys his products plus what we pay directly in stores. He's more or less double dipping us shaking us down twice. I don't fault him for that; it's just business. Inevitably his work made it possible for a tremendous amount of outsourcing where corporations are able to send their work into other countries becides America.
By empowering the Corporate Merchant (Employers) sector to gain so much international capability, he rode the money wave that has essentially devalued all of us. You've probably noticed how many people opposed NAFTA but we got it anyway eh? Now today you see how many Americans oppose the illegal migration stampede from Mexico but it continues anyway? So does outsourcing. All this means the Corporations are "sitting on many waters" and pulling the strings over the governments, including the United States becoming servitude to them. Instead of paying U.S. taxes they take their business -and Bill Gates products- anywhere they want. But, I'm not writing this to complain. Gates has been integral to the fulfillment of Bible Prophecy but if not him someone else would have taken his place.
But now let's address the flip side; my engines. Why aren't fuelless engines being snapped up faster than a Gates hotcake factory? Think about it. Fuelless engines running on recycled free H2O & recycled air would make us all free of energy bills for gasoline & diesel forever, in other words, ENERGY INDEPENDENCE FROM O.P.E.C., ENERGY FREEDOM FROM OVERSEAS MERCHANTS, FREEDOM FROM HUGO CHAVEZ TYPES. hahahaha So no matter how much you guys or I might want to complain about $3 a gallon, $4 a gallon or more for car fuels, {or NAFTA, or outsourcing, or anything economic for that matter}, the Merchants will fight my engines because they make us Free of them, free of their international puppet strings, self-sustaining-free of a need for globalization. My Millenial Dawn engine makes electricity because there's no recoil, the ball's combined recoilless speed away from each other at the same time exceeding the Speed of Light. But you will never get either of my engines -or anyone else's that frees us from all these energy bills even if they resurrected Nicolai Tesla- because it eliminates the criss-crossed globalization spider web the Merchant-Employer-Corporations now have us locked into & financially tortured just as tight as any pu
Industrial Age 2 + How-to Stop Malignant Cancers.
Hmmm, good link, thanks. Seriously, that's something I was not aware of, and I will likely encounter that limit sooner rather than later.
:)
But at least one of us is confused (certainly me, maybe both of us).
In your post, you stated, "XP SP2 introduced a change such that only the bottom 32 bits of physical memory will ever be used, even if that means wasting memory." MSKB 929605, which you kindly linked to, states, "32-bit versions of Windows Vista limit the total available memory to 3.12 GB.". 3.12 GB is less than 32 bits worth of address space (4 GB), but more than 31 bits (2 GB). So it's not a 64-bit vs 32-bit thing. It's not even a 32-bit vs 31-bit thing. It's a something-else thing. Interesting. Stupid, but interesting.
Also, my understanding is that 32-bit Windows never uses anything more than a 32-bit virtual address space. Thus, 32-bit drivers will never see a 64-bit address. According to the article, it would appear many drivers cannot even handle a 32-bit address space.
Cheers,
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
True. A public FixPak was required to get Mozilla to work back around 2001/2002 or so, and I assume that same FixPak is needed to get Firefox to work. FWIW, though, I've made no TCP/IP updates to my own Warp 4 system, and my copy of Firefox 1.5.11 works just fine on that system. Just base FP15.
Also, I use SCSI drives, so I've not had the large-disk issues that plagued Warp 4 in its early days and I've never needed the newer IDE drivers. FWIW.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Windows 2000 is barely capable of running Firefox on a PPro/200 with 64MB, though it still does so well enough for basic surfing, but OS/2 is relatively fast when running Firefox on the same hardware.
I don't know that Windows XP or Vista (the current incarnations) will even boot on a 64MB PPro, much less load and run Firefox at an acceptable speed.
Linux distros are also able to run Firefox on that hardware, but some of the larger desktops which are becoming the community darlings are quite slow by themselves, making Firefox much less useful on the same limited hardware than it would otherwise be. That's why I tend to use DSL or Puppy in place of PCLinuxOS, Ubuntu, or some of the other large (memory-heavy) distros.
Does that make my comments easier to parse? The phrase "limited hardware" was intended to define the context of my comments; sorry for not make that more obvious.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Listen to yourselves, you nerds arguing about OS/2... OH Microsoft wouldn't exist without IBM!... blah blah blah... Did you even listen to his entire presentation?
It is amazing how much Bill could predict. You also probably missed everything he said about being actively involved in shaping the PC market, from hardware on up to software. Microsoft was involved in MAC software, fer crissakes. Dozens of companies licensed and used their BASIC system. The list goes on and on... But nope. To you nerds, it all boils down to "IBM were teh st00pid". Yeah ok.
I remember attending Nick Neogroponte's 1995 book tour talk on his book Being Digital, a collection of Wired Magazine columns he wrote. Nick was the founder of the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Wired magazine which was about internet topics. But his book and magazine bareley mentions the world wide web, Mosaic and Netscape browsers, and the Netscape juggarnaut IPO which occured that same year. I think everyone knew computers would eventually be networked together around the world, this would be available to ordinary citizens, and people would make money off this. But most of them didnt anticipate this would happen in 2-3 short years as early as the 1990s. Even Gates was relatively late to scene, promoting his private AOL-like network. Then on one of his famous retreats (he hides a week or two each year just to catch up on his reading) he had a "St. Paul-like" conversion and embraced the public internet with a vengence. His Internet Explorer became number one browser, perhaps after some shady business practices which caused major governements to sue him.
Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are long term survivors in an industry where one rarely shines for more than a decade. Each seems to have nutured four or so billion dollar megahits amongst trail of several mediocre products. The PayPal guys are on their second hit with YouTube, but these people are rare.
You are confusing Segment and Virtual memory address space.
One single app can't have access to more than 4GB memory simultaneously at one given time, due to 32bit limit of memory pointing register and segment lenght.
with PAE, more than 4GB (in fact more than 2GB or 3GB for "server" versions) can be made available in total to all application. In fact with memory between 1GB and 4GB it is still needed to have enough continuous address blocks on which to map the memory.
In Linux, the installer chooses a kernel compiled with HIGHMEM64 for this to work. Period.
In Windows, you must enable PAE by editing some text file *AND* application needs to be AWE enabled.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I speak Australian English so an American accent sounds foreign to me. I listened to the recording all the way through but when I realised that he sounded to me just like Ray Romano I found it hard to take him seriously :-)
Um, did you read my earlier post? There's a region of physical address space reserved for hardware. It varies from 500 to 900 MB, depending on your system's hardware. 4 GB - 900 MB = 3.1 GB.
A 32-bit virtual address space means that pointers are 32 bits, so there is a natural limit of 4 GB of addresses simultaneously available to a process. However, the range of physical memory mapped into the process can change. And different processes can have different ranges of memory mapped into them. Thus even though each process is limited to 4 GB at once, a process can make use of more than that by swapping data in and out of its address space (assuming appropriate OS support). Another way is to have 3 or more processes, each individually limited to 4 GB, with each be assigned their own 2 GB of physical memory, meaning that the system actually makes use of 6 GB or more.
The OS is also limited in address space, but the OS can map memory in and out of its own address space as needed. In the same way that the OS can swap memory out to disk, the OS can throw pages out of its address space when they aren't needed, then pull them back in. Thus, the OS can access more than 4 GB of RAM.
Kernel mode also uses a 32-bit virtual address space, but often drivers have to work with physical addresses. For example, a driver needs to transfer data to the hardware. So it takes the address of the memory buffer with the data, asks Windows for the corresponding physical address, and sends the physical address and the buffer length to the device. The device then does a DMA transfer to or from the given physical address and signals to the driver when it is done. If the driver doesn't properly handle 64-bit physical addresses, this process will not work correctly. By never using any physical addresses where any of the upper 32 bits are set, Windows is able to avoid one possible problem with 32-bit device drivers. (There are still many other possible problems.)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Ahhhh. I see, now. Even though the driver is limited to 32 bits for most things, it may still be given a 36-bit physical memory address when PAE is being used. That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.