Slashdot Mirror
Return of the '70s Microsoft Weirdos
theodp writes "On the eve of the company's move from Albuquerque to Seattle in 1978, a famous photo was taken (in a shopping mall no less) of the original Microsoft team, looking mighty sharp in their '70s outfits. Almost 30 years later, as Bill Gates prepares to depart from Microsoft, the group (looking older, but better) reconvened for a retake."
The 70s photo is of of a bright eyed bushy tailed group ready to take on the world. It tells a story, smacks of potential and is a slice of history.
The current photo is a happy snap without a story. It begs the question "Why?" It adds an ending to the 1970s photo that would have best been left unwritten, allowing each viewer of the 1970's photo to make their own judgement of history. The photo is like a cliched ending to a stereotypical Hollywood morality tale.
Although your post is obviously a joke, Windows did a fantastic job of getting the PC into the lives of average people. This is something that Linux is only beginning to do, IMO.
This picture got me thinking.
For all the things people dislike about Microsoft, even the stuff people sees as evil one should still acknowledge the contribution made by Bill Gates and Microsoft to the world as it is today. I am by no means a fan of Microsoft, yet had it not been for the visions of Bill Gates I sincerely doubt that computers would have gained the same traction in society as they have today.
I often seem to forget this when shouting my mouth off about how bad Microsofts software is or how evil Microsoft is. I will try to remember this the next time I get into a "how I hate Microsoft" frenzy.
While I'd grant you the fact that Linux is indeed powering many of the systems people interact with, it remains that Linux has failed time and again to fulfill it's Year Of Desktop boasts.
Windows, for all it's warts, allowed almost everyone access to the world of computers.
Can we get rid of that horrific myth once and for all? If there had been no Windows, we would have had something else, and chances are it would have been much better.
Like AmigaOS, for instance.
I'd say it held it back if anything.
I personally got into 16-bit, GUI computing in 1987 when my parents gave in to ten-year-old me and spent what for them was a load of money on an Atari ST. Over the next couple of years a lot of other kids my age followed suit and bought STs or Amigas. We were introduced to Windows (Version 2, y'know) at school and it just seemed hopelessly antiquated. We couldn't get our heads round why anybody would buy a system running this crap when they could get about five STs for the same price, all of which would run rings round the PC clone.
Of course, time passed and Atari, Commodore et al proved themselves much less proficient at running businesses than they were at designing computers, support waned and we found ourselves with no realistic option other than Windows (95 by this point). It still felt like a backward step and they'd had years to catch up.
So I reckon that if things had worked out a bit differently and, say, Commodore had been as ruthless in business as Microsoft, we'd be far ahead of where we are now. Or at least we'd have got to where we are now years ago. Windows never put a computer into my house, and it did a good job of killing off the better, cheaper alternatives that myself and millions liked me had plumped for.
Unix, born in the 1960s, had a 20 year head start over Microsoft, but Unix geeks just weren't interested in bringing a desktop to the masses in the same way Microsoft was.
It's certainly true we could have had something better -- Amiga, Commodore, Apple, etc. -- but if any one of those alternatives succeeded like Microsoft, it would have most likely adopted the same evil practices Microsoft used, and we'd probably end up with a similarly crappy system. In the alternate universe, it could very well have been Commodore Doors.
Fortunately, Linux and Mac are both making headway in the current time line.
Windows did a fantastic job of stifling innovation in the PC industry. Imagine how much more reliable and diverse computers would have been if Microsoft had not prevented innovation from occuring? Microsoft was more concerned about monopoly maintenance than innovation.
We are 5 or even 10 years behind in computing thanks to MS. Think about it. Who wasn't in 32bit computing except MS customers back in 1995? Did you see the Netscape 4 demos which seriously drove them into panic that time? Now we are beginning to talk about Web services in freaking 2008 and people still suffer when they try it with IE.
You better watch Archive.org "computer chronicles" videos and think what would happen if MS wasn't in scene with their business tactics and backwards products.
http://www.archive.org/details/computerchronicles
People were video editing on their Amigas back in 1991 for instance.
What you fail to understand is that, without Windows, something else would have filled the void. Progress in personal computers would not have stopped if Windows weren't around. Indeed, Microsoft was so concerned about monopoly maintenance, that innovation in the PC industry suffered. Progress might have been faster without Bill Gates' presence.
Valid speculation, but speculation nonetheless. It may well be the case that someone would have filled the void, but I don't think you can consider it a certainty. Consider what else was out there about the time that, say, Windows 3.0 was really taking root as the OS of choice for the masses:
- Apple's MacOS was good, but tied to a hardware platform that was horribly overpriced, which would have been a barrier for a lot of computer purchases by families/individuals
- Unix/Linux flavors. Linux was just starting out and certainly wouldn't have been ready as an OS for a personal computer for most. Unix would have been overkill/pointless in the same role.
- OS/2 would probably have been the defacto choice for most PC's, but would IBM have filled the role of Microsoft to the same level? Remember that in the early 90's IBM was still arguably in their "Computers are for businesses" mode, and like Apple saw the OS as tool for selling hardware; without Microsoft to drag them into/compete with them in the home computer arena, would they have dedicated the kind of resources necessary to improving OS/2 at the same rate that Windows improved?
Microsoft really was in a somewhat unique place to do what they did; they had ties to IBM (and others) that allowed them to get their OS's on a lot of computers, but they were still independent enough to take advantage of the then bold idea that "It's all about the software". I don't think you can say for certain that another company would have just stepped in and filled their shoes, and succeeded in bring computers to the masses as well as they did.
The 8088 processor was chosen by IBM for the IBM PC specifically to hold personal computing back. The processor series was a very poor choice for a desktop machine.
The 6809 was a far superior chip, good enough that a reasonably convincing Unix clone was available in 1980, the year IBM decided to create the "IBM PC". That was bad from their perspectives, because it would strengthen Unix as a competitor in the midrange business. You can still get OS-9 for embedded use or set-top box use. The 6809 shared many architectural features and philosophy with the much more powerful 68000 (which also appeared in an eight bit external bus form in 1982). This would have eased the transition to 32 bit computing, which also would have been a bad thing.
This, of course, is not Microsoft's fault. IBM didn't give a damn that the processor wasn't the best choice of a desktop OS, nor did they very much care about the fact that the "OS" they chose wasn't much more than a set of primitive libraries and provided no real hardware management at all. These were, in fact, desirable from their point of view. They wanted something quick, on which they could slap the IBM nameplate and make a lot of short term bucks selling expensive doorstops, along the way keeping Apple IIs out of businesses. They succeeded on all counts in the short term, which was all the term there was meant to be. The "IBM PC" would have been a technological dead end, it was in fact intended to be so, if it wasn't for the fact somebody ended up creating a killer app for all those doorstops: Lotus 1-2-3.
Windows 3 (ca. 1990) was a tremendous achievement, given what they had to work with. But it was technically far behind what was available at the time. MacOS 6 had been available for a couple of years, and it not only had a superior GUI, it had built in support for sound and networking (which didn't come on most PCs). There was, of course, OS-9. Even Microsoft had a better OS than Windows 3 on top of DOS, namely XENIX.
So it is true that Windows accelerated the usage of MS-DOS by the average user. But DOS itself, which was the underpinnings of Windows, held the user back. How many users had to learn the nuances of TSRs, extended memory vs. expanded memory etc? How many programers had to deal with non-productive technical details like thunks as they struggled to take advantage of 32 bit hardware with a sixteen bit operating system? How long was networking delayed by proprietary protocols shoehorned onto an operating system with no fundamental support for networking, when TCP/IP had already been existence for years?
All in all, its a mixed bag. Windows made a really bad computer with really bad system software a lot more tolerable for users, and Microsoft deserves credit for this. But they don't deserve credit for personal computing. The whole "IBM PC" and "DOS" enterprise set computing back almost a decade.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm glad to hear your grandma can successfully set up and administer a Windows installation. My grandma isn't so much skilled. She just uses a few apps, and calls me to install programs and do troubleshooting, like 90% of windows users do.
Only when it was clear that the Internet was here to stay and that walled-garden rivals like MSN couldn't compete did MS go for it wholeheartedly. Thanking MS for the likes of Google Earth is giving them credit they don't deserve, in that area at any rate.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Bill Gates vision? You mean his business model? Nothing visionary or new there. He was selling an operating system product that was included with each PC so OF COURSE he wanted "a computer on every desk". So would you if you were selling a product with zero marginal cost. He just was lucky enough to get on the right horse with one of the two most important products on the PC (along with Intel's CPUs). It wasn't an especially good product even by the standards of the day. If it wasn't him it would have been someone else - have no doubt of that. Microsoft wasn't even in the operating system business relatively late in the game but it turned out to be a cash cow that put them where they are today.
Vision? No I'm not convinced Bill Gates' "vision" helped accelerate adoption of PCs. You can make a reasonable (though hypothetical) argument that his company's crappy technology and operating system monopoly held adoption of computers by the masses back by several years. Don't get me wrong, there are many things he deserves credit for - both good and bad - but his vision isn't among them.
Nah - Commodore execs were too busy being incompetent and sabotaging Amiga on their own to be that evil.