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The Software That Failed To Compete With Windows
harrymcc writes "When Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0 back in November 1985 — it turned 25 on Saturday — it wasn't clear that its much-delayed windowing add-on for DOS was going to succeed. After all, it was a late arrival to a market that was already teeming with ambitious competitors. A quarter-century later, it's worth remembering the early Windows rivals that didn't make it: Visi On, Top View, GEM, DESQview, and more."
They left out the most viable competitor.
So, is this supposed to be a story of victory for MS or a tale of woe for the rest of us?
I still have a copy of DesqView/X which I know came afterward but was a much better alternative. I remember a friend showing me it running on top of DOS and Windows 3.1(or maybe it was '95) running on DVX. That was better multitasking than Windoze ever brought.
0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
As someone who in 1991 ordered his 386/SX (4MB RAM, 80MB hard drive and 256k VGA card) with MS DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.0, I'm amazed that OS/2 isn't mentioned in the article since it was the other OS option at the time.
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
GEM was pretty good but Ventura was the only app I ever came across for it.
DesqVIEW was useful but really just as a fancy menu / full screen task switcher.
For a while were were an OS/2 shop, it really was better than Windows but Windows did the dirty with Word and here we are.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
DR-DOS.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
K. Trout
Half the audience here is still running it.
This was perhaps the Enabler for Windows. It addressed the primary multi-tasking via
a terminate-and-stay-resident pop-up that had a calculator, todo list, and the like.
By solving this problem for Word Perfect, Lotus and DB3 users, it delayed the
adoption of windowing environments for another 2-3 years till Windows 3.0
AmigaOS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOS
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"Twenty-five years and two days later, it’s not just hard to remember an era in which Windows wasn’t everywhere"
Bullshit - As a C64 and Atari ST veteran, twenty-five years later it's painful to remember the extraordinary effort it took to lose to windows. I had better graphics playing Neuromancer on the C64 than windows managed for a decade, and let's not even talk about comparing Star Flight on the ST vs the DOS version.
Jack Tramiel should be strung up for crimes against computing.
{sigh} - Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Exactly as stated. What about GeoWorks, and its Ensemble upgrade? If I recall (which may be incorrect), GeoWorks was another competitor about that time. And it also was one of the (if not THE) first to run AOL, back when it was one of the more easily-used online systems before the Internet became the behemoth it is today.
Once Win95 with 32-bit computing came out for desktops (even with all its bumps and bruises), it seems Geos wasn't able to keep up, unfortunately.
I was working as a paperwork generator for a school funding appeal in 1994. They wouldn't pay the bucks for Windows 3 (why spend $45 when you're only trying to make $3 million), but I did get GeoWorks to run on my 386SX (which I had only because when my 286 died, they couldn't get a replacement 286 motherboard; they were very annoyed). It was very nicely designed, ridiculously usable and very fast. Fatal problem? It was ridiculously unstable and would crash if you looked at it funny. Windows with Wordpad would have beaten it as a productivity tool. Oh well.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
was awesome. I used it to run multiple nodes on my Renegade BBS. Of course, back then nothing was truly multitasking, but this was pretty darn stable for its time. We moved to Windows '95 when we were told that it would provide better multitasking abilities.
It was at that point I started truly despising Windows/Microsoft. "What are all of these files in my root directory?" I remember exclaiming. I always kept a very organized filesystem, and now my operating system was telling me I couldn't do that anymore.
It was all pretty much downhill from there.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
DESQview was brilliant. It was completely workable on the hardware of the time, functional, did what the box said, fast... It was the right solution for the time. It just happened that hardware moved on and left the phase in time that DESQview occupied behind.
I was running multinode BBSes under DESQview back in the day and getting fantastic performance. None of the graphical competitors were in any way workable alternatives for that sort of performance on the hardware available.
http://technologizer.com/2010/07/23/amiga/
It was ahead of pretty much everything at its début. But they managed to cock it up something fierce - it was amazing to see a decade of PC technology leadership go "poof" with bad management at the helm.
GEM was a damn good piece of software. It was actually multiplatform (CP/M on 8088 and 68000, DOS (any CPU), and I think I saw floppies of GEM for the Commodore 64.
Incredibly powerful considering the tiny resources it needed. One of the first DTP softwares, Ventura, was based on GEM for its user interface.
Like X, GEM isn't quite an operating system. It's a graphical shell. Well... more or less what Windows 1.0 was!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Windows 1.0 was a total failure. Nobody used it. I worked at a computer store at the time and people would ask us to take it off the drives of the compter because they had no use for it.
Windows 2.0 was also a total failure.
Only when Windows 386 and WIndows 3.0 came out was Windows usable. Even then most people didn't use it. It just slowed down their dos programs.
Only when Windows 3.11 came out did WIndows become popular. Mostly to run DOS apps. Windows won because Microsoft just gave it away for the longest time. Almost nobody would have paid for it. That is why all the others failed. Most people wouldn't pay for a program to run programs!
Microsoft used the drug dealer method to win market share. But to call any version of Windows before 3.0 as not a failure is just not valid.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
... is to own everything from the application down to (and in some cases including) the hardware. It was inevitable that add-ons to DOS were not going to be allowed to survive. The only viable UIs have been those on top of other (non Microsoft controlled) O/Ss. And they have been viable only because Microsoft hasn't been able to kill them off. Yet.
Captcha: penguin
Have gnu, will travel.
What a load of shit. It is pretty hard to compete when PC vendors were tied by jackbooted licensing deals with Microsoft and they sabotage their own software so competing software won't or runs "poorly" compared to their own. What's that? Oh yeah, Microsoft was sued just for that; sabotaging their own software.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
My favorite Windows alternative back in the early 1990's was Wayfarer, a freeware replacement for the Windows v3.x Program Manager. Long before Microsoft figured out how to do tabbed and nested windowing, Wayfarer did both.
My favorite trick as to post a screenshot of the Windows Program Manager as the screen background and then turn off Progam Manager completely and replace it with Wayfarer, which would minimize to a single desktop icon. People would click on what looked like Program Manager icons with no result.
(Including the tech support guy who showed up unannounced at my desk one day to install software while I was out and was five minutes away from wiping and reinstalling my entire PC because he couldn't figure out why it wasn't working. I told him the next time he wanted to hijack my PC during the work day he needed to schedule an appointment so he didn't interfere with my work day.)
Ah, those were the days when we could still have some fun with customization. Now it's all "safe choices" or lock-downs, depending on how you look at it.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
There are plenty of motor car manufacturers, and most people don't just drive a Ford (or whatever). So why is the computing market so different ? I don't believe that it is down to manufacturing capacity, ie s/ware is so much easier to make many of once you have the first copy; if that was so then the many smaller manufacturers, the list is huge.
I think that the key is standards, everyone wants the same - especially file formats. The way that MS got to where it is was by taking everyone else's standards and keeping its own as secret as it could. Whatever reasons: it is something that we should learn from and stop from happening again.
Disclaimer: my desktop has always been Unix based since 1986, Linux for the last 15 years.
I had a Tandy 1000 (still do actually) and ran Deskmate during the Windows 1.0 days... It is hard for people to understand just how messy things were in those days... printer drivers were essentially non-existent and you had to embed printer commands in documents if you were doing anything fancy (meaning different fonts or sizes). There were a plethora of TSR programs (Terminate-Stay Resident) like Sidekick. There were all kinds of hacks to make your machine use memory above 640k. Deskmate was basically something more similar to the Office suite than a real Windows replacement. There were all kinds of menuing programs at the time, many of them shareware, that would essentially allow you to build a simple application launch screen. Deskmate did a pretty fair job of documents and rudimentary spreadsheets... It was the MS Works of its day. Other applications like Lotus 123 and dBase (or Clipper) were the norm - and you ran one of them at a time. (No multitasking) So Windows 1.0 was basically a fancy menu program and as TFA points out, it had many competitors... It wasn't until Windows 2.1 came out that it advanced any farther than that...
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
DESQview rocked back in the day!
Ran several PCBoard BBS nodes off of one machine with DESQview.
Would not even think of doing that with the old versions of Windows.
These are not examples of technologies that Windows beat. They are example of companies, many of whom had superior products, that never made it due to Gates' underhanded business practices.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Did anyone else try out the version of GEOS for the Commodore 64?
Technoli
Given the particulars of the DOS environment, and the capabilities of the displays at the time, I found XTREE much superior to anything prior to Win95.
(Excluding the Macintosh and Amiga GUIs, of course.)
I can see the fnords!
IMO, for a year or two DESQview was a real marvel compared to anything else out there, it even had early cut and paste of ASCII text between applications. I once visited their small office not too far from the Santa Monica pier. (I think it was on Pico)
- TWR
CP/M? Features almost like *nix but could run on a 32kB computer
Ah, now you remember!
No? Anybody?
I think sometimes the geeks forget the Marketing adage that most enduring products are functionally "just okay." Typically a successful product uses lots of cash to drown their competitors. Might makes right.
Someone somewhere said "Early to bed. Early to rise. Advertise Advertise Advertise"
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
One of the things I like to think about is that out there, somewhere, is someone still using 1.0 as their daily computer.
"The horror."
A spectacular opportunity, dommed to failure for all the same reasons as the others.
Nice trip down memory lane... I used DeskMate at home for a while, got into configuring DesqView for clients, and talked clients out of most of the rest.
I used DR-DOS for a long time to generate bootable floppies for stuff like patches and Norton Ghost, avoiding some of the unpleasentness of the various MSDOS problems. Ultimately, didn't DR-DOS go to Caldera? I have some of those disks still.
But Windows was pretty much unstoppable. My old buddies from then still lament that Apple never wrote Mac OS for Intel processors, but that would have gotten Apple into DLL and driver hell, trying to support even the worst drivers from the worst writers, and then getting tarnished with the reputation of unreliablility.
Still, Windows seems to have come out of that ok.
Did anyone else get a MACH board for Christmas, and drool over that awful mouse?
Anyone else ever play Balance Of Power? Damn, I miss that.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Man I loved Desqview. It had true preemptive multitasking and separate virtual desktops for processes years before Windows.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
"I believe Windows 1.0 predates OS/2 by a bit."
You're right, but OS/2 is worth mentioning anyway. I tried it back in the day, and really liked it. It was a 32 bit os when Windows was still only 16 bit ...
OS/2 2.0 was 32 bit but OS/2 1.0 was a 16-bit protected mode text based replacement for DOS. OS/2 1 eventually had a GUI called Presentation Manager, the API was very similar to MS Windows. I think OS/2 1 + PM is the actual first competitor to WIndows, not OS/2 2.
In the early MS Windows 3 era MS told developers that Windows was just a temporary GUI for DOS to satisfy existing installations that will eventually be migrated to OS/2 1 + Presentation Manager. They emphasized how source compatible WIndows and Presentation Manager were and that porting would not be a major issue.
IBM and MS were partners in OS/2. IBM was developing OS/2 2.0 while MS was developing OS/2 NT in parallel. While both were 32-bit and GUI based, OS/2 2 was the more expedient reworking of OS/2 1 and ran only on x86 CPUs. OS/2 NT was to be to the complete rewrite that would run on various CPUs. At some point MS decided to ditch IBM and renamed OS/2 NT to Windows NT. Its interesting to note that Windows NT offered OS/2 1 support.
i ran desqview on an old IBM PC, dos circa 2.1 or 3.3 i had wordstar open in two windows at once. the point was you could copy/paste between them. it was awesome. you could have several windows if you wanted. this was years before DOS 5 and it's "shell" thing. It was a close as you could get to task-switching on an 8088 with MS DOS.
DESQview/X was even cooler than DESQview, which was a remarkable piece of software.
This could display MS-DOS character cell and Windows 3.0 apps onto an X-Terminal, could run X apps locally, could display X apps from Unix onto your pc.
It was too late to market. Windows 3.11 came out soon after, with reasonable networking, and that was the end... Sadly, even the X window system is now a niche player...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
There are plenty of motor car manufacturers, and most people don't just drive a Ford (or whatever). So why is the computing market so different ?
Windows programs run on Windows. Some of them run on Linux through Wine, but that's still a crapshoot.
So if you have thousands of dollars of Windows software, you can't just switch to a different OS and continue to use it.
Now that I think about it I'm not sure whether MS's OS/2 development project was called OS/2 NT or OS/2 3.0.
This is an extremely insightful comment. I would add his ability to market vaporware. Remember...He didn't even have DOS when he sold it to IBM.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
since it is lacking a lot of the CPU code for task switching... i.e. there was no memory protection, any program could write to anywhere in memory. (which spawned a million keyboard-hook malwares) i really wonder how desqview accomplished what it did. did it rewrite the machine code of the programs it loaded into memory?
It's been a long time, but my recollection is that Windows used to multi-task anything that wasn't actually a Windows application *terribly*. I ran DESQview for a long time with plenty of fond memories. In fact, I want to think that a later version of DESQview was my first X-Server on my PC....
Evolution: love it or leave it
Mondrian was a TopView clone created by Dynamical Systems Research, a company formed by Nathan Myhrvold and Chuck Whitmer. Microsoft bought them because Mondrian was arguabley smaller and faster than the IBM product. The team of engineers went to work in the WIndows team and were a good part of the reason that Windows 3.0 emereged as the "good enough" GUI to dominate the industry efver since.
For running a BBS on an 8MHz PC/XT, DoubleDos was great.
No windows or GUI, but you'd get two functioning DOS environments. Even better, you could run a CGA adapter and a Monochrome adapter at the same time. Each would be like its own functioning computer. It was extremely simple and lightweight.
Desqview was cool, but with 640K ram, more than 2 programs at once was unrealistic so DoubleDos was still better.
Windows was a pig. I tried it once and threw it out. A windowed GUI was pointless at 640x200 black and white.
Godaddy is a scam and a ripoff.
There are plenty of motor car manufacturers, and most people don't just drive a Ford (or whatever). So why is the computing market so different ?
I don't believe that it is down to manufacturing capacity, ie s/ware is so much easier to make many of once you have the first copy; if that was so then the
many smaller manufacturers, the list is huge.
I think that the key is standards, everyone wants the same - especially file formats. The way that MS got to where it is was by taking everyone else's standards and keeping its own as secret as it could.
Whatever reasons: it is something that we should learn from and stop from happening again.
Disclaimer: my desktop has always been Unix based since 1986, Linux for the last 15 years.
The issue certainly is standards.
I can drive whatever car I want on basically any road I want because the interface is standard. You've got some kind of more-or-less flat surface that my tire roll on.
Similarly, I can get behind the wheel of virtually any car and do OK because the interface is pretty standard. Ignition, gas pedal, brake pedal, steering wheel, spedometer, etc.
The problem, when it comes to computers, is that there's precious little standardization.
A specific piece of software will run on one OS, but not another. Or it'll run with a specific service pack installed, but not without.
A specific OS will only run on certain types of hardware.
A specific piece of software will draw its UI one way... Another piece of software will have a completely different UI... Maybe you can hit CTRL+Z in one app, but not in another... Maybe the middle-mouse button works one way here, and another way there...
So people just pick what's going to behave the way they're used to. They pick the OS and the software that they're familiar with. Which is why everyone yelled and screamed when Microsoft rolled out the whole "ribbon" thing - it was too different.
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
[citation needed]
if it hadn't been for trumpet winsock i would have moved to linux in 1994.
You could check this, or you could talk to some other people who watched it all happen.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Business practices, marketing, distribution channles, partnerships, good ol'fashioned sales glad-handing are just as important to product sucesses in that real world outside of the computer geek's narrow view. To me, it's as legitimate a way to win as product capability. If you want a technically superior product to suceed ( or a technically inferior product, come to that), get a management team who can win in the real world, not one who complains about how the other side isn't playing fair.
I bet none of these had Solitaire. If they included some free time waiting games they would have been a success.
I was working tech support in the late 90s. This stuff was not common, but it was still "in the wild". Somebody fielded a call from a woman who, when asked what here OS was, replied "WordPerfect". The wise tech realized that WordPerfect was one of these companies that had written their own shell. From the Layman's PoV, it was easy to regard the shell as the OS. The woman was not nearly the idiot that some techs had made her out to be.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Actually he marketed a concept. When he sold DOS to IBM, IBM already had Commodore... who was delaying their IBMPCOS project heavily. Lots of promises, lots of nothing to show for it. Gates convinced IBM that Commodore's PC operating system was ages-off vaporware and that he could do it faster.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
> The problem, when it comes to computers, is that there's precious little standardization.
Yes, that is definitely one BIG problem with computers. /me *glares* at Excel for STILL having non-standard cut/copypaste. ... does NOTHING ?! Seriously, WTF, its 2010 and MS can't even implement this right in Excel 2007 ....
e.g. Copy cell, type into another cell, Paste
Apparently you don't know what the word underhanded means.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
AmigaOS had true multitasking, a windowing UI called Intuition, multiple screen of varying resolution on top of each other and a hardware mouse cursor (via custom graphics chips such as Denise). It also had scripting languages such as Amiga Basic (by MS) and an ARexx interpreter.
In 1986.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Yeah! Preach it brother! Speak truth to power!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He also didn't have a working Windows for quite some time but instead an artful screen show. He spotted GEMS at one of the big tech conferences in 'Vegas, sent his minions over to take copious notes, killed it by announcing something "better" was coming, and then got to work building something to show. GEMS died on the vine because everyone ASSumed Microsoft would build something to kill it and GEMS couldn't get enough developer support to continue. Microsoft had a HUGE marketing campaign for their vaporware back then - and it worked. When Windows 1.0 was released it was pretty compared to say Desqview but it didn't multitask and background apps were halted for foreground tasks - I hated it. In the end I managed to stay away from Windows until Win95 at home but had to suffer with it at work. I wish I'd known about Linux back then and grown up with it :-(
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
"Windows multitasks (in a Desqview window)."
In my opinion, there was an additional reason why Visi On failed (As if there weren't enough reasons already)
Visi On used copy protection. You either had to have your original floppy disk in the drive at boot or have a genuine Visi On mouse attached (the software would check the mouse for a serial number). Now, tell me you don't see the problem with disks or mice wearing out quickly!
From a historical preservation perspective, the worst part was since few people want to preserve old software besides games, it almost "protected" itself out of existence!
..Que flame bait...
I always loved it. Basically let you have unix's "screen" program. Short and sweet.
*WE* made it happen that way. We as software devs for the longest time would make 3 different versions and then maybe sell a Mac ver and a Sun/HP Unix ver. We got tired of the 5+ different software configurations *ON TOP OF* the zillions of hardware configurations. Just for our sanity we picked windows. Love em or hate em MS was everywhere. Eventually the only software that was everywhere was windows. But we didnt care. We were too busy selling tons of software...
This is a site I've enjoyed browsing for quite some time that gives small walk-throughs of the UI on many versions of different operating systems.
http://toastytech.com/guis/
Depends on your definition of 'compete` and apparently ingesting too many chemicals at the time that has caused you long term amnesia. In this case MS definition of 'compete' is to engulf the competing product and suck every last morsel of real innovation out of it, similarly to how a squid eviscerates its next dinner. The below extract is just one of many beautifully illustrating how they do 'business' out of Redmond:
.. I suggested that someone on the technical side call Robert Smith at Phoenix in Norwood who has in depth technical knowledge of this product and is willing to share it"
--
"Geoview is a gui that runs on top of MS-DOS for low end systems. It is more of a competitive issue for Windows (and Works) than DOS
"We need data on this product ASAP, it is about to scoop Works on a major deal, in going through the mass merch channel this fall if we do not kill it have we gotten a copy of it and done any evaluation?" link
" It would great if we could get our hands on Jaguar. Joachim and Jeremy are harassing Atari and Amstrad respectively to get them to send us a copy" link
"the way to shut out novell in the base is to either ship a full client or make it so there is no network connectivity " link
"I an reading about the Gateway adoption of the Corel software. I am interested to understand what this means better and how it relates to any contracts we have with them link
.Net and C# came about to push Java out of the market, not the other way around.
Yep! .Net is about as close to Java as one can get without violating Sun’s^H^H^H^H Oracle’s copyright.
Yeah, right.
Maybe not in sales, but in usage.
I think the reason we don't have OS/2 servers today is because of how popular linux was becoming amongst nerdy college students.
I used OS/2 for a while but the licenses were as expensive or more expensive than windows for workgroups. As a broke college kid linux was very interesting to me. I could do anything I was willing to invest my time into learning how to do with it.
All those nerdy college kids became employees at some point and eventually management.
That one isn't inherently better than the other. At first glance, it sounds like preemptive multi-tasking is the way to go since that is what all our desktops use now and since it is far more stable. However that is only true in an environment flush with resources, as our computers are. It incurs a good deal of overhead, which is why it was more problematic on older hardware. You could do it, but you paid a performance price. That's part of the reason you saw CMT not just on Windows but on things like MacOS as well. If programs behave themselves, it can be a much lower amount of overhead, and that mattered on those slower processors.
For just an idea of how slow they were consider that it took almost all of a 486 to play a stereo 128k MP3. I remember when I first started playing with them and in Windows 95, it wasn't possible. Even running nothing but an MP3 player the overhead from the OS (which wasn't fully preemptive itself) was too much, I had to turn it down to mono or reduce quality to play. To get full stereo I had to drop to DOS and play it with Cubic Player. Now of course we can play them in the background with less than 1% CPU time on a single core.
Just something for people to consider with regards to cooperative vs preemptive. Preemptive works great and is really what you want on a desktop computer where arbitrary code can be executed because it keeps problematic code from running away with resources, and also just makes programming a bit easier (you have to be careful when programming something for a co-op system that will be expected to use as much resources as it can get, yet still cede control properly). However it does incur overhead to make happen, and when you talk a slow enough system, it is a non-trivial amount.
That would be nice, but cars and operating systems are a totally different dynamic. The interface for all cars is virtually identical: two or three pedals, a shift lever and a steering wheel. Virtually car will run on public roads, regardless engine size, number of doors and even wheel count. Even something more exotic, like a tank or construction equipment will run on the road, even if it does damage pavement in the process.
Operating systems, however, are a totally different animal. First, you've got user interface which has an impact on user-friendliness and functionality. Second, you've got the applications available on each system. Then you've got a host of other factors, like software lock-in, marketing prowess, established user base, etc. All these factors contribute to a particular platform being popular.
I suppose, in theory, various companies could developed their own OS and then follow certain standards. That already exists to some extent. But you're still dependent on software developers offering a version of their application that runs in your OS. That's not a trivial undertaking in the least, even selecting which operating systems to support is daunting.
But building the OS itself is a massive undertaking, and everyone's got their own vision about what it should do, so this inevitably breeds incompatibility. What you're suggesting almost sounds like everyone should go with a single base OS and then do nothing more than skin their version.
.. i was sure we are talking about Linux desktop.
IBM already had Commodore
I'm pretty sure you mean Digital Research and their CP/M-86 operating system. Which already existed, but which Digital was raising roadblocks over on account of IBM's insistence on NDA terms.
-AC
There is a quick review to the past...
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/03/operating-system-interface-design-between-1981-2009/
So why is the computing market so different ?
The only reason I run Windows is because I play games on my PC. It's just vendor lock-in, and I realise I'm rewarding them for it by buying their product, but I'm a little short-sighted. The first thing I'd do if I was in power would be to mandate open standards.... The software market is _completely_ fucked at the moment. DirectX is the major problem for games.
I would dual boot Linux (that was my original intention when I got this computer), but at the time the fakeraid implementation on Linux was tenuous at best - my first attempt at a linux installation on this system helpfully told me that the best thing to do would be to format my primary drives seperately before continuing. I have bought another HD to stick Linux on, but I haven't got around to it yet... I haven't checked to see if their fakeraid implementation is working better, either.
Multiple Apps are ruining at the same time.
There are plenty of motor car manufacturers, and most people don't just drive a Ford (or whatever). So why is the computing market so different ?
because what you do with them is completely different.
With a car, you are doing something that is fairly primitive: travelling from one point to another.
You are taking yourself. possibly passengers.
But the operation is trivial, and it does not need to be repeatable, or recreatable by others.
In contrast, what most people want to do with computers (at least in the business world) MUST be
repeatable
recreatable by others
and sharable with others.
and the complexity of what you are sharing, is way, way higher.
You arent just moving a handful of words/numbers around. you are moving them around, preserving a particular place on a page, with a particular font, with a particular relationships to other words/numbers. and if you are sharing spreadsheets/etc. then you need to ensure that if some of them are altered, then [this other set of numbers] change, in a guaranteed predictable way.... and so on, and so on.
Yeah - that's the reason we didn't get the year of Linux Desktop - wasn't because Linux wasn't awesome enough... it was because Microsoft Cheated!!!!!!!
Excel 2010 isn't any better.
First of all, your post erroneously assumes that the answer to the question: "When will Linux be ready for the desktop?" is not "It has been ready for years.". You also are overlooking all the lies told, the FUD sold, the standards committee tampering, and the Halloween Documents that prove that Microsoft indeed cheated, even though it still didn't win (though their customers have certainly lost.)
The question I want answered is "When will Windows be ready for the desktop?", because I guarantee you my Linux box blows the doors of of any Windows machine hands down, and does it all without being a Malware fest.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Apparently you don't know what the word underhanded means.
Come on.. They guy is in marketing. You need to use more meaningless buzz words..
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
Remember...He didn't even have DOS when he sold it to IBM.
What Gates had was a full suite of programming languages ready to port to the new micro.
What Gates had was the guts to promise delivery of a serviceable 16 bit CP/M clone in time for the scheduled launch of the IBM PC.
These were the words IBM needed to hear.
What Gates had was the smarts to negotiate a non-exclusive license for DOS -
which would sell for $200 less than CP/M 86.
$467 less, adjusted for inflation. The Inflation Calculator
MS-DOS would be the commodity OS.
That alone permanently altered the landscape.
The MS-DOS PC was an unquestionably viable commercial product before the cloning of the PC BIOS.
Before they branched out to the "tips" business. Snappy file manager, but that was about it, really.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
The short history of windowed operating systems:
Memory Prices (1957-2010)
1985 $300/MB
1990 $100/MB
1995 $32/MB -- cartel warning !!!
1996 $5/MB -- and the wall came crumbling down
1998 $1/MB
Even uglier if you correct for inflation.
I couldn't stand *any* of the early Windowing products. Too cramped. My "fat" Mac was no better than anything else. Spent more time dragging Windows around on that small screen to see what I was working on than getting anything useful accomplished.
Had two floppy drives, but Jobs had instilled a miraculous ability into the OS to pop out the wrong floppy when it needed a file on a different diskette, the one you knew you'd have to put back in two seconds later. There was no way to override or preempt this. Jobs knows best. Burned into my amygdala so deeply it will twitch on the autopsy table at the sound of automatic floppy disk eject.
If I had been willing to upgrade with a hard disk, that system might have become borderline usable. I priced the drive upgrade at roughly on par with buying a turbo XT with a hard drive and monitor from scratch.
From that day forward, I learned to tolerate MSDOS, and had a work flow that got enough done. What I realized in retrospect is that my work flow discouraged experimentation. No Carmack for me. New ideas were added straight into the production code base. Just to keep the number of contexts to a minimum, with no multitasking to help out. I was shaped by my tool, and not in a good way.
At one point we had a spare machine and I tried out Coherent. That experiment ended immediately when I discovered that the bundled C compiler supported K&R, but not ANSI. All of my own code was portable ANSI. Game over. I didn't have access to the internet yet, so it wasn't easy to download Linux, which was still pretty green.
My long sentence under DOS ended when I jumped to Windows NT 4 circa 1996 on a brand new Pentium Pro. Had my first cable modem within the year. Good times.
By 1999 I had several large monitors, a KVM, OpenSSH, and *finally* enough system memory. I was no longer shackled to picking one primary work environment. I could use whichever system best matched the requirements. Divorce rocks!
For me 1999 was an inflection point in the merit debate. It was like the sexual liberation of the late 1960s. Choosing your system environment in 1985 was like watching a movie made in the 1950s about communicating emotion. You weren't operating in a regime of easy choices. Much consumer loyalty in the PC space 1985-1999 was born of cognitive dissonance. After you married the damn thing, you couldn't bear not to defend it.
Most people think of getting a driver's licence as a milestone of independence. For me, a decade of suck ended the day in December 1995 when I discovered AltaVista through my crappy dial-up service. "Damn, this rocks!" I thought to myself. I've never give ten brain cells to a press release for the rest of my natural days! Finally a liberation worth having.
For my desktop, I wanted a window that opened outward, not a set of prison bars to tile a display that was too small to begin with. This was largely driven by the limitations of the CRT and the cost of memory. Pricey to have a desk full of bit-mapped workstations prior to 1996.
After my sour Mac experience, had it been available in 1986 for a competitive price, I sure would have enjoyed a 24" text mode video panel (say 80 rows by 200 columns, and a couple of grey levels). My window manager could have been a frame enhanced Emacs running under MSDOS, and I would have been happy as a pig in poo.
I never found much use for micro-managed gun turrets with more screen area devoted to window cruft than document content.
Who the fuck marked this insightful? It's fucking well known IBM asked Gates to find a DOS when Microsoft told IBM they didnt have one. Oh boohoo QDOS writers werent told who Microsoft were buying for. So MS got a DOS for IBM, this doesnt make it vapurware
I'm not sure why you blame Jack Tramiel. The PC was bound to succeed against existing computers because the architecture was more open. And the Amiga was after Jack's era. Microsoft won because it controlled the OS on top of the open hardware. Commodore was not an OS company even if it had been given a magic envelope from the future, and it was too late in the game to turn it into an OS company.
Commodore perhaps could have survived by marketing the Amiga as a desktop publishing (DP) computer, a "cheaper Mac". But back then nobody knew what DP was or how big it would get. DP was the only thing that saved Apple.
Many good software and hardware companies died off in that era. The few combination of behaviors that worked were hard to fathom at the time, and much of it came down to luck.
Table-ized A.I.
This is heresy to many "Conservative" economists. MS prevailed due to their unholy alliances with IBM and Intel; and anti-competitive practices. They also had a slick marketing campaign in the begining. It's not just about the technology.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
DESQview looks like it.
No, his sons should be.
And forgetting games, GEM on the ST ( even in its original form ) was still more functional then MSwindows has ever been.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Or pushed out due to unfair/illegal business practices?
I vote the 2nd.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
TopView was unusable junk, in my experience.
Windows 1.0 was also junk in my experience. It was only released to show that Microsoft would soon have a usable windowing operating system.
Books written about that time indicate that Windows 1.0 was released to try to buy time until Microsoft could release a product that was better than GEM. It was dishonest marketing, the books indicate. People at that time had so little knowledge about computers that they did not detect the lie.
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q1.07/5F0C866C-6DDF-4A9A-9515-531B0CA0C29C.html
The above article is very demonstrative of the truth of the insightful GP comment.
Very interesting article even for someone that lived through it. I can remember reading articles and thinking that Microsoft is just doing it better or doing what's best for us consumers, when all along they were out to kill superior products and were trying to take over certain technological advances (such as streaming video or authoring media). Very interesting article.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
It doesn't take that many dollars to use some kind of virtualization tool, and run your windows application inside a virtual machine.
Except when it comes to games.
Or audio/video/photo editing. Or commercial publishing.
Essentially, anything that doesn't involve databases, email, webservers, specialized machine control (routers, cnc machines, etc), or number crunching.
I think by now everyone knows that answer to "When will Linux be ready for the desktop?", is never. It's not an insult, it's just a fact. Linux just works better for certain workstations, embedded systems, and most servers. It falls down flat when it attempts to disguise itself as a desktop OS. The developers would be better off forgetting things like laptops and desktop systems and pour their resources into mobile versions of the operating system and the back-end that would serve and control those mobile systems. This includes future control/communications platforms that are starting to appear in mass-market transportation. It's missed the boat for being ready for the desktop by a longshot when so much of computing is already moving away from it.
BSD is a better desktop OS than Linux for that matter anyhow (just look at MacOSX for a prime example), and isn't in a state of fractured chaos like Linux (Too many flavors: great for choice, bottom-barrel for support and quality control).
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
...due to Gates' underhanded business practices.
You mean successful business practices, right?
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."
Similarly, I can get behind the wheel of virtually any car and do OK because the interface is pretty standard. Ignition, gas pedal, brake pedal, steering wheel, spedometer, etc.
Well, since most of the cars on the planet have also clutch pedal, you might be in for a little surprise... ;p
One that hath name thou can not otter
It may be that DesqView, GEM etc were better than Windows 1.0, but when PCs became a viable platform (i.e. when 80386 was a viable choice), Windows 3.0 was the only O/S choice, vastly superior than anything else on the PC.
When the 386 CPU came out, some of the people that were into computers understood that it was time for a true 32-bit operating system for the PC. Most magazine articles of the time talked repeatedly about how 32-bit operating systems is the future of the PC and the IT industry.
Microsoft got it, and they made Windows NT. The others didn't(*), and they faded into oblivion.
(*)Except Apple, that is: MacOS was superior than Windows, but Windows run on PC compatibles.
Nothig to see here, move along
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.
You have confused a computer with a gaming console. Color me surprised.
If only I could use Ardour with a realtime kernel to not only have a superior Digital Audio Workstation, but also do live signal processing while on stage :-( Oh wait, that's right, I've been doing that for years! You also evidently don't know what is available for the other applications you identified. Unix/Linux are where the real tools are at to be found.
You are confusing your ignorance of the available tools with actual unavailability of tools, I'm afraid.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yes, that is exactly what I mean, much in the same way that Charles Manson was a successful murderer. Give my condolences to Brak.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Obviously you have a narrow understanding of what happened. IBM technically never asked them to find anything. They asked if Microsoft had something to offer that would work. Microsoft stated they did. Then Microsoft's Paul Allen went and negotiated with the Seattle company that cloned CP/M (called QDOS (for quick and dirty operating system)).
At that point in time there was nothing wrong with what they did other than it was very deceptive, and it forewarned of their future practices, which were very destructive to innovation and to the market as a whole.
The insightful nature of his post was that he pointed out with clarity that the road was not lined with rose petals, instead it was lined with artillery aimed at technologies that would have certainly been better choices had the industry been allowed to advance unfettered by the threats and criminal actions of Microsoft over its first 20 years.
In other words it wasn't through competition that these alternative products lost but through deceptive and criminal acts. Those criminal acts that resulted in a criminal trial (the Justice Department doesn't pursue civil claims) and Microsoft's conviction which resulted in a Judge's initial order to break Microsoft up. Though the order was overturned when Microsoft got the judge thrown out (after the trial) the criminal conviction stood. It was only a question of remedy at that point. The individual states were still suing Microsoft.
So, let's not make it seem like Microsoft was just better at what they did and that they came up with DOS in some purely innocent manner, and let's not be convinced that their criminal conviction means nothing.
If I'm not much mistaken I believe some vestiges of an OS/2 subsystem survived in Windows until very recently. In fact I do often wonder if there's more OS/2 in Windows than they let on...
Who is this delectable creature with an insatiable love of the dead?
Back around 1991 I had a PC-clone 386SX. For you youngsters, thats a 32-bit CPU with a 16-bit (i.e. slow) data bus. I didn't have the coin to put Windows/386 or Windows 3.0 on it, but I could afford GeoWorks. It worked very well on that old machine. I kept using it after I moved on to a used 486. GeoWorks word processor was quite good for it's time. I was sad it never got much market share.
OK. I'll speak the truth and take the hit.
No, you didn't "take the hit" (post currently modded at +5). You're a mod whore making such statements and bashing Bill Gates. If you have something to say, just say it.
Well good luck playing games chump.
Cause my gaming WINDOWS box owns yourz.
In the early MS Windows 3 era MS told developers that Windows was just a temporary GUI for DOS to satisfy existing installations that will eventually be migrated to OS/2 1 + Presentation Manager. They emphasized how source compatible WIndows and Presentation Manager were and that porting would not be a major issue.
That was the plan, but IBM was not interested in making software easy to port, and made a bunch of gratuitous changes to OS/2 PM (the famous one being moving the screen coordinate zero-point to the bottom left.)
The "source compatibility" issue was one of the major reasons Microsoft started on Win32 and eventually broke from IBM.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I've owned and used Top View, GEM, DESQview and Windows 1.0 and all later editions. And I think the real reason Windows won was simple - Drivers.
I was running Lotus 123, Word Perfect, Ventura Publisher, and AutoCAD. I had expensive ($3000+) graphics cards, a 21" monitor and a laser printer (when they were $5000 beasts). Every time a new software release came out, I had to wait months for drivers to appear for the graphics card and printer. Sometimes they never arrived.
When Windows appeared, it wasn't very useful. But they always seemed to have drivers. I switched to Ami Pro, Excel and PageMaker because they all ran on a system (Windows) that had drivers for all my equipment. It was wonderful to be out of the waiting-for-drivers quandary. When Windows 386 appeared, I could run my DOS apps in a Window and not have to switch back-and-forth to DOS.
I'm pretty sure the younger crowd would have no idea what we went through. Every single app either ran at 640x480 (pretty bad on a 21" monitor) or had to have custom drivers. And you only had text printing - no graphics - without drivers. And you only had text printing if your printer emulated the IBM Graphics Printer.
Pretty soon, the hardware vendors started noticing that the availability of Windows driver became a binary decision for consumers - graphics boards with just Windows drivers would sell, while devices without became hard to sell. Companies that focused on Windows-only got the jump on those that had to write dozens of drivers.
Stop and think about the effort of keeping track of drivers for graphics, printer, mouse, modem, keyboard, sound card for EVERY app. And then do it again for each new release of every app. This is why Windows won - at least in my opinion.
Place nail here >+
I miss Brak, but I miss Dad more.
Slowly waving my hand - "This is not the sig you are looking for."