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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."
I don't believe OS/2 was ever a competitor to the Windows 1.0 that the article is about. Maybe windows 3.x, but I believe Windows 1.0 predates OS/2 by a bit.
TFA indicate that IBM's Top View would have been around at the same time though.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
From the article: "I considered only environments which were designed to run on IBM-compatible PCs, and which (like pre-1995 versions of Windows) ran on top of DOS rather than replaced it. (That's why the Mac OS and OS/2, for instance, aren't here.)"
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
Well, except for UNIX and a couple of others. There was real multi-tasking in 1985, don't let anybody tell you that Windows '95 was first with it.
MS was actually late to the game when it came to multi-tasking.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Thought it was more the "lock-in" provided by the Window API. Microsoft didn't conquer the workstation market until around 1995 with Windows NT/95. One by one they got the workstation vendors to replace their UNIX OS's with Windows NT using a "UNIX is LEGACY" advertising campaign; DEC, Digital, then HP and SGI caved in, as application developers could really only support the three most popular OS's that their customers use. As Windows NT took over one vendor after another, they gradually reached No.1 position and forced customers and vendors to use Windows.
UNIX competitors didn't help themselves by charging "UNIX" prices for components like monitors and RS232 cables as well as having totally different API's for everything - remnants of this can be seen when reading Linux man pages - there will be references to POSIX behavior, parameters or result codes.
At this time, Microsoft Mail was the dominant E-mail server software, but even they had to adopt "sockets" in order to connect to web servers. Sun came out with this little PC on a board solution that ran a Windows desktop in a window in order to allow users to use Microsoft Office, before buying up StarOffice (renamed to OpenOffice) and released it to break the Microsoft stranglehold, then went on to provide JAVA as a rival to MFC, .NET and C#
You can stand up to Microsoft, but only through co-operation, quality and reliability. Make sure that whatever you develop is to an internationally agreed standard that literally leaves no bit unspecified (even in an API function call). Otherwise, Microsoft will just find a way of embracing, extending and extinguishing that specification through a patent on the use of that single bit. Similarly with "extension" based API's and formats.
Tie down every single bit and avoid any sort of "extension format"
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
"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.
The GP had a point. You remember what they jokingly referred to the CGA as? Crappy Graphics Adapater, because it had 4 colors: black, white, cyan, and magenta.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter
Hell, even my Apple ][ had (graphics) Page Flipping plus 6 colors: black, white, green, violet, orange, blue
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/01/i-heart-cheatsheets.html
Preemptive vs co-operative. In early multitasking setups (Win 3, MacOS, etc) each task had to cede control of the CPU itself so that the OS could schedule the next process - a badly behaved app could fail to do so and thus take over the whole system. Preemptive multitasking puts the OS in control so that it can decide how much CPU time each process gets.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Agreed, except that the ST was 16-bit (actually parts were 32-bit). There's a rumor (not sure how true it is) that the letters "ST" came from "Sixteen/Thirtytwo".
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
I would point out that StarOffice never ceased to exist (and never was quite the same as OpenOffice), and that .Net and C# came about to push Java out of the market, not the other way around.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.