Yes -- Commodity PCs existed before IBM based on the old semi-standardized 8080, CP/M, and S/100 technology where PCs were almost, but not quite compatible with each other.
The IBM Standard allowed things like disk drives, video cards, and BIOS details to be interoperable, so you could actually take a disk from one PC and use it on a PC from a different vendor. This probably would have happened anyway in the early 80s with or without IBM.
What IBM did do is licence all of this technology pretty cheaply (~$5/PC) to their competitors, but apparently that was only due to anti-trust restrictions.
A quick Google indicates that Aldus PageMaker 3.0 was out for Window 2.11 and OS/2 1.3. I used the 4.0 release, it was just as good as the Mac version. I also found a reference to "Samna Word" (later AmiPro) as the only Windows wordprocessor in 1989. (<1471@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU>)
> The Mac interface to Word Perfect was always OK
The original releases were terrible GUI programs -- if I recall, they were nearly identical to the DOS version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect
I'm not clear on why Novell vs Microsoft is more interesting than Sun vs Microsoft or AOL/Netscape vs Microsoft (both mostly ignored on Groklaw & Slashdot). Or why anyone thinks the result will be any different than those two (cash + technology cross-licences).
I guess it will be interesting to hear in gory detail how WordPerfect blew a dominant market position through bad programming and bad marketing and about Microsoft's usual tricks. Also I sincerely look forward to the OpenDoc flamewars.
2) How were Micrographix, Aldus, Ami, and others able to release high quality first gen Windows programs while the larger shops at Lotus and WordPerfect were unable to? (Honest question, perhaps MS was nicer to the small guys.)
Related question is why Lotus & WordPerfect were also unable to produce a decent Macintosh or OS/2 PM apps.
3) The legend is that Macintosh version of WordPerfect is STILL in assembler. Coding in Assembler was not all that odd in the DOS and Apple II worlds.
> he did want OS/2 to become the future and not Windows
IIRC, he wanted IBM to win over Microsoft, but he wasn't under any illusion that OS/2 would become more popular than Windows. Either way WP/PM sucked worse than the Windows version.
> Well, they did develop a graphical version of WP 4 for the Amiga platform, which was a quite usable product also
There was also versions for Mac and NeXT in that timeframe -- the Mac version was also pretty bad (IIRC, it emulated a 80x25 monospaced DOS screen).
I think WP wrote each different version from scratch (in ASM), so while the Amiga team may have got it, that didn't help the Windows programmers. Compare this to Microsoft who pretty much did a straight port of Excel 2.2 from Mac to Windows.
Nope. The founder of WordPerfect wrote a history of the company which is available online. At no point did he ever trust Microsoft or Bill Gates, nor did he believe that "OS/2 was the future".
My take is that WordPerfect was the king of DOS assembly programming and was always on top of the heap because of the sheer amount of functionality they could cram into 640K.
They simply had no clue how or desire to engineer a product for a more modern environment. (The terrible WP releases for Windows and OS/2 were also written in ASM.) They were hoping these GUIs were just a flash in the pan and everyone would go back to using DOS.
The only way Novell has a chance in this trial is if they can show that MS illegally leveraged OEM bundling agreements to push MS Office. (I can't really remember Office being bundled until long after WP was left for dead.)
I didn't see your other post, and your discussion of EOPNOTSUPP does not follow (you would get EROFS, no?), so I'm confused why you even brought it up. Hopefully your knee didn't jerk just because you saw "...OS X do not have these features...":)
Note that you picked the most simple example possible. How would KDE handle a (for example) 10MB MDB database file that uses file record locking? It's certainly not going to work right over a FTP link.
The more complex usecases are exactly why Windows and OS X do not have these features (except as add-ons to web design software).
That is why an *amazing* number of Win32 (as in NT, *not* 95) calls are merely renamed OS/2 calls
The Other way around: IBM licenced the Win16 API from Microsoft for use in OS/2 PM. MS wanted the OS/2 API to be "just a recompile" for Windows programmers, but IBM balked and changed/renamed some things. Eventually MS introduced Win32 which was much closer to Win16 than PM was.
Win32 and PM look similar because they both derive from the same base (Win16).
It's a shame I didn't grab some of the developer CDs from old jobs -- It would be nice to "share" NT/RISC abandonware to people who had the systems, so they could tool around with IE4 and Office 4.2. (At least I got FoxPro for Macintosh:P)
Wiping a real, live bootable NT4 PowerPC ThinkPad would be criminal. It should be in your personal museum or sold to a collector. You can run NetBSD on any old ordinary laptop.
The app situation on NT/Alpha is often misrepresented like this -- on the SERVER, there was hardly anything you couldn't get. SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle, Domino, all ran on Alpha.
The big problem with Alpha is that price/performance wasn't *that* overwhelming after the Pentium Pro shipped. Also, there was the inherent risks in running a "Tier 2" platform, even when some uses (like Exchange) really needed the CPU power.
(We had DEC out to demo NT/Alpha for us, and on two seperate occassions their show-n-tell systems failed to boot. So, there probably was a big vendor factor there too.)
You have no understanding of Apple's relationship to PowerPC.
Apple originally switched to PowerPC because they thought it was going to become a popular "PC" chip outside of the Mac world. They wanted larger economies of scale than the old 68K line had, and they thought that Windows NT and OS/2 was going to bring that. They were wrong of course, and PPC became mainly an embedded chip.
Larger customer base for PPC => More investment in the architecture => Apple not falling years behind in hardware specs like with the G4.
Besides, if Microsoft and IBM decided to bring out Windows for PowerPC again, there probably is very little Apple can do to stop it.
And a Communist would argue that Congress is a bourgeois corruption and it's members should be imprisoned or shot. Which is just as irrelevant as your post. Try to follow the discussion.
All of which use the same configuration system and user interface mechanics.
In other words, the problem isn't toolkits (the more programming tools, the better). The problem is that the enduser is painfully aware of the toolkits.
The Court's 1942 decision in Wickard vs. Filburn gave Congress the power to regulate anything.
You seem to have missed the main point. The EFF is arguing that Congress did NOT impose broadcast flags. It was an administrative decision from the FCC which overstepped their authority from Congress to "promote digital television".
If Congress had actually passed a law mandating broadcast flags, the antis would in a much more difficult position.
Before Jobs came back to Apple, Newton was spun off into its own company, Newton Inc.
If this was true, how could Jobs "kill" it then?
I suspect Newton Inc existed in name only, and when Apple looked at the real and accounting costs of spinning it off, they decided it wasn't worth it. Without capital from Apple, Newton Inc couldn't have rented an office, much less become a viable business.
All good points, but still it goes back to the "historical accident" of AT&T providing cheap source licenses to all comers.
As far as I know, until Windows NT*, there was no other third party operating system a hardware vendor could license and customize for their particular hardware.
* Back in the RISC chip days, the press had figures like $1Million for the right to port NT to your platform, plus of course the per-copy royalties on top.
When you get into Vertical Market stuff, the important issues are (1) Ease of Deployment and (2) a rich client interface. Which all adds up to ActiveX. So, even if the developers are aware of W3C HTML, they still end up with an IE-only product. The prospect of redeveloping applets in Java or even making an alternate 'down-level' version is not cheap.
Your point about implementations is good, but for many years IE was the only thing that approximated W3C support, so often developers don't understand that Mozilla isn't another Netscape 4 and really is mostly "IE-compatible".
if your basic design isn't UNIX-like you have to provide a good UNIX environment one way or another
I would say this has less to do with the design merits of UNIX itself; and more to do with the historical accident that UNIX is the only operating environment to ever become a vendor-independent standard. And because of that, free/cheap implementations became available. Be and Microsoft only support UNIX-like environments because it was cheap to do so.
Put another way, if DEC would have allowed a "Berkeley VMS", UNIX might not have become the consensus choice.
A) Doesn't fit in Apple's transition towards consumer electronics. B) High R&D investment required to get it up to modern standards C) Virtually Zero installed base, zero app programmers. Only demand is from the Apple Freak crowd, who is just as likely buy a highly profitable VideoPod (etc) with their $500.
This is pretty simplistic reasoning. Apple was losing a ton of money at the time and there was the real need to cut down on the speculative projects and concentrate on the "core markets" (if even just to make Wall Street happy). Apple also cut dozens of Macintosh models at the same time.
Not to mention that the Newton brandname was pretty much dirt at that point. Even though the later models were nice, people though of the thing as a big joke. A Palm Pilot was the cool thing to have, not a Newton.
Plus you had the huge psychological impact of Microsoft entering the market with Windows CE and getting a ton of licensees (which Apple couldn't get). I suspect Apple had no desire to play the Second Fiddle Minority Platform game in two different markets. (WinCE turned out to be a bit of a dud, but that's what Apple thought was going to happen to Windows 3.1 as well.)
After you consider all those business reasons, I suppose you could make the personality argument.
Did you really play Doom3? I can't remember any time when you get "blitzed by 10 monsters" --usually they come at you 1 and 2 at a time (probably to keep framerates up).
The game is great if you like fighting demons jumping out at you in a dark space station. If you'd rather play online war games, you won't like it. My only real complaint is that it was too long -- beginning and end are good. The middle was trudging through a dozen identical levels fighting the same guys over and over.
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Yes -- Commodity PCs existed before IBM based on the old semi-standardized 8080, CP/M, and S/100 technology where PCs were almost, but not quite compatible with each other.
The IBM Standard allowed things like disk drives, video cards, and BIOS details to be interoperable, so you could actually take a disk from one PC and use it on a PC from a different vendor. This probably would have happened anyway in the early 80s with or without IBM.
What IBM did do is licence all of this technology pretty cheaply (~$5/PC) to their competitors, but apparently that was only due to anti-trust restrictions.
A quick Google indicates that Aldus PageMaker 3.0 was out for Window 2.11 and OS/2 1.3. I used the 4.0 release, it was just as good as the Mac version. I also found a reference to "Samna Word" (later AmiPro) as the only Windows wordprocessor in 1989. (<1471@cfa.cfa.harvard.EDU>)
> The Mac interface to Word Perfect was always OK
The original releases were terrible GUI programs -- if I recall, they were nearly identical to the DOS version. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPerfect
I'm not clear on why Novell vs Microsoft is more interesting than Sun vs Microsoft or AOL/Netscape vs Microsoft (both mostly ignored on Groklaw & Slashdot). Or why anyone thinks the result will be any different than those two (cash + technology cross-licences).
I guess it will be interesting to hear in gory detail how WordPerfect blew a dominant market position through bad programming and bad marketing and about Microsoft's usual tricks. Also I sincerely look forward to the OpenDoc flamewars.
1) Probably.
2) How were Micrographix, Aldus, Ami, and others able to release high quality first gen Windows programs while the larger shops at Lotus and WordPerfect were unable to? (Honest question, perhaps MS was nicer to the small guys.)
Related question is why Lotus & WordPerfect were also unable to produce a decent Macintosh or OS/2 PM apps.
3) The legend is that Macintosh version of WordPerfect is STILL in assembler. Coding in Assembler was not all that odd in the DOS and Apple II worlds.
> he did want OS/2 to become the future and not Windows
IIRC, he wanted IBM to win over Microsoft, but he wasn't under any illusion that OS/2 would become more popular than Windows. Either way WP/PM sucked worse than the Windows version.
> Well, they did develop a graphical version of WP 4 for the Amiga platform, which was a quite usable product also
There was also versions for Mac and NeXT in that timeframe -- the Mac version was also pretty bad (IIRC, it emulated a 80x25 monospaced DOS screen).
I think WP wrote each different version from scratch (in ASM), so while the Amiga team may have got it, that didn't help the Windows programmers. Compare this to Microsoft who pretty much did a straight port of Excel 2.2 from Mac to Windows.
Nope. The founder of WordPerfect wrote a history of the company which is available online. At no point did he ever trust Microsoft or Bill Gates, nor did he believe that "OS/2 was the future".
My take is that WordPerfect was the king of DOS assembly programming and was always on top of the heap because of the sheer amount of functionality they could cram into 640K.
They simply had no clue how or desire to engineer a product for a more modern environment. (The terrible WP releases for Windows and OS/2 were also written in ASM.) They were hoping these GUIs were just a flash in the pan and everyone would go back to using DOS.
The only way Novell has a chance in this trial is if they can show that MS illegally leveraged OEM bundling agreements to push MS Office. (I can't really remember Office being bundled until long after WP was left for dead.)
> Except that it's not news for me,
:)
I didn't see your other post, and your discussion of EOPNOTSUPP does not follow (you would get EROFS, no?), so I'm confused why you even brought it up. Hopefully your knee didn't jerk just because you saw "...OS X do not have these features..."
mount_ftp in OS X is Read Only only (just like the Finder feature). The news for you is that it is nothing like the KDE feature described by the OP.
> story about the CSS text file and FTP
Note that you picked the most simple example possible. How would KDE handle a (for example) 10MB MDB database file that uses file record locking? It's certainly not going to work right over a FTP link.
The more complex usecases are exactly why Windows and OS X do not have these features (except as add-ons to web design software).
That is why an *amazing* number of Win32 (as in NT, *not* 95) calls are merely renamed OS/2 calls
The Other way around: IBM licenced the Win16 API from Microsoft for use in OS/2 PM. MS wanted the OS/2 API to be "just a recompile" for Windows programmers, but IBM balked and changed/renamed some things. Eventually MS introduced Win32 which was much closer to Win16 than PM was.
Win32 and PM look similar because they both derive from the same base (Win16).
It's a shame I didn't grab some of the developer CDs from old jobs -- It would be nice to "share" NT/RISC abandonware to people who had the systems, so they could tool around with IE4 and Office 4.2. (At least I got FoxPro for Macintosh :P)
Wiping a real, live bootable NT4 PowerPC ThinkPad would be criminal. It should be in your personal museum or sold to a collector. You can run NetBSD on any old ordinary laptop.
The app situation on NT/Alpha is often misrepresented like this -- on the SERVER, there was hardly anything you couldn't get. SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle, Domino, all ran on Alpha.
The big problem with Alpha is that price/performance wasn't *that* overwhelming after the Pentium Pro shipped. Also, there was the inherent risks in running a "Tier 2" platform, even when some uses (like Exchange) really needed the CPU power.
(We had DEC out to demo NT/Alpha for us, and on two seperate occassions their show-n-tell systems failed to boot. So, there probably was a big vendor factor there too.)
You have no understanding of Apple's relationship to PowerPC.
Apple originally switched to PowerPC because they thought it was going to become a popular "PC" chip outside of the Mac world. They wanted larger economies of scale than the old 68K line had, and they thought that Windows NT and OS/2 was going to bring that. They were wrong of course, and PPC became mainly an embedded chip.
Larger customer base for PPC => More investment in the architecture => Apple not falling years behind in hardware specs like with the G4.
Besides, if Microsoft and IBM decided to bring out Windows for PowerPC again, there probably is very little Apple can do to stop it.
And a Communist would argue that Congress is a bourgeois corruption and it's members should be imprisoned or shot. Which is just as irrelevant as your post. Try to follow the discussion.
All of which use the same configuration system and user interface mechanics.
In other words, the problem isn't toolkits (the more programming tools, the better). The problem is that the enduser is painfully aware of the toolkits.
The Court's 1942 decision in Wickard vs. Filburn gave Congress the power to regulate anything.
You seem to have missed the main point. The EFF is arguing that Congress did NOT impose broadcast flags. It was an administrative decision from the FCC which overstepped their authority from Congress to "promote digital television".
If Congress had actually passed a law mandating broadcast flags, the antis would in a much more difficult position.
Before Jobs came back to Apple, Newton was spun off into its own company, Newton Inc.
If this was true, how could Jobs "kill" it then?
I suspect Newton Inc existed in name only, and when Apple looked at the real and accounting costs of spinning it off, they decided it wasn't worth it. Without capital from Apple, Newton Inc couldn't have rented an office, much less become a viable business.
All good points, but still it goes back to the "historical accident" of AT&T providing cheap source licenses to all comers.
As far as I know, until Windows NT*, there was no other third party operating system a hardware vendor could license and customize for their particular hardware.
* Back in the RISC chip days, the press had figures like $1Million for the right to port NT to your platform, plus of course the per-copy royalties on top.
When you get into Vertical Market stuff, the important issues are (1) Ease of Deployment and (2) a rich client interface. Which all adds up to ActiveX. So, even if the developers are aware of W3C HTML, they still end up with an IE-only product. The prospect of redeveloping applets in Java or even making an alternate 'down-level' version is not cheap.
Your point about implementations is good, but for many years IE was the only thing that approximated W3C support, so often developers don't understand that Mozilla isn't another Netscape 4 and really is mostly "IE-compatible".
if your basic design isn't UNIX-like you have to provide a good UNIX environment one way or another
I would say this has less to do with the design merits of UNIX itself; and more to do with the historical accident that UNIX is the only operating environment to ever become a vendor-independent standard. And because of that, free/cheap implementations became available. Be and Microsoft only support UNIX-like environments because it was cheap to do so.
Put another way, if DEC would have allowed a "Berkeley VMS", UNIX might not have become the consensus choice.
A) Doesn't fit in Apple's transition towards consumer electronics.
B) High R&D investment required to get it up to modern standards
C) Virtually Zero installed base, zero app programmers. Only demand is from the Apple Freak crowd, who is just as likely buy a highly profitable VideoPod (etc) with their $500.
This is pretty simplistic reasoning. Apple was losing a ton of money at the time and there was the real need to cut down on the speculative projects and concentrate on the "core markets" (if even just to make Wall Street happy). Apple also cut dozens of Macintosh models at the same time.
Not to mention that the Newton brandname was pretty much dirt at that point. Even though the later models were nice, people though of the thing as a big joke. A Palm Pilot was the cool thing to have, not a Newton.
Plus you had the huge psychological impact of Microsoft entering the market with Windows CE and getting a ton of licensees (which Apple couldn't get). I suspect Apple had no desire to play the Second Fiddle Minority Platform game in two different markets. (WinCE turned out to be a bit of a dud, but that's what Apple thought was going to happen to Windows 3.1 as well.)
After you consider all those business reasons, I suppose you could make the personality argument.
Did you really play Doom3? I can't remember any time when you get "blitzed by 10 monsters" --usually they come at you 1 and 2 at a time (probably to keep framerates up).
The game is great if you like fighting demons jumping out at you in a dark space station. If you'd rather play online war games, you won't like it. My only real complaint is that it was too long -- beginning and end are good. The middle was trudging through a dozen identical levels fighting the same guys over and over.