The core question is: "Would IBM have de-emphisized OS/2 in 1995 if it were not for Microsoft Windows licencing considerations?"
Ultimately unanswerable. Reading the trial document tea leaves has proven fruitless.
I can see how from the perspective of a home "Teamer" one might see the consumer sales momentum of 1994 and think that OS/2 was really gaining, and that it's shelving _had_ to be a massive consipricy.
On the otherhand, as someone who worked with OS/2 for years, including a year as a OS/2 sysadmin, it just seemed everything about the marketing of that product was "half" assed, and the conculsion was inevitable as early as 1992-3.
It never really reached it's intended top shelf enterprise market. The PPC strategy had exploded into an expensive debacle. IBM was dumping cheapo copies on hobbiest dabblers for quick cash, while telling corporate customers that the product was dead. The fix was in for OS/2, long before Win95 stepped into the picture.
I can't comment on your version of the conversation, but given the choice of believing you or Judge Jackson...
Reference Please. I just re-read the FoF, and neither your or my story made it in there (both are based on the testimony of a IBM exec, and I maintain that getting a steep discount was more important to IBM than OS/2 in 1995).
What Jackson found was a significant amount of ball-squeezing around Lotus Notes & SmartSuite. IBM did not capitulate and it hurt the PC company.
IBM never agreed to renounce SmartSuite or to increase its support for Microsoft software, and in the end, Microsoft did not grant IBM a license to pre-install Windows 95 until fifteen minutes before the start of Microsoft's official launch event on August 24, 1995.[125]
It was marketed as a general destop OS thoughout 1994 and most of 1995.
True, but I always thought this was last minute dumping to make up some cash on a failed product. OS2 had previously only been sold to 'enterprise' customers, who for the most part ended up using Windows. Jackson's story indicates that it was part of a "IBM First" effort that started in 94.
The funny thing is that Jackson says:
The fact that IBM no longer tries to compete with Windows is evidenced by the fact that it prices OS/2 Warp at about two-and-one-half times the price of Windows 98.
Of course OS/2 _always_ cost 2-3x the price of Windows, so therefore it never really competed.
First of all, after 7 years of unsuccessfully marketing OS/2, IBM was already 'leaking' to the tradepress that the product was on it's last legs long before Win95 shipped.
You are talking about events that occurred long after everyone in the industry knew that OS/2 was dead. And you are citing 1 IBM executive with a grudge spin on the story.
But anyway, the conversation really went like this:
IBM: Remember that "divorce" agreement we had that gave us rights to Windows 3.0?
MS: Fuck yes. You only pay $11 per copy of Windows, while Compaq and everyone else pays 3 times that amount.
IBM: Well, we want the same deal for Windows 95.
MS: You gotta be kidding. We just spent the last 5 years rewriting that hunk of junk.
IBM: Give it to us or we'll sue your ass sideways.
MS: Well, OK, but do us a favor and stop bundling OS/2 in a duelboot config on your corporate models.
IBM: Well, we were going to dump OS/2 anyway, so that's fine with us.
(I would also point out that OS/2 had significantly higher hardware requirements than Windows and was never marketed as a general desktop OS.)
Should have been more clear -- I was talking about the GUI apps too. The char mode apps were probably fine, although I could see why the customer base might not see the advantage over plain ol DOS.
Excel & Word for PM were in beta, apparently. My guess is that MS was playing it both ways, and they hadn't yet decided to bet the farm on Windows.
But the actual OS is unimportant. MS beat WP and Lotus in the apps market because the latter two didn't take GUI apps seriously, not because of some platform switcheroo.
Because back when IBM and Microsoft where developing OS/2, Microsoft told WordPerfect and Lotus that OS/2 was the platform of the future.
People keep posting this 'argument' on Slashdot who obviously never used either WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 for OS/2. Those products on OS/2 were fucking terrible -- worse than the Windows versions! WP/2 was usually typified as a "bad Windows port" and was off the market within a year or so, and the early versions of 1-2-3/2 weren't even feature complete.
Incidentially, MS almost shipped Office for OS/2 PM. It would have soundly beaten Lotus & WP on that platform too. Could it be that Lotus and WP just had no clue how to write a GUI application, whereas MS had been writing them for years on the Mac side?
(And yes, IBM/MS said "OS/2 is the platform of the future!" in 1987, 88, 89, 90... until it was blatently obvious that OS/2 was going nowhere fast. Lots of 3rd party vendors saw the tide and got onto the Windows bandwagon.)
Consider too, that people who could afford a computer, as well as net access, were as most would call it by the economic standards at the time "rich"...
Bullshit. Usenet had a huge set of bitterly defended traditions which encouraged a good signal/noise ratio. People posted with their real names and their companies and job titles. The culture was very small, and moronic posts were silently noted.
What's taken over is the tradition of the BBS scene (many of whom managed to afford computers and still come off like idiots). Noise happens for the sake of noise. Most people post with handles and throwaway addresses and can't be identified, and are therefore more likely to flame, troll, misspell, misthink, and say Me Too.
However, the old guard will probably have the last laugh as everyone forgets about news. Usenet currently has a significantly better SN ratio than webboards like Slashdot for example.
If I didn't make myself clear: My belief is that the feature is broken (someone else has a score 5 post pointing out what a royal pain in the ass it can be), a continual security hole, and I wish I could turn it off.
It does solve the misconfigured webserver problem, which fits MS's bill because they make lots of money off of 'legacy' apps like MS Office that need to work sorta smoothly with the web. It has absolutely nothing to do with Michael's antitrust paranoia.
Using local file-types instead of MIME types sent by the server has _nothing_ to do with browser-shell integration. The bug only exists when you are using HTTP - the local shell could care less about your MIME type.
IE does this because many years ago, many UNIX-based web servers were not configured in a MS-friendly manner (most DOS & Win MIME types weren't registered on the server). Thus a user would click on MYFILE.WKS and get a text/plain response (instead of application/x-lotus123 or whatever) and a screen full of junk chars in Netscape.
The real problem is that the cure is worse than the disease, and IE has been plagued with filetype interpretation bugs for years and years.
Micheal's comments about anti-trust and browser integration were classic unsubstantiated trolls, IMO, although he's right about MS being stuck with preserving backwards compatibility with broken webservers. It would be nice if "Use Only MIME for file type determination" was a user option.
Why does everyone forget about Corel WordPerfect Office?
Maybe because WordPerfect took about a 7 year vacation back in the 90s? You might be right that modern versions are better than MSO (a stagnant product, for sure), but some of us are still shuddering from the early GUI releases.
Your first point -- it gets deeper than that. Windows 95 was a necessary product because experience (Xenix, OS/2, NT 3) had shown them that people wanted 90% driver compatibility and 99% software compat, and there needed to be a bridgehead. It's a beautiful kludge in it's way, but damn has it outlived it's usefulness.
But, then a few things happened --
1) NT 4.0 development got behind - major features (plug-n-play, power management) got pushed back to NT5
2) NT5 got hitched to ActiveDirectory, a hugely complex system that took a long time to get right, and all of its other great features were delayed accordingly
3) (I suspect) Microsoft found that segmenting the market into 'professional' and 'home' and charging according was making them tons of money.
My guess is that Win 98/ME were the 'backup plans' in case NT5 missed it's target (which it did, even the planned Win 2000 "Home" edition), but reports indicate there was also the factor that "it makes tons of money so therefore it must be good!"
The end result was an unpleasant situation where consumers had a choice of running their Win32 apps on an unstable Win98 or an unfinished WinNT. This brought about an enormous amount of pain (which for the most part they could afford, being the only desktop OS vendor and all...)
The point is that keeping 9x in service for so long wasn't really "the plan". It's really too bad that the backup idea wasn't something like NT 4.5, which could have shipped for home and business users in 1998.
Of course. I just think it's hi-larous that they thought they were saving money by making you guys go through some 20 minute Windows reboot support script rather than just telling you "DNS is down in Bungletown. Stop calling."
Certainly they are not taking in the entire $39.95 each month. The local provider (Cox Cable in my town) obviously takes a portion of that montly bill, but Excite! must still be receiving a ton of money each month.
Nah - they only get about $15 of that $40. The rest stays with the cable company (who is greedly eyeing that $15 for themselves, or selling your ass to Microsoft or AOL for some change).
Furthermore, they have to take all of the customer service calls, which is why they are screwed. They never thought there would be so many slashdotters rubbing their minimum wage idiots' noses into the existence of their NetBSD on Mac IIcx Firewalls. Of course, they wouldn't have had such support costs if their network was better run (but again that's probably because they were undercapitalized by the cable companies who created them, umm, not to mention their dotcrap buying spree).
Those of you who are being cut off will be lucky if you pick up 'just a pipe' service. This could be the big Interactive TV Convergance shakedown that the cablecos have wanted from day 1.
Slashdot gets crapped on only because they don't delete posts and that has lead to a weird little culture that grows below most people thresholds.
But, -1 Penis Birds I can handle, as with the good k-whores and trolls. What buggers me is the poorly written content-free posts that do nothing but reiterate politically-acceptable drivel and beaten-to-death-in-1998 jokes (such as the post one at the root of this thread).
K5 doesn't have a real solution to that (other than to keep the story mix changing), and as the community grows and the bar gets lowered, the standard for what's considered a good post will fall with it. (I see it happening there already) I think slash, with 200 posts/hour, has accepted the fact that most people suck and just given us an essentially arbitrary and random system to cut the #s of posts down to a reasonable number.
Well, other weblogs solve that problem by handing out delete rights to moderators manually. But being "trusted" still sounds more like a cookie for providing good posts than a real system to improve discussion (reading) quality.
It solves the crapflood problem, but it really doesn't solve the crap comment problem (that slash is trying to solve by letting readers filter at different scores). All-in-all it's probably better to reward users for good posts than encourage them to k-whore to be seen, but as Taco points out, he's got an order of magintude more traffic.
(I should note that I read/. at -1 and rarely ever rate comments on K5 - so it goes.)
Comparing Slash and K5's moderation system is pointless.
Slashdot has moderation to allow the readership to make a rough selection of the discussion quality they would like to read. (And it pretty much fails at that, but oh well...)
K5 has ratings to reward posters for good posts and maybe cut down on some of the AOL replies - the reader can't use it to filter the discussion (unless I'm totally up my ass here...). Meaning, it's feedback to the poster, not to the readship as a whole.
Well, I just dropped the change, so we'll see what it comes with...
My hope is that it's a sorta-BSDish system and most 'modern' packages will compile. If not, I'm screwed unless I want to learn unix systems programming.
It actually appeared to not include X11, but http://www.estoredirect.com will bundle Exceed.
Microsoft Interix - a UNIX-compatible subsystem and tools for NT/2000. $99. (Bonus: Includes Microsoft GCC!)
While it doesn't solve the integration problems (com, VS), it might solve the threading issues (as well as the security issues) because it operates on kernel level (native?) instead of in user space as with cygwin and other solutions.
I'm curious if anyone has any firsthand experience porting/using the typical OSS software with Interix. There's not much 3rd party information on the web (that I can find), and MS seems to sell it as a migration solution only.
(There was a/. interview with the Interix developer, but it unfortunately turned into a flamewar and Interix wasn't discussed much.)
"(The Internet, mostly a bulletin board at the time, topped out at 9600 baud back then.)" doesn't exactly give you a lot of credibility.
It's not technically correct language, but the gist of it is right on.
Let me take a stab at rewriting that --
"Individual Internet service was limited to slow timeshare access from a few centralized machines which had (scarce at the time) Internet connectivity. The primary attraction was a text-only discussion group system. Nobody imagined that home broadband and cheap wireless routing hardware would allow people to become their own access providers (to our broad range of multimedia and shopping services) for $40/month. "
Re:I just got to wonder.......
on
Lineo Frees CP/M
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Microsoft's plan at the time was in fact to migrate the userbase from DOS to Xenix (apparently DOS 2 supported Unix-like / path seperators and -switches).
MS's primary customer (IBM) had other plans however, and Xenix was dropped as the next gen PC OS in favor of OS/2.
OK -- the jokes about "effective circumvention devices" have been beaten to death on slashdot. So, I bothered to look up what the DMCA actually says --
a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Clear as mud. My guess is that if the 'ordinary operation' of the iPod mounts the filesystem for use with standard file access tools, then it fails even this broad definition.
DR-DOS was essentially an upgraded version of CP/M-86 that was made to be (sorta) MS-DOS compatible.
It was sold as a retail product (before MS/IBM DOS was) with the primary benefit being peer-to-peer networking in the box. It was significantly cheaper than "LANtastic" or the MS/IBM solution.
Novell went insane and among other things, ended up buying DR (for a lot of money, about a year before Win95 was released. MS's OEM relationships were widely understood at the time, too.). They renamed the product Novell DOS. Again the primary sell was peer-to-peer, but it also had Novell compatibility without an additional client install. NetWare also require(d|s) DOS to boot, so the product was somewhat useful to Novell.
Novell spun off Caldera, as both a Linux business and as a vehicle to sue Microsoft over DOS marketing issues. Caldera renamed the product back to DR-DOS.
Caldera (after winning a chunk of change from MS) spun off Lineo so they could buy SCO and go and focus on whatever SCO does.
One thing to realize is that by 1987, a hypertext/"docuverse" product was already on the market -- Lotus Notes (which had it's roots in a older centralized system called Plato Notes that dated back to the early 70s).
However, Lotus was sold to large corporations for 'knowledge management' and it's, uhm, cultural impact was primarily felt there as a project management tool. It never had the social impact that Xanadu promised or the WWW achived, and never gets any credit for envisioning much of the tech that we see now with the WWW.
History of Notes -- v 1.0 had hyperlinks (or "DocLinks") in 1987.
Slashdot Mirror
The core question is: "Would IBM have de-emphisized OS/2 in 1995 if it were not for Microsoft Windows licencing considerations?"
Ultimately unanswerable. Reading the trial document tea leaves has proven fruitless.
I can see how from the perspective of a home "Teamer" one might see the consumer sales momentum of 1994 and think that OS/2 was really gaining, and that it's shelving _had_ to be a massive consipricy.
On the otherhand, as someone who worked with OS/2 for years, including a year as a OS/2 sysadmin, it just seemed everything about the marketing of that product was "half" assed, and the conculsion was inevitable as early as 1992-3.
It never really reached it's intended top shelf enterprise market. The PPC strategy had exploded into an expensive debacle. IBM was dumping cheapo copies on hobbiest dabblers for quick cash, while telling corporate customers that the product was dead. The fix was in for OS/2, long before Win95 stepped into the picture.
Reference Please. I just re-read the FoF, and neither your or my story made it in there (both are based on the testimony of a IBM exec, and I maintain that getting a steep discount was more important to IBM than OS/2 in 1995).
What Jackson found was a significant amount of ball-squeezing around Lotus Notes & SmartSuite. IBM did not capitulate and it hurt the PC company.
It was marketed as a general destop OS thoughout 1994 and most of 1995.
True, but I always thought this was last minute dumping to make up some cash on a failed product. OS2 had previously only been sold to 'enterprise' customers, who for the most part ended up using Windows. Jackson's story indicates that it was part of a "IBM First" effort that started in 94.
The funny thing is that Jackson says:
Of course OS/2 _always_ cost 2-3x the price of Windows, so therefore it never really competed.
That's a gross misrepresentation.
First of all, after 7 years of unsuccessfully marketing OS/2, IBM was already 'leaking' to the tradepress that the product was on it's last legs long before Win95 shipped.
You are talking about events that occurred long after everyone in the industry knew that OS/2 was dead. And you are citing 1 IBM executive with a grudge spin on the story.
But anyway, the conversation really went like this:
IBM: Remember that "divorce" agreement we had that gave us rights to Windows 3.0?
MS: Fuck yes. You only pay $11 per copy of Windows, while Compaq and everyone else pays 3 times that amount.
IBM: Well, we want the same deal for Windows 95.
MS: You gotta be kidding. We just spent the last 5 years rewriting that hunk of junk.
IBM: Give it to us or we'll sue your ass sideways.
MS: Well, OK, but do us a favor and stop bundling OS/2 in a duelboot config on your corporate models.
IBM: Well, we were going to dump OS/2 anyway, so that's fine with us.
(I would also point out that OS/2 had significantly higher hardware requirements than Windows and was never marketed as a general desktop OS.)
Should have been more clear -- I was talking about the GUI apps too. The char mode apps were probably fine, although I could see why the customer base might not see the advantage over plain ol DOS.
Excel & Word for PM were in beta, apparently. My guess is that MS was playing it both ways, and they hadn't yet decided to bet the farm on Windows.
But the actual OS is unimportant. MS beat WP and Lotus in the apps market because the latter two didn't take GUI apps seriously, not because of some platform switcheroo.
Because back when IBM and Microsoft where developing OS/2, Microsoft told WordPerfect and Lotus that OS/2 was the platform of the future.
... until it was blatently obvious that OS/2 was going nowhere fast. Lots of 3rd party vendors saw the tide and got onto the Windows bandwagon.)
People keep posting this 'argument' on Slashdot who obviously never used either WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 for OS/2. Those products on OS/2 were fucking terrible -- worse than the Windows versions! WP/2 was usually typified as a "bad Windows port" and was off the market within a year or so, and the early versions of 1-2-3/2 weren't even feature complete.
Incidentially, MS almost shipped Office for OS/2 PM. It would have soundly beaten Lotus & WP on that platform too. Could it be that Lotus and WP just had no clue how to write a GUI application, whereas MS had been writing them for years on the Mac side?
(And yes, IBM/MS said "OS/2 is the platform of the future!" in 1987, 88, 89, 90
Consider too, that people who could afford a computer, as well as net access, were as most would call it by the economic standards at the time "rich"...
Bullshit. Usenet had a huge set of bitterly defended traditions which encouraged a good signal/noise ratio. People posted with their real names and their companies and job titles. The culture was very small, and moronic posts were silently noted.
What's taken over is the tradition of the BBS scene (many of whom managed to afford computers and still come off like idiots). Noise happens for the sake of noise. Most people post with handles and throwaway addresses and can't be identified, and are therefore more likely to flame, troll, misspell, misthink, and say Me Too.
However, the old guard will probably have the last laugh as everyone forgets about news. Usenet currently has a significantly better SN ratio than webboards like Slashdot for example.
If I didn't make myself clear: My belief is that the feature is broken (someone else has a score 5 post pointing out what a royal pain in the ass it can be), a continual security hole, and I wish I could turn it off.
It does solve the misconfigured webserver problem, which fits MS's bill because they make lots of money off of 'legacy' apps like MS Office that need to work sorta smoothly with the web. It has absolutely nothing to do with Michael's antitrust paranoia.
Using local file-types instead of MIME types sent by the server has _nothing_ to do with browser-shell integration. The bug only exists when you are using HTTP - the local shell could care less about your MIME type.
IE does this because many years ago, many UNIX-based web servers were not configured in a MS-friendly manner (most DOS & Win MIME types weren't registered on the server). Thus a user would click on MYFILE.WKS and get a text/plain response (instead of application/x-lotus123 or whatever) and a screen full of junk chars in Netscape.
The real problem is that the cure is worse than the disease, and IE has been plagued with filetype interpretation bugs for years and years.
Micheal's comments about anti-trust and browser integration were classic unsubstantiated trolls, IMO, although he's right about MS being stuck with preserving backwards compatibility with broken webservers. It would be nice if "Use Only MIME for file type determination" was a user option.
Why does everyone forget about Corel WordPerfect Office?
Maybe because WordPerfect took about a 7 year vacation back in the 90s? You might be right that modern versions are better than MSO (a stagnant product, for sure), but some of us are still shuddering from the early GUI releases.
Check http://www.archive.org/ -- a legitimate site that uses DivX 3.
Your first point -- it gets deeper than that. Windows 95 was a necessary product because experience (Xenix, OS/2, NT 3) had shown them that people wanted 90% driver compatibility and 99% software compat, and there needed to be a bridgehead. It's a beautiful kludge in it's way, but damn has it outlived it's usefulness.
But, then a few things happened --
1) NT 4.0 development got behind - major features (plug-n-play, power management) got pushed back to NT5
2) NT5 got hitched to ActiveDirectory, a hugely complex system that took a long time to get right, and all of its other great features were delayed accordingly
3) (I suspect) Microsoft found that segmenting the market into 'professional' and 'home' and charging according was making them tons of money.
My guess is that Win 98/ME were the 'backup plans' in case NT5 missed it's target (which it did, even the planned Win 2000 "Home" edition), but reports indicate there was also the factor that "it makes tons of money so therefore it must be good!"
The end result was an unpleasant situation where consumers had a choice of running their Win32 apps on an unstable Win98 or an unfinished WinNT. This brought about an enormous amount of pain (which for the most part they could afford, being the only desktop OS vendor and all...)
The point is that keeping 9x in service for so long wasn't really "the plan". It's really too bad that the backup idea wasn't something like NT 4.5, which could have shipped for home and business users in 1998.
Of course. I just think it's hi-larous that they thought they were saving money by making you guys go through some 20 minute Windows reboot support script rather than just telling you "DNS is down in Bungletown. Stop calling."
Certainly they are not taking in the entire $39.95 each month. The local provider (Cox Cable in my town) obviously takes a portion of that montly bill, but Excite! must still be receiving a ton of money each month.
Nah - they only get about $15 of that $40. The rest stays with the cable company (who is greedly eyeing that $15 for themselves, or selling your ass to Microsoft or AOL for some change).
Furthermore, they have to take all of the customer service calls, which is why they are screwed. They never thought there would be so many slashdotters rubbing their minimum wage idiots' noses into the existence of their NetBSD on Mac IIcx Firewalls. Of course, they wouldn't have had such support costs if their network was better run (but again that's probably because they were undercapitalized by the cable companies who created them, umm, not to mention their dotcrap buying spree).
Those of you who are being cut off will be lucky if you pick up 'just a pipe' service. This could be the big Interactive TV Convergance shakedown that the cablecos have wanted from day 1.
Slashdot gets crapped on only because they don't delete posts and that has lead to a weird little culture that grows below most people thresholds.
But, -1 Penis Birds I can handle, as with the good k-whores and trolls. What buggers me is the poorly written content-free posts that do nothing but reiterate politically-acceptable drivel and beaten-to-death-in-1998 jokes (such as the post one at the root of this thread).
K5 doesn't have a real solution to that (other than to keep the story mix changing), and as the community grows and the bar gets lowered, the standard for what's considered a good post will fall with it. (I see it happening there already) I think slash, with 200 posts/hour, has accepted the fact that most people suck and just given us an essentially arbitrary and random system to cut the #s of posts down to a reasonable number.
Well, other weblogs solve that problem by handing out delete rights to moderators manually. But being "trusted" still sounds more like a cookie for providing good posts than a real system to improve discussion (reading) quality.
/. at -1 and rarely ever rate comments on K5 - so it goes.)
It solves the crapflood problem, but it really doesn't solve the crap comment problem (that slash is trying to solve by letting readers filter at different scores). All-in-all it's probably better to reward users for good posts than encourage them to k-whore to be seen, but as Taco points out, he's got an order of magintude more traffic.
(I should note that I read
Comparing Slash and K5's moderation system is pointless.
Slashdot has moderation to allow the readership to make a rough selection of the discussion quality they would like to read. (And it pretty much fails at that, but oh well...)
K5 has ratings to reward posters for good posts and maybe cut down on some of the AOL replies - the reader can't use it to filter the discussion (unless I'm totally up my ass here...). Meaning, it's feedback to the poster, not to the readship as a whole.
Well, I just dropped the change, so we'll see what it comes with...
My hope is that it's a sorta-BSDish system and most 'modern' packages will compile. If not, I'm screwed unless I want to learn unix systems programming.
It actually appeared to not include X11, but http://www.estoredirect.com will bundle Exceed.
Microsoft Interix - a UNIX-compatible subsystem and tools for NT/2000. $99. (Bonus: Includes Microsoft GCC!)
/. interview with the Interix developer, but it unfortunately turned into a flamewar and Interix wasn't discussed much.)
While it doesn't solve the integration problems (com, VS), it might solve the threading issues (as well as the security issues) because it operates on kernel level (native?) instead of in user space as with cygwin and other solutions.
I'm curious if anyone has any firsthand experience porting/using the typical OSS software with Interix. There's not much 3rd party information on the web (that I can find), and MS seems to sell it as a migration solution only.
(There was a
"(The Internet, mostly a bulletin board at the time, topped out at 9600 baud back then.)" doesn't exactly give you a lot of credibility.
It's not technically correct language, but the gist of it is right on.
Let me take a stab at rewriting that --
"Individual Internet service was limited to slow timeshare access from a few centralized machines which had (scarce at the time) Internet connectivity. The primary attraction was a text-only discussion group system. Nobody imagined that home broadband and cheap wireless routing hardware would allow people to become their own access providers (to our broad range of multimedia and shopping services) for $40/month. "
Microsoft's plan at the time was in fact to migrate the userbase from DOS to Xenix (apparently DOS 2 supported Unix-like / path seperators and -switches).
MS's primary customer (IBM) had other plans however, and Xenix was dropped as the next gen PC OS in favor of OS/2.
OK -- the jokes about "effective circumvention devices" have been beaten to death on slashdot. So, I bothered to look up what the DMCA actually says --
a technological measure `effectively controls access to a work' if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Clear as mud. My guess is that if the 'ordinary operation' of the iPod mounts the filesystem for use with standard file access tools, then it fails even this broad definition.
By the way -- if anyone wants to get up-close-and-personal with CP/M -- Buy this Osborne 1.
(It might be spam, but it's on-topic spam!)
The lineage is like this:
DR-DOS was essentially an upgraded version of CP/M-86 that was made to be (sorta) MS-DOS compatible.
It was sold as a retail product (before MS/IBM DOS was) with the primary benefit being peer-to-peer networking in the box. It was significantly cheaper than "LANtastic" or the MS/IBM solution.
Novell went insane and among other things, ended up buying DR (for a lot of money, about a year before Win95 was released. MS's OEM relationships were widely understood at the time, too.). They renamed the product Novell DOS. Again the primary sell was peer-to-peer, but it also had Novell compatibility without an additional client install. NetWare also require(d|s) DOS to boot, so the product was somewhat useful to Novell.
Novell spun off Caldera, as both a Linux business and as a vehicle to sue Microsoft over DOS marketing issues. Caldera renamed the product back to DR-DOS.
Caldera (after winning a chunk of change from MS) spun off Lineo so they could buy SCO and go and focus on whatever SCO does.
One thing to realize is that by 1987, a hypertext/"docuverse" product was already on the market -- Lotus Notes (which had it's roots in a older centralized system called Plato Notes that dated back to the early 70s).
However, Lotus was sold to large corporations for 'knowledge management' and it's, uhm, cultural impact was primarily felt there as a project management tool. It never had the social impact that Xanadu promised or the WWW achived, and never gets any credit for envisioning much of the tech that we see now with the WWW.
History of Notes -- v 1.0 had hyperlinks (or "DocLinks") in 1987.
In similar spirit, there's also Atari 2600 Doom