Rightfully, this should be considered an 'IBM Victory' as much, or more, than an Apple one. Apple just punched out the sheet metal for the cases, and stuffed the boards, etc. They even brought in a third party OS.
At the University of Minnesota, anyway, they have (or used to have) an arrogant program where all equipment obsoleted went to outstate warehouses and was stored for ten years or so before being scrapped. This had the happy result of insuring that the equipment was useless and obsolete before being released to the public.
The people who get 'A' grades in courses consistently are often the people who nose along the syllabi as closely as possible. People who measure the success of the education in how well they digest and disgorge whatever limited scope of knowledge the professor decided upon.
When I was in tech school I wanted to know about the tech in general (I was already getting my A for the most part). People would groan in the lecture after I asked some particular question about electronics that went further than the course outline. Inevitably after I asked my question, someone else in class would ask 'is this going to be on the test?' and pencils would drop and people would stop paying attention for awhile.
People with 4.0 GPAs often are dandies or teacher's pets who have a hard time adapting to an unmanaged life in the real world. They do well in large corporations with layers of hierarchy where free study and unchanneled exploration are discouraged.
The question of wether the system will scale properly when you start throwing additional chunks of hardware at it would need to be addressed. I'd say that basing the size of the system on the generosity of alumni and contributors would be bad science.
I bought a cheap Rio player that plays CDRs with MP3s burned on them. For awhile I thought 'well, it's bigger physically, and it doesn't hold nearly as much.'. But then I thought again: 'well, I can carry a wallet with ten CDRs of my music on it, and I've got 7 gigs of music. An additional 6.5 gigs of music costs... uh, let's see... another ten CDR disks... two and a half bucks.
And I paid $80 for the Rio player. It's a Rio Volt.
And it uses two AA batteries that last ten+ hours. Then I can pull two more batteries out of my pocket and plug those in.
There are just too many reasons why someone like me is happier buying a CDR based player. Hell, if I want to listen to a CD on impulse that isn't ripped, I can even plug that in and play it.
Every boot floppy for CP/M, was unique and different for each platform it ran on. Or at least, there were a significant number of different CP/M floppy versions for a bunch of different platforms. There were probably several platforms that shared boot media.
It's wrong to try to change history. There was a degree of customization needed for CP/M that is unknown in the MS-DOS world (well, there are one or two 'odd' MS-DOS platforms, Tandy for one, but they're the exception). There was NOT a BIOS abstraction layer that prevented the need for customization on the bootable media.
Dude, you need to disable the macro that enters a carriage return/linefeed along with the period, every time you type a period on the keyboard. It really futzes up your text, and makes it look even more like didactic ranting that the actual verbal content makes obvious.
Your whole argeument is fraught with half-truths and distortions.
Your hatred of Microsoft disqualifies you from making rational arguement on this subject. Sadly, that's the case with most anti-Microsoft ranters, so history may end up rendering the lot of you as neo-luddites, which isn't the case.
The 'off flying his plane' story appears to be an U.L. that some have debunked. What has NOT been debunked is the strong culture-clash between Digital Research and IBM. The people running D.R. were the sort who would go out of their way to insult the 'dark suit, white shirt' sorts who ran IBM.
Gates and Microsoft were far more accomodating. Perhaps they 'sold out' to IBM in that regard. Bill Gates didn't die in a biker bar as a has-been, though.
OS/2 cost significantly more to run 'in the critical era' than Windows, because Windows 3 runs acceptably on a 286 machine with 4 megs of RAM. OS/2 needed at least 16 megs, and all that extra memory provided was additional layers of abstraction and additional subsystems of crap that people at the time didn't need for their everyday working. Remember, this was at a time when single 4 meg 30-pin SIMMs cost in excess of $400 apiece.
IBM was alone in vending OS/2 by version 2.0. I remember ordering the OS/2 2.0 disk set (it was practially free after a time, when IBM realised they were holding a bag of goods) and it wouldn't support my video hardware. At the time, the media kit cost less than the floppies themselves would have new, so people were ordering it for that purpose alone.
Also worth noting, and a strong reason why no OEMs would bundle OS/2 with their hardware is: Every sale of 'clone' hardware by Compaq or Compu-Add, or any of the players of that time involved a royalty payment to IBM, one of their competitors, if they bundled OS/2 with it. Vendors do NOT like to make substancial royalty payments to their competitor for each unit sold. Microsoft had no product in the hardware market competing with the cloners, it was a no-brainer to bundle Microsoft products with their offering.
Bullshit. I should type the preceeding word in All Caps.
IBM tried to take the 'PC' proprietary with OS/2 and the Microchannel architecture. They were at that time trying to 'KILL' the clone makers and open computing.
Remember, at that time most regular people in the PC business were making their money selling solutions cobbled on top of the open architecture of DOS. IBM rolled out OS/2 and MCA as a way to recapture and take over the world again. Luckily they were far too late, and too self-involved with being an evil empire to be in touch with the market, so they failed. IBM were a 'force of evil' in computing well into the 90's, if not to this day.
There were buttons and T-shirts against OS/2 and MCA. 'OS/2' as 'the wonderful anti-Windows alternative' came years later.
CP/M worked on the 8080, the Z-80, and somewhat on the 68000.
Each version of CP/M had to have it's own hand tweaked BIOS section. And I mean every version, that ran on every variant of system, not just cross-processor. So two different Z-80 systems each had to have their own adapted version of CP/M. The 'adaptation' involved assembly language coding of low-level I/O stuff.
Linus Torvalds was on record years ago as saying that he thought Microsoft Powerpoint was a really nice program. I remember reading it in Linux Journal back when I subscribed, four or five years ago.
Get an old Sun box. A SS5 should be enough. Or even a little IPX that you can get for free. They support a serial console, so you can unplug the framebuffer entirely and just use it like a classic UNIX box. I have a VT220 terminal for such purposes.
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That would buy Microsoft a heck of a lot of mercenaries.
They make Apple's processors, too.
Rightfully, this should be considered an 'IBM Victory' as much, or more, than an Apple one. Apple just punched out the sheet metal for the cases, and stuffed the boards, etc. They even brought in a third party OS.
So, what you're saying, is it's all a dicksize competition, kind of a sports thing.
Geeks often shrug when people start ranting about sports things.
It would set to work manufacturing clusters of robotic Guy Kawasakis and somebody would have to pull the power plug.
Can you imagine the power of a cluster of Guy Kawasakis?
And really, all Apple was doing was rebadging IBM Silicon in the first place.
'1984' evil empire indeed!
At the University of Minnesota, anyway, they have (or used to have) an arrogant program where all equipment obsoleted went to outstate warehouses and was stored for ten years or so before being scrapped. This had the happy result of insuring that the equipment was useless and obsolete before being released to the public.
Also, Apple needed the marketing bullet point.
The people who get 'A' grades in courses consistently are often the people who nose along the syllabi as closely as possible. People who measure the success of the education in how well they digest and disgorge whatever limited scope of knowledge the professor decided upon.
When I was in tech school I wanted to know about the tech in general (I was already getting my A for the most part). People would groan in the lecture after I asked some particular question about electronics that went further than the course outline. Inevitably after I asked my question, someone else in class would ask 'is this going to be on the test?' and pencils would drop and people would stop paying attention for awhile.
People with 4.0 GPAs often are dandies or teacher's pets who have a hard time adapting to an unmanaged life in the real world. They do well in large corporations with layers of hierarchy where free study and unchanneled exploration are discouraged.
The question of wether the system will scale properly when you start throwing additional chunks of hardware at it would need to be addressed. I'd say that basing the size of the system on the generosity of alumni and contributors would be bad science.
I bought a cheap Rio player that plays CDRs with MP3s burned on them. For awhile I thought 'well, it's bigger physically, and it doesn't hold nearly as much.'. But then I thought again: 'well, I can carry a wallet with ten CDRs of my music on it, and I've got 7 gigs of music. An additional 6.5 gigs of music costs... uh, let's see... another ten CDR disks... two and a half bucks.
And I paid $80 for the Rio player. It's a Rio Volt.
And it uses two AA batteries that last ten+ hours. Then I can pull two more batteries out of my pocket and plug those in.
There are just too many reasons why someone like me is happier buying a CDR based player. Hell, if I want to listen to a CD on impulse that isn't ripped, I can even plug that in and play it.
Another term for a product that isn't 'open ended', meaning that protocols can be added, is 'dead end.'
VAX is an operating system in your universe?
Wrong again.
Every boot floppy for CP/M, was unique and different for each platform it ran on. Or at least, there were a significant number of different CP/M floppy versions for a bunch of different platforms. There were probably several platforms that shared boot media.
It's wrong to try to change history. There was a degree of customization needed for CP/M that is unknown in the MS-DOS world (well, there are one or two 'odd' MS-DOS platforms, Tandy for one, but they're the exception). There was NOT a BIOS abstraction layer that prevented the need for customization on the bootable media.
Look Out Rotten Democrats: Republicans Of The Heartland.
(sorry, just got through reading my poly-tricks websites)
Dodge Darts live until the rear axle rusts off.
Oh, and the slant-six rules.
It's embedded in the commodity hardware these days.
Translation: it's better the way it is now.
Dude, you need to disable the macro that enters a carriage return/linefeed along with the period, every time you type a period on the keyboard. It really futzes up your text, and makes it look even more like didactic ranting that the actual verbal content makes obvious.
Calm down. Perhaps go take a ten minute break.
Your whole argeument is fraught with half-truths and distortions.
Your hatred of Microsoft disqualifies you from making rational arguement on this subject. Sadly, that's the case with most anti-Microsoft ranters, so history may end up rendering the lot of you as neo-luddites, which isn't the case.
The 'off flying his plane' story appears to be an U.L. that some have debunked. What has NOT been debunked is the strong culture-clash between Digital Research and IBM. The people running D.R. were the sort who would go out of their way to insult the 'dark suit, white shirt' sorts who ran IBM.
Gates and Microsoft were far more accomodating. Perhaps they 'sold out' to IBM in that regard. Bill Gates didn't die in a biker bar as a has-been, though.
Hold on a minute, here.
OS/2 cost significantly more to run 'in the critical era' than Windows, because Windows 3 runs acceptably on a 286 machine with 4 megs of RAM. OS/2 needed at least 16 megs, and all that extra memory provided was additional layers of abstraction and additional subsystems of crap that people at the time didn't need for their everyday working. Remember, this was at a time when single 4 meg 30-pin SIMMs cost in excess of $400 apiece.
IBM was alone in vending OS/2 by version 2.0. I remember ordering the OS/2 2.0 disk set (it was practially free after a time, when IBM realised they were holding a bag of goods) and it wouldn't support my video hardware. At the time, the media kit cost less than the floppies themselves would have new, so people were ordering it for that purpose alone.
Also worth noting, and a strong reason why no OEMs would bundle OS/2 with their hardware is: Every sale of 'clone' hardware by Compaq or Compu-Add, or any of the players of that time involved a royalty payment to IBM, one of their competitors, if they bundled OS/2 with it. Vendors do NOT like to make substancial royalty payments to their competitor for each unit sold. Microsoft had no product in the hardware market competing with the cloners, it was a no-brainer to bundle Microsoft products with their offering.
Bullshit. I should type the preceeding word in All Caps.
IBM tried to take the 'PC' proprietary with OS/2 and the Microchannel architecture. They were at that time trying to 'KILL' the clone makers and open computing.
Remember, at that time most regular people in the PC business were making their money selling solutions cobbled on top of the open architecture of DOS. IBM rolled out OS/2 and MCA as a way to recapture and take over the world again. Luckily they were far too late, and too self-involved with being an evil empire to be in touch with the market, so they failed. IBM were a 'force of evil' in computing well into the 90's, if not to this day.
There were buttons and T-shirts against OS/2 and MCA. 'OS/2' as 'the wonderful anti-Windows alternative' came years later.
CP/M worked on the 8080, the Z-80, and somewhat on the 68000.
Each version of CP/M had to have it's own hand tweaked BIOS section. And I mean every version, that ran on every variant of system, not just cross-processor. So two different Z-80 systems each had to have their own adapted version of CP/M. The 'adaptation' involved assembly language coding of low-level I/O stuff.
You're full of it, dude.
Up until DOS and later, Windows, OS'es worked on multiple platforms and actually WORKED, period!
What you say doesn't make sense?
Which OSes do you refer to? On what platforms?
Are you calling FORTRAN an 'OS'??
Linus Torvalds was on record years ago as saying that he thought Microsoft Powerpoint was a really nice program. I remember reading it in Linux Journal back when I subscribed, four or five years ago.
Get an old Sun box. A SS5 should be enough. Or even a little IPX that you can get for free. They support a serial console, so you can unplug the framebuffer entirely and just use it like a classic UNIX box. I have a VT220 terminal for such purposes.