If Apple had seriously pushed Dylan when they were first working on it, it might have had a chance. But, today, we have Python, C#, Java, and C++, with mature implementations, lots of libraries, tons of books, and excellent environments to support them. Even if Dylan is arguably better, it is not enough better to catch on.
Maybe if the Dylan community created a killer IDE with a really high-quality implementation, it might still take off...
There is a way to check this: you do look at the important and successful projects, and you do look at what people do for a living. And you will find that they are usually employed by some employer that has an active interest in the open source projects they are working on (this includes university students, where it is part of education--also, in a sense, job related).
In fact, if you are in the US and working anywhere in the computer industry or academia, you usually cannot work on open source projects without your employer's permission because otherwise they would own everything you do.
Among the products included a microwave, fridge, coffee maker, toaster, dishwater and washer drier. These all tied into a control panel which could be accessed from a household computer which showed the status of each item.
Lots of companies are working on that. The thought that it is all run by software from a single company is scary. It would be even scarier if that company were Microsoft, given their track record on reliability, safety, and security.
The neatest was the implimentation of RFID with the fridge. Using RFID tags which they believe will be on all products in the next 5 - 10 years you can look up exactly what products are left and get a full inventory.
Again, obvious idea that lots of people have been working on.
We put them where they belong: into the X11 server. It is, in fact, depressing that the most common native X11 desktop fails to use standard X11 functionality and fails to work properly over remote connections, for this and many other reasons. KDE at least has the excuse that it's based on cross-platform technology, but Gnome is not.
And sure, let's only allow _one_ application to use the sound device at a time. That really sounds like progress...
Either Gnome should use a Gnome-independent network audio standard, or it should just leave the mixing to the kernel. There is no need for Gnome to invent and use its own sound daemon.
Open source isn't about hiring and paying people, it's about everyone working together to make better software for themselves
Most open source programmers are employed and get paid to do open source programming.
Open source isn't about some utopian, socialist community, it's about companies paying in order to develop software for their own benefit. Open source is a more efficient free market alternative to big software companies.
To put it more bluntly, you can hire a lot of well-paid programmers with the money people spend on Windows licenses--a lot more than the number Microsoft hires from their revenue.
As I was saying: the airlines are heavily subsidized, far more so than Amtrak. That's why they are cheaper, and that's why people choose them. In the US, I fly even short routes as well--what choice do I have?
Cincinnati to Dallas is pushing it for current train systems (that's about 1000 miles?)--that's going to take a lot longer on the train than on the plane (although it may still be more pleasant).
A sensible infrastructure would use planes for distances starting at around 500 miles and use trains integrated with the airports for shorter distances.
You are comparing apples and oranges. The.NET download includes the GUI libraries, lots of other libraries, the compiler, the linker, and tons of other tools (same incidentally for Java). The equivalent collection of libraries and tools for C/C++ is much bigger. Look around in/lib and/usr/lib and start adding things up.
In general, C/C++ libraries and tools tend to be much more bloated than.NET or Java libraries and tools: the byte code representation, reflection, and single runtime approach of.NET or Java actually give those languages an advantage when it comes to library and code size.
As for the "runtimes", 350k is quite a heavy-weight runtime, actually. Fortunately, all of these languages (C#, Java, C, C++) can be implemented with much smaller runtimes.
This was clearly a judgment call, not due to a formal analysis. NASA doesn't want to repair the Hubble, for various political and technical reasons.
And why should they do a formal analysis? The whole point of making Hubble human-serviceable was probably to serve as another ustification for the shuttle program. The rational, low-risk decision would have been to start planning on sending up an entire replacement telescope years ago, for less money and less risk than the service missions.
So, why start now with formal cost/risk/benefit analyses? No manned mission would survive that kind of analysis at this point: at this point, it's pretty much always cheaper and less risky to achieve whatever scientific or technological objective we have with unmanned missions.
If they can only survive through government funding, Amtrak obviously isn't being used enough to merit its existence.
Great! Let's apply that logic to planes and cars.
Why shouldn't their funds be cut. Right now, a train ticket does not cost significantly less than a plane ticket.
That's because the infrastructure and operating expenses necessary for flying are heavily subsidized by the government (i.e., your and my tax dollars)
Traveling from one side of the US to the other takes a matter of hours by plane, but days by train (I've done it both ways).
That's because the US railroad infrastructure is thoroughly obsolete--it doesn't haev to be that slow.
Of course, for coast-to-coast trips, planes will remain significantly faster for some time to come, but planes could be competitive for the most heavily traveled routes, up and down along the coast, within the mid-west, and other regional trips.
Windows Embedded refers either to Windows CE or to Windows XP Embedded. They are almost certainly going to be running Windows XP Embedded on these machines. That is basically your normal Windows XP with a different licensing agreement that gives you more options for customizing it: it's mostly the same codebase, it mostly has the same problems (security and otherwise).
That's the business attitude in general. The difference is that most products are so "cheap" that you really have to worry about the cost of suporting something like OS/2. That's why people port and move to other platforms, not because they enjoy it.
In the case of OS/2, IBM probably has a dozen people there basically just to keep the software for those laptops going. For most other products, that wouldn't be worth it.
For a community that still uses Fortran? I don't think that's their biggest concern.
You must have been "out of the loop" for the last decade: the scientific and engineering communities have shifted massively to C/C++, as well as to a variety of interpreted languages. Fortran is still a player, but it is not dominating the field anymore.
I don't see either Java or C# offering the raw speed that the scientific community wants.
People get raw speed by using highly tuned subroutine libraries. You can call those as easily from C# as you can from C, C++, or Fortran.
More generally, the bulk of any piece of software is not performance critical, so you can write that in the most convenient language and translate only the performance critical parts into whatever language is most convenient.
Java can't do that because it is hobbled by JNI, lack of multidimensional arrays, and other problems. C# is a good language for that kind of usage (in addition to being fast enough for most inner loops, even if you don't believe that).
The.NET download is just part of Windows now; sooner or later, you will need it, whether you want it or not. 65M is not all that large compared to other runtimes and libraries (C/C++ is much larger).
The real problem here is that somehow these machines installed malware. The problem could be that they are running IE, it could be that the malware is exploiting a bug, etc.
There is a simple solution: run Linux instead. That will protect you from both malware and.NET.
Apple has a long history of trying to use the legal system to its advantage when things aren't going its way in the market. In the look-and-feel lawsuits, Apple wanted to get legal ownership of all GUIs, which came to a crashing halt when the court was made aware that Apple didn't even invent the technology.
Microsoft hasn't done any such thing--they have focused aggressively on the business side of things: bundling agreements, volume discounts, marketing, etc. Obviously, Microsoft's strategy has been more successful; Microsoft has had no need for these kinds of legal tricks. In fact, Microsoft's conduct was perfectly fine until they started owning such a major part of the market.
I think in many ways, the world is better off with Microsoft in the driver's seat than with Apple--at least, so far, Microsoft's behavior has allowed open source to flourish. (Of course, in the future, Microsoft may emulate Apple's behavior when they feel sufficiently threatened.)
I don't think I said anything about which C# implementation or cluster tools to use. In fact, cluster computing with C# has already started independently of Microsoft, Microsoft's product announcement just creates more interest in this area.
And, yes, I agree: Linux + Mono is the way to go: a proven, open, high-performance cluster platform with a high-quality, open source language and runtime. I don't think Microsoft will be able to compete.
Actually, clustering started on platforms like Appolo and Cray.
No, it didn't. Those systems had a form of "clustering" (as did other systems before them), but not in the current sense of using large numbers of cheap commodity hardware. In different words, clustering technology was invented on other platforms, it started (i.e., took off in the real world) on the systems I mentioned.
(Emphasis added.) And where do you think Apple got clustering capabilities? [whistles sweetly, waits...]
Well, not from BSD UNIX because BSD UNIX didn't have any special facilities for clustering. BSD APIs happen to be supported by a lot of clustering software, but clustering software is fairly portable anyway.
Really, I don't see anywhere where the GP poster said anything about Apple inventing clustering.
I didn't object to any fictitious claim by him that Apple invented clustering, I objected to his implication that somehow this was some big battle between Apple and Microsoft. Neither of those companies has any relevance to the clustring market. Apple's attempts to enter it are as irrelevant at this point as Microsoft's. If anything, Microsoft has better technology with C# and provides a real alternative to the UNIX-based clustering systems (but they'll still fail because UNIX and FOSS systems will match and exceed them quickly).
I am considering an iBook,
I suppose the grass is always greener... the one thing I can say for mine is that power management works, something that's a pain to get working on many x86 laptops. Other than that, it's a very mixed bag. Nice theming, some nice standard applications, UNIX command line, but poor WiFi range, sluggish and proprietary window system, limited software selection, painful system management in many areas, etc. If you mostly spend your time at the command line and are looking for some commercial GUI apps, it's a good choice. If you want to use Gnome or KDE apps, or if you develop any kind of graphical software based on X11, forget it.
First of all, scientists are no dummies; C# is a much nicer language than Fortran 77 and (with the right class libraries) nicer than Fortran 9x, and it's not a very complicated language, so they'll probably just use it.
Furthermore, a lot of scientific libraries are now written in C and C++, for which there are already compilers with CLR backends.
But there is no need to recompile: unlike Java, C# and the CLR have very fast and easy to use native interfaces, so you can just keep your existing binaries and call them from C#. This is also important for calling things like PVM and MPI.
But, yes, you probably will also see Fortran-to-CLR compilers.
Technically, I think C# is a great language for scientific and cluster computing, unlike, say, Java. Whether you want to use Microsoft-designed languages, APIs, and/or software is another question.
Clustering was started on platforms like Sun and Linux. Yet, there is no mention of that in your posting--you talk as if it was Apple and Microsoft. Yeah, Apple has been in the news because they put themselves there.
Cluster computing is still the domain of Linux, BSD, and Solaris, and there is no indication that that is changing at all, glitzy press releases from Apple and Microsoft notwithstanding.
C# is a winner for these kinds of applications: it is far simpler and less error prone than C++, yet it offers crucial features for compute-intensive jobs like value classes, multidimensional arrays, efficient genericity, overloading, an efficient and simple native code interface, and some other language improvements.
Sun really screwed this up with Java: if they had taken the scientific and numerical communities seriously and added the necessary features to Java, Java could be the undisputed winner in this market. Instead, Sun kept Java proprietary, played politics with it, and ultimately turned into a bloated web applications platform.
Sun has been claiming that they will be coming out with a separate Java-like numerical language, but that will likely be too little too late.
The computer professionals you refer to were elitists
No, the computer professionals I refer to are computer scientists, computer engineers, and professional developers.
UNIX was and is a piece of crap. The user interface was designed for elites who could be bothered to fight the system.
Actually, UNIX was widely used by non-experts for E-mail, calendaring, and desktop publishing, who had no trouble interacting with it. Many still prefer it to this day.
But if you like GUIs, you could already get several excellent GUI-based systems, including the Alto and Smalltalk-80.
In fact, Windows XP, Linux, and OS X all use preemptive multitasking (as opposed to cooperative multitasking). The Wikipedia article on multitasking explains correctly how this all works and what the terms mean.
Given your claim that you were actually involved in the development of 8086-based systems, you provide an excellent illustration of what kind of people were building the PC: you didn't know what you were doing then and you still don't 25 years later.
We are talking about an 8086 here and the OS you could use with it. Multitask? Gosh, that thing had a hard time doing one task all the way through. There is no way you can multitask an 8086, sorry.
Digital Research had MP/M-86 in 1981 (same year MS-DOS was released), and Minix runs a UNIX-like system on the 8086, so your assertion is just wrong in the face of facts.
In fact, the 8086 was, in many ways, a nicer processor for building multi-tasking operating systems than, say, the 68000.
Microsoft? Sorry that didn't exist either. It was Gates and his buddy who supplied IBM with code on the first go around.
Microsoft was already a well-established software company at the time they started shipping MS-DOS: they had shipped Microsoft Basic for the Altair in 1975, and later for the Apple II and CP/M.
Gates had absolutely no decision in what OS was pushed. He was hired by IBM to write what they wanted. That's what he did.
Microsoft wasn't "hired by IBM to write what they wanted", Microsoft offered a system to IBM when they were asked whether they had anything. It turned out they didn't actually have the product they were offering (some things just never change), so they quickly went out and licensed code from someone else. Furthermore, IBM didn't have much to say about the MS-DOS design.
The main ring of the circus held IBM who was launching the PC and needed an operating system.
Yes, and whoever they gave that task to was going to dominate the PC industry, no matter what garbage they shipped. IBM really started the PC revolution through their brand name and recognition. The fact that the PC succeeded despite using MS-DOS is a testament to the strength of IBM's position.
You guys are bickering over trivial items that were sidebars at the time.
I'm not "bickering" at all. I'm pointing out that MS-DOS was a piece of shit from the start and that lots of people knew that at the time. Claims that MS-DOS had any technical merits or introduced anything of value to the computer industry are completely baseless.
I remember, I was there too.
Then you weren't paying much attention: you are wrong about both what was technically possible (in fact, what was technically standard) and about lots of business issues.
But it is somewhat ironic that you would point out the limitations of the 6502 to bash Bill Gates since he personaly wrote the code that made the Apple ][, the Commodore PET and most of the rest of the Micros possible, Microsoft Basic.
The Apple II was developed with, and shipped with, Integer Basic. Microsoft Basic was a later addition once the machine was already well on its way.
The market rejected Pascal because it was a piece of elitist crap designed to make students 'program properly'.
Pascal was designed as a teaching language; it was never intended to be used by "the market". That doesn't make it "elitist crap", it makes it a well-designed language that has been used wrong.
And Pascal was anything but rejected by the market: once the few things it needed for a real-world language were added, it was a huge commercial success: Turbo Pascal, Lisa, Macintosh, and one of the major non-UNIX workstation OS's were written in it.
That is the big difference between the geek elite and ordinary people. Ordinary people want to do a job with a minimum of fuss and the geek elite want to convert them to their way of thinking.
Bullshit. In the 1980's, there were computer professionals and then there were people who didn't know what they were doing. The latter promised easy solutions and failed to deliver--they didn't even understand the problems.
Well, obviously nobody was running BSD and Smalltalk on $2000 desktop PCs.
That's far from "obvious". While 4.1BSD wouldn't have run on a PC, the machine could have easily run a reasonable multi-tasking OS with a decent file system. I know because I had written such an OS for an 8 bit microcomputer as a student project. There were also several commercial offerings. And the 8086's memory model wasn't all that different from a PDP-11, so some PDP-11 UNIX could have been ported to it.
Just four years later, Amiga came out with AmigaOS, which was a microkernel and GUI running on a machine without MMU and with fairly little memory, costing half of what a PC did.
One thing that people forget is the "hacker" mentality in early microcomputing. People wanted to run things right on the metal, with as little overhead as possible. Developers rewrote chunks of DOS and BIOS for tiny speed increases.
So, stupid was selling operating systems to stupid. What's your point?
The OS that Microsoft *really* wanted to push was not MS-DOS, but MS Xenix which was a cut-down version of UNIX.
I was around at the time, and let me tell you: Microsoft wasn't "pushing" Xenix. If there had been any way to get my fingers on a copy, I would have.
Unfortunately for everyone, MS's master IBM never was interested,
Yes, IBM wanted a lousy OS for the PC, and in MS, they found a company idealy suited to supplying it. What's your point?
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If Apple had seriously pushed Dylan when they were first working on it, it might have had a chance. But, today, we have Python, C#, Java, and C++, with mature implementations, lots of libraries, tons of books, and excellent environments to support them. Even if Dylan is arguably better, it is not enough better to catch on.
Maybe if the Dylan community created a killer IDE with a really high-quality implementation, it might still take off...
There is a way to check this: you do look at the important and successful projects, and you do look at what people do for a living. And you will find that they are usually employed by some employer that has an active interest in the open source projects they are working on (this includes university students, where it is part of education--also, in a sense, job related).
In fact, if you are in the US and working anywhere in the computer industry or academia, you usually cannot work on open source projects without your employer's permission because otherwise they would own everything you do.
Among the products included a microwave, fridge, coffee maker, toaster, dishwater and washer drier. These all tied into a control panel which could be accessed from a household computer which showed the status of each item.
Lots of companies are working on that. The thought that it is all run by software from a single company is scary. It would be even scarier if that company were Microsoft, given their track record on reliability, safety, and security.
The neatest was the implimentation of RFID with the fridge. Using RFID tags which they believe will be on all products in the next 5 - 10 years you can look up exactly what products are left and get a full inventory.
Again, obvious idea that lots of people have been working on.
How would we deal with common variables?
We put them where they belong: into the X11 server. It is, in fact, depressing that the most common native X11 desktop fails to use standard X11 functionality and fails to work properly over remote connections, for this and many other reasons. KDE at least has the excuse that it's based on cross-platform technology, but Gnome is not.
And sure, let's only allow _one_ application to use the sound device at a time. That really sounds like progress...
Either Gnome should use a Gnome-independent network audio standard, or it should just leave the mixing to the kernel. There is no need for Gnome to invent and use its own sound daemon.
Open source isn't about hiring and paying people, it's about everyone working together to make better software for themselves
Most open source programmers are employed and get paid to do open source programming.
Open source isn't about some utopian, socialist community, it's about companies paying in order to develop software for their own benefit. Open source is a more efficient free market alternative to big software companies.
To put it more bluntly, you can hire a lot of well-paid programmers with the money people spend on Windows licenses--a lot more than the number Microsoft hires from their revenue.
As I was saying: the airlines are heavily subsidized, far more so than Amtrak. That's why they are cheaper, and that's why people choose them. In the US, I fly even short routes as well--what choice do I have?
Cincinnati to Dallas is pushing it for current train systems (that's about 1000 miles?)--that's going to take a lot longer on the train than on the plane (although it may still be more pleasant).
A sensible infrastructure would use planes for distances starting at around 500 miles and use trains integrated with the airports for shorter distances.
You are comparing apples and oranges. The .NET download includes the GUI libraries, lots of other libraries, the compiler, the linker, and tons of other tools (same incidentally for Java). The equivalent collection of libraries and tools for C/C++ is much bigger. Look around in /lib and /usr/lib and start adding things up.
.NET or Java libraries and tools: the byte code representation, reflection, and single runtime approach of .NET or Java actually give those languages an advantage when it comes to library and code size.
In general, C/C++ libraries and tools tend to be much more bloated than
As for the "runtimes", 350k is quite a heavy-weight runtime, actually. Fortunately, all of these languages (C#, Java, C, C++) can be implemented with much smaller runtimes.
This was clearly a judgment call, not due to a formal analysis. NASA doesn't want to repair the Hubble, for various political and technical reasons.
And why should they do a formal analysis? The whole point of making Hubble human-serviceable was probably to serve as another ustification for the shuttle program. The rational, low-risk decision would have been to start planning on sending up an entire replacement telescope years ago, for less money and less risk than the service missions.
So, why start now with formal cost/risk/benefit analyses? No manned mission would survive that kind of analysis at this point: at this point, it's pretty much always cheaper and less risky to achieve whatever scientific or technological objective we have with unmanned missions.
If they can only survive through government funding, Amtrak obviously isn't being used enough to merit its existence.
Great! Let's apply that logic to planes and cars.
Why shouldn't their funds be cut. Right now, a train ticket does not cost significantly less than a plane ticket.
That's because the infrastructure and operating expenses necessary for flying are heavily subsidized by the government (i.e., your and my tax dollars)
Traveling from one side of the US to the other takes a matter of hours by plane, but days by train (I've done it both ways).
That's because the US railroad infrastructure is thoroughly obsolete--it doesn't haev to be that slow.
Of course, for coast-to-coast trips, planes will remain significantly faster for some time to come, but planes could be competitive for the most heavily traveled routes, up and down along the coast, within the mid-west, and other regional trips.
Windows Embedded refers either to Windows CE or to Windows XP Embedded. They are almost certainly going to be running Windows XP Embedded on these machines. That is basically your normal Windows XP with a different licensing agreement that gives you more options for customizing it: it's mostly the same codebase, it mostly has the same problems (security and otherwise).
That's the business attitude in general. The difference is that most products are so "cheap" that you really have to worry about the cost of suporting something like OS/2. That's why people port and move to other platforms, not because they enjoy it.
In the case of OS/2, IBM probably has a dozen people there basically just to keep the software for those laptops going. For most other products, that wouldn't be worth it.
For a community that still uses Fortran? I don't think that's their biggest concern.
You must have been "out of the loop" for the last decade: the scientific and engineering communities have shifted massively to C/C++, as well as to a variety of interpreted languages. Fortran is still a player, but it is not dominating the field anymore.
I don't see either Java or C# offering the raw speed that the scientific community wants.
People get raw speed by using highly tuned subroutine libraries. You can call those as easily from C# as you can from C, C++, or Fortran.
More generally, the bulk of any piece of software is not performance critical, so you can write that in the most convenient language and translate only the performance critical parts into whatever language is most convenient.
Java can't do that because it is hobbled by JNI, lack of multidimensional arrays, and other problems. C# is a good language for that kind of usage (in addition to being fast enough for most inner loops, even if you don't believe that).
The .NET download is just part of Windows now; sooner or later, you will need it, whether you want it or not. 65M is not all that large compared to other runtimes and libraries (C/C++ is much larger).
.NET.
The real problem here is that somehow these machines installed malware. The problem could be that they are running IE, it could be that the malware is exploiting a bug, etc.
There is a simple solution: run Linux instead. That will protect you from both malware and
Apple has a long history of trying to use the legal system to its advantage when things aren't going its way in the market. In the look-and-feel lawsuits, Apple wanted to get legal ownership of all GUIs, which came to a crashing halt when the court was made aware that Apple didn't even invent the technology.
Microsoft hasn't done any such thing--they have focused aggressively on the business side of things: bundling agreements, volume discounts, marketing, etc. Obviously, Microsoft's strategy has been more successful; Microsoft has had no need for these kinds of legal tricks. In fact, Microsoft's conduct was perfectly fine until they started owning such a major part of the market.
I think in many ways, the world is better off with Microsoft in the driver's seat than with Apple--at least, so far, Microsoft's behavior has allowed open source to flourish. (Of course, in the future, Microsoft may emulate Apple's behavior when they feel sufficiently threatened.)
I don't think I said anything about which C# implementation or cluster tools to use. In fact, cluster computing with C# has already started independently of Microsoft, Microsoft's product announcement just creates more interest in this area.
And, yes, I agree: Linux + Mono is the way to go: a proven, open, high-performance cluster platform with a high-quality, open source language and runtime. I don't think Microsoft will be able to compete.
Actually, clustering started on platforms like Appolo and Cray.
No, it didn't. Those systems had a form of "clustering" (as did other systems before them), but not in the current sense of using large numbers of cheap commodity hardware. In different words, clustering technology was invented on other platforms, it started (i.e., took off in the real world) on the systems I mentioned.
(Emphasis added.) And where do you think Apple got clustering capabilities? [whistles sweetly, waits...]
Well, not from BSD UNIX because BSD UNIX didn't have any special facilities for clustering. BSD APIs happen to be supported by a lot of clustering software, but clustering software is fairly portable anyway.
Really, I don't see anywhere where the GP poster said anything about Apple inventing clustering.
I didn't object to any fictitious claim by him that Apple invented clustering, I objected to his implication that somehow this was some big battle between Apple and Microsoft. Neither of those companies has any relevance to the clustring market. Apple's attempts to enter it are as irrelevant at this point as Microsoft's. If anything, Microsoft has better technology with C# and provides a real alternative to the UNIX-based clustering systems (but they'll still fail because UNIX and FOSS systems will match and exceed them quickly).
I am considering an iBook,
I suppose the grass is always greener... the one thing I can say for mine is that power management works, something that's a pain to get working on many x86 laptops. Other than that, it's a very mixed bag. Nice theming, some nice standard applications, UNIX command line, but poor WiFi range, sluggish and proprietary window system, limited software selection, painful system management in many areas, etc. If you mostly spend your time at the command line and are looking for some commercial GUI apps, it's a good choice. If you want to use Gnome or KDE apps, or if you develop any kind of graphical software based on X11, forget it.
First of all, scientists are no dummies; C# is a much nicer language than Fortran 77 and (with the right class libraries) nicer than Fortran 9x, and it's not a very complicated language, so they'll probably just use it.
Furthermore, a lot of scientific libraries are now written in C and C++, for which there are already compilers with CLR backends.
But there is no need to recompile: unlike Java, C# and the CLR have very fast and easy to use native interfaces, so you can just keep your existing binaries and call them from C#. This is also important for calling things like PVM and MPI.
But, yes, you probably will also see Fortran-to-CLR compilers.
Technically, I think C# is a great language for scientific and cluster computing, unlike, say, Java. Whether you want to use Microsoft-designed languages, APIs, and/or software is another question.
Clustering was started on platforms like Sun and Linux. Yet, there is no mention of that in your posting--you talk as if it was Apple and Microsoft. Yeah, Apple has been in the news because they put themselves there.
Cluster computing is still the domain of Linux, BSD, and Solaris, and there is no indication that that is changing at all, glitzy press releases from Apple and Microsoft notwithstanding.
C# is a winner for these kinds of applications: it is far simpler and less error prone than C++, yet it offers crucial features for compute-intensive jobs like value classes, multidimensional arrays, efficient genericity, overloading, an efficient and simple native code interface, and some other language improvements.
Sun really screwed this up with Java: if they had taken the scientific and numerical communities seriously and added the necessary features to Java, Java could be the undisputed winner in this market. Instead, Sun kept Java proprietary, played politics with it, and ultimately turned into a bloated web applications platform.
Sun has been claiming that they will be coming out with a separate Java-like numerical language, but that will likely be too little too late.
The computer professionals you refer to were elitists
No, the computer professionals I refer to are computer scientists, computer engineers, and professional developers.
UNIX was and is a piece of crap. The user interface was designed for elites who could be bothered to fight the system.
Actually, UNIX was widely used by non-experts for E-mail, calendaring, and desktop publishing, who had no trouble interacting with it. Many still prefer it to this day.
But if you like GUIs, you could already get several excellent GUI-based systems, including the Alto and Smalltalk-80.
In fact, Windows XP, Linux, and OS X all use preemptive multitasking (as opposed to cooperative multitasking). The Wikipedia article on multitasking explains correctly how this all works and what the terms mean.
Given your claim that you were actually involved in the development of 8086-based systems, you provide an excellent illustration of what kind of people were building the PC: you didn't know what you were doing then and you still don't 25 years later.
We are talking about an 8086 here and the OS you could use with it. Multitask? Gosh, that thing had a hard time doing one task all the way through. There is no way you can multitask an 8086, sorry.
Digital Research had MP/M-86 in 1981 (same year MS-DOS was released), and Minix runs a UNIX-like system on the 8086, so your assertion is just wrong in the face of facts.
In fact, the 8086 was, in many ways, a nicer processor for building multi-tasking operating systems than, say, the 68000.
Microsoft? Sorry that didn't exist either. It was Gates and his buddy who supplied IBM with code on the first go around.
Microsoft was already a well-established software company at the time they started shipping MS-DOS: they had shipped Microsoft Basic for the Altair in 1975, and later for the Apple II and CP/M.
Gates had absolutely no decision in what OS was pushed. He was hired by IBM to write what they wanted. That's what he did.
Microsoft wasn't "hired by IBM to write what they wanted", Microsoft offered a system to IBM when they were asked whether they had anything. It turned out they didn't actually have the product they were offering (some things just never change), so they quickly went out and licensed code from someone else. Furthermore, IBM didn't have much to say about the MS-DOS design.
The main ring of the circus held IBM who was launching the PC and needed an operating system.
Yes, and whoever they gave that task to was going to dominate the PC industry, no matter what garbage they shipped. IBM really started the PC revolution through their brand name and recognition. The fact that the PC succeeded despite using MS-DOS is a testament to the strength of IBM's position.
You guys are bickering over trivial items that were sidebars at the time.
I'm not "bickering" at all. I'm pointing out that MS-DOS was a piece of shit from the start and that lots of people knew that at the time. Claims that MS-DOS had any technical merits or introduced anything of value to the computer industry are completely baseless.
I remember, I was there too.
Then you weren't paying much attention: you are wrong about both what was technically possible (in fact, what was technically standard) and about lots of business issues.
But it is somewhat ironic that you would point out the limitations of the 6502 to bash Bill Gates since he personaly wrote the code that made the Apple ][, the Commodore PET and most of the rest of the Micros possible, Microsoft Basic.
The Apple II was developed with, and shipped with, Integer Basic. Microsoft Basic was a later addition once the machine was already well on its way.
The market rejected Pascal because it was a piece of elitist crap designed to make students 'program properly'.
Pascal was designed as a teaching language; it was never intended to be used by "the market". That doesn't make it "elitist crap", it makes it a well-designed language that has been used wrong.
And Pascal was anything but rejected by the market: once the few things it needed for a real-world language were added, it was a huge commercial success: Turbo Pascal, Lisa, Macintosh, and one of the major non-UNIX workstation OS's were written in it.
That is the big difference between the geek elite and ordinary people. Ordinary people want to do a job with a minimum of fuss and the geek elite want to convert them to their way of thinking.
Bullshit. In the 1980's, there were computer professionals and then there were people who didn't know what they were doing. The latter promised easy solutions and failed to deliver--they didn't even understand the problems.
Well, obviously nobody was running BSD and Smalltalk on $2000 desktop PCs.
That's far from "obvious". While 4.1BSD wouldn't have run on a PC, the machine could have easily run a reasonable multi-tasking OS with a decent file system. I know because I had written such an OS for an 8 bit microcomputer as a student project. There were also several commercial offerings. And the 8086's memory model wasn't all that different from a PDP-11, so some PDP-11 UNIX could have been ported to it.
Just four years later, Amiga came out with AmigaOS, which was a microkernel and GUI running on a machine without MMU and with fairly little memory, costing half of what a PC did.
One thing that people forget is the "hacker" mentality in early microcomputing. People wanted to run things right on the metal, with as little overhead as possible. Developers rewrote chunks of DOS and BIOS for tiny speed increases.
So, stupid was selling operating systems to stupid. What's your point?
The OS that Microsoft *really* wanted to push was not MS-DOS, but MS Xenix which was a cut-down version of UNIX.
I was around at the time, and let me tell you: Microsoft wasn't "pushing" Xenix. If there had been any way to get my fingers on a copy, I would have.
Unfortunately for everyone, MS's master IBM never was interested,
Yes, IBM wanted a lousy OS for the PC, and in MS, they found a company idealy suited to supplying it. What's your point?
I seem to remember that the 5150 model PC shipped without an operating system.
No, it usually shipped with an OS, it just wasn't preinstalled or "bundled". But you didn't have much of a choice anyway.
I mean do you imagine that IBM just put a piece of hardware on the market without having arranged for an OS???