RE: Why

["Paul McHale" <pmchale@doubleesolutions.com>]

Nate,

> saw a mac install once, looked nice.  but at the same time they dont have
> a tenth(or even a hundredth?) amount of hardware to support, and with
> their closed arch. its quite easy to ensure compadiblity.

A little long and historical, but bear with me.  I don't think it's that
bad.

I think you just hit on what got us into this whole mess in the first place.
The rise of MS.  Not too long ago, people basically ran in DOS mode with the
application called windows 3.x.  When you bought software (especially games)
you would install it telling the software what type sound card you had, etc.
We begged unix companies to produce a commercial unix for the brain damaged
x86 architecture.  We needed to run those cool unix apps but couldn't afford
to pay $10K for a unix workstation plus 20% more for maintenance (read
support).

Commercial unix was in the high dollar vertical market and mistakenly blew
off the growing PC market.  The MS did the second best thing to happen to
the PC (as I zip up my asbestos undies), they released Win95.  This was
generational.  It offered preemptive multitasking, trivial GUI based peer to
peer networking with resource sharing (something neither unix or Novell do
to this day)and common developer API.  My games no longer cared what sound
card I had or how much memory I had below 640K.  About the same time NT 3.51
came out with 4.0 being developed.

Then magic took place.  The unix developers finally started developing
workstation apps for the PCs.  Several years ago, we replaced a $10K unix
workstation with a $3K PC (NT) which ran circles around the unix
workstation.  NT, despite criticisms, is reasonably stable as a workstation
for day to day use.  Most people power them off every night anyway.

This was the true beginning of ms domination.  Big blue saw this and tried
to enter with OS/2.  They screwed up and got in bed with ms.  A losing
proposition for many.  I believe you either work for ms or are in ms's way.

This is when the best thing to happen to PCs took place.  Linux.  I am not
just saying that to reduce flames from earlier comments.  Win95 was crucial
for business.  There just wasn't anything else available.  Shame on sun,
sgi, concurrent and all the rest who foolishly competed with the PC and not
the OS.  One could either say they failed to fill the void and ms didn't.
Either way, it created the very environment ms needed and they took it.

Another interesting point.  If commercial unix had taken over the PC, would
we have been better off?  Their prices and customer relations we a joke.
Very limited vendor compatibility.  We bought them because we had to.  Oddly
enough, microsoft spanked them into line a little.  Now ms needs their come
uppance.

Linux is now keeping the monster at bay.  Without Linux, I don't want to
think of what ms would be doing.


paul

--
Paul McHale
   Work:   937-253-7610          Double E Solutions
   Mobile: 937-371-2828          4912 Effingham
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