[Gllug] RE: : Gates to get Knighthood!!! - Here comes a rerant

[David Abbishaw]

Really wish this list was Colour sometimes to aid in posting, but hopefully
you'll pick out my rant.  Please if I have my history wrong please point it
out but I want proof OK!

Message: 8
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2005 16:52:06 -0000 (GMT)
From: "John Winters" <john at sinodun.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [Gllug] Re: Gates to get Knighthood!!!
To: "Greater London Linux User Group" <gllug at gllug.org.uk>
Message-ID:
	<14811.80.229.33.228.1109782326.squirrel at webmail.sinodun.org.uk>
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-15

> I really didn't want to get into a war over this one BUT....
>
> Before Bill gates came along and started offering (sorry licensing - and
> that's very important if you know his history) Dos to IBM (and just for
> that
> hat I used to work for IBM and wasn't keen on the company at all.), IBM
> did
> not have anything sensible to run on their hardware.

>>Err, no.  The original IBM-PC came with a choice of 3 operating system. 
>>Microsoft just did the best job of ensuring their option was pre-loaded.

On August 12, 1981, IBM introduced its new revolution in a box, the
"Personal Computer" complete with a brand new operating system from
Microsoft and a 16-bit computer operating system called MS-DOS 1.0  - I
don't recall what the other os/s were can anyone rememeber?  I was only 4 at
the time.  I think BASIC might have been one but really as OS?  Hmm
debatable in its self I think.

And the alternatives at the time?  Well Atari and Acorn were there in the
home market.  There was qdos (which MSDOS was based/written on) There was
CP/M (which qdos was based upon)

MS actually purchased qdos for about $50K before it went to IBM with DOS

Apple had lisa and of course Xerox was there, of which neither had an x86
version I believe.  Apple spent millions trying to make and market lisa (the
first desktop computer with a gui (oh they used staff from Xerox for that))
and sold about 10'000 units.  IBM were the only company using off the shelf
parts to make the PC.  And until it was released there weren't clones but
other non compatible intel x86 processors (or rather 8088)  Does anyone
count the IBM 5100 as a PC?

Now MS has down a wonderful job at marketing and I doubt anyone can deny
that but you can't market something truly awful to the masses or we would
all be buying buckets of dung. :)

Now wheres Linux in all this - well in 10 years time Linus would release
some thing small that worked. In the mean time the GNU project would start
creating a compiler and tools (GCC) and really help put it all together. But
GNU well most of those tools were inspired by Unix.  And this beast that
Linus wrote well it was for 386 and inspired a lot by the fact you had to
licence minix.

If you want to know more read http://www.linuxgazette.com/node/9721







>  Dos -> Windows etc
> really sold that hardware, and probably made people want to clone it. Thus
> cheap commodity PCs became easily available.

Again, not true.  People were into cloning PCs long, long before Windows
arrived on the scene.  The actual killer application which created a
market for clones and dictated how close a clone they had to be was Lotus
1-2-3.  Not a Microsoft product at all.


If we didn't have Dos then Windows make the PC sell so well I doubt the
quantity of people making clones would be near to what it was, at it's the
quantity of people here that's important.  Sun SPARCs were cloned but not to
anywhere near the same quantity and they didn't change the world.


> Yes maybe someone else would have got there BUT they didn't

But without Bill Gates getting there, someone else undoubtedly would have.
 Whether they'd have been quite as into iffy business practices as he is
is open to debate, but the fact remains we would still have had commodity
PCs and users would probably have had a lot less pain if we'd had a
technology company (instead of a marketing company) making the most money.


I think the point here is that Bill Gates changed the way computers got to
the masses, yes someone else may have got there buy they didn't he did.  At
the time there was lots of competition and however he did it people bought
his products and they are now part of everyday life.  And that's history.

On a side not Minix the OS that Linux used to develop Linux on and probably
showed him the way (at least to improve on (it was only 12000 lines of
code)) was designed for the IBM PC, it was ported to other hardware at least
until version 2.  But would that have been the same without the PC and would
the PC have sold so well without DOS, the IBM 5100 didn't!



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