[Gllug] Re: Gates to get Knighthood!!! (Andrew Halliwell)

[Christian Smith]

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005, Jack Bertram wrote:

>* Bruce Richardson <itsbruce at uklinux.net> [050303 16:42]:
>> On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:59:34PM +0000, Jack wrote:
>> > * Christian Smith <csmith at micromuse.com> [050303 15:36]:
>> > > For a start, we may not have been stuck with a single tasking, polling
>> > > synchronous IO operating system mess that was MS-DOS until 1995! DOS held
>> > > the industry back to 1983 PC standards for over ten years. In that time,
>> > > for example, SUN had moved from 68K and VME bus, through i386 with ISA,
>> > > and SPARC on VME, SBUS and finally PCI, and gone from a 32-bit platform to
>> > > 64-bit platform, with barely a hiccup by comparison. Similar story from
>> > > HP, DEC, IBM and all the other vendors who's operating systems actually
>> > > isolated the programs from the hardware, and all without 8.3 filename
>> > > restrictions!
>> >
>> > While I agree that DOS was limited in crucial respects, I think there
>> > are a number of interesting points here:
>> >
>> > * None of these other systems were able to compete against DOS, despite
>> > their technology superiority.
>>
>> Erm, that's effectively gibberish.  First of all, Smithy was comparing
>> architectures (Sun hardware versus Intel).  Secondly, for the time frame
>> that DOS was the main OS on Intel PCs, the quoted architectures and
>> Intel weren't in the same market, so competition is not an issue.
>
>Well, Christian was responding to my comment that there wasn't any
>evidence to suggest that we'd have something better without DOS.  He
>pointed out that there were better things, and I agreed but said it was
>irrelevant because they weren't competing against DOS.


Perhaps, but as PCs got more powerful, they started converging into the
workstation market, at which point they were held back by the inadequate
functionality of DOS/Windows. PCs just couldn't manage the IO that
workstations could because DOS didn't hide the ISA bus architecture, hence
holding PC hardware back for compatibility's sake until ~1995.


>
>> > This is despite the presence of competing
>> > operating systems (OS/2, CP/M) on the same architecture, and at least in
>> > the period we're talking about (pre-1992, say) it's difficult to accuse
>> > Microsoft of having a monopoly position.  After all, there were DOS
>> > clones available in those days too!  So I'm not convinced that
>> > Microsoft's "parasitism" was responsible for holding back the industry,
>> > nor that if Microsoft hadn't existed the industry would have progressed
>> > faster.
>>
>> Then I urge you to reconsider.  The thing is, almost nobody in the early
>> PC industry cared about DOS.  DOS was a piece of crap that barely
>> started a machine up.  Anthing useful was done by individual programs.
>> So nobody really cared that MS had an exclusive contract with IBM,
>> because they didn't care about DOS.  They wanted to run Visicalc.
>
>I agree.  But why did the vendors write software to run on DOS rather
>than the alternatives?  For a number of reasons, but the most important
>were (a) they didn't have sophisticated operating system needs and (b) DOS
>was cheap and ubiquitous.  So Microsoft were selling an operating system
>that was fit for purpose - while competitors were, arguably,
>overengineering their OSes.


Visicalc started as an Apple][ program, so people didn't target DOS until
it got entrenched. This was largely an IBM thing, then the clone market,
but certainly not a DOS thing. DOS was just along for the ride.


>
>> > needs (or uncovers latent needs, if you believe in these).  Given that
>> > noone bought these other technologies, arguing that they are superior is
>> > like arguing that Betamax was superior.  True from a technical sense,
>> > but too expensive to have any real-world impact, and hence not superior
>> > in the marketplace - which is the acid test.
>>
>> You are assuming a perfect market, with perfectly informed customers,
>> honest vendors and cool, rational thought all round.  The reality was a
>> very new industry where very little was obvious to most people and where
>> at least one vendor was doing its best to FUD and starve (economically)
>> the competition into oblivion.
>>
>> For example, GEM running on C-DOS offered a very usable GUI with
>> co-operative multitasking and an easy development language (Locomotive
>> Basic) on 8086 machines, long before MS was capable of offering anything
>> comparable.
>>
>>   The fact that that combination failed wasn't exclusively
>> because of MS' monopolistic tactics but it had a hell of a lot to do
>> with it.
>
>Well, I'd argue that at this point in time, it was MS's competitive
>tactics, not monopolistic tactics.  And I'm not assuming a perfect
>market, far from it. If it were a perfect market, then they would not
>have been able to turn their competitive advantage into a monopoly.


MS have abused their DOS monopoly almost from the start. MS compilers used
to generate code that checked the underlying DOS for 'compatibility'[0],
and complain to the user if the generated program was run on a non-MS DOS.
This is FUD tactics of the highest order.

MS also threatened to pull hardware vendors' licenses if they shipped
other, non-MS DOS, and how can we forget the per-processor licensing
charge (vendor would pay for DOS license even if they didn't ship DOS on
that box.)

All of this is pre-Windows 3.0, mid-80s. MS had a monopoly by the time the
IBM AT came out (1985) Hell, they probably had a monopoly when the XT was
released (1983).


>
>> > You could argue, then, that the ability of Microsoft to contribute to
>> > the creation of a dynamic market which addressed customers' needs was
>> > one of the things which has forced the progress of technology, rather
>> > than a limiting factor on it.
>>
>> But this is an argument made more often in ignorance than awareness.
>
>I think it's difficult to prove or disprove (at least when looking
>at the time period before Windows).  I do think (and I'm not accusing
>you of this) that the "evil Microsoft" argument is often made more
>becaues it's fashionable than because it's right.  Just because
>Microsoft has broken the law and is a monopoly doesn't mean that
>everything it has done throughout all its history has not been worth
>doing.  I've been arguing for a balanced viewpoint which acknowledges
>Microsoft's contribution to computing history as well as its negative
>effect on it.


MS contributions to computing history:
- MS BASIC ('nuff said)
- MS DOS (bought in 'technology' anyway)
- MS Windows (Not poorly designed. Not designed at all.)
- MS Bob
- That Paperclip thing.


>
>cheers,
>jack
>

Christian

[0] The test involved invoking some undocumented int 21h calls, which were
    essentially nops but left the registers in a specific state. The
    details are not at hand for now.

-- 
    /"\
    \ /    ASCII RIBBON CAMPAIGN - AGAINST HTML MAIL
     X                           - AGAINST MS ATTACHMENTS
    / \
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug