[Gllug] Re: Gates to get Knighthood!!!

[Richard Jones]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2005 at 04:31:09PM -0000, David Abbishaw wrote:
> 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.  Dos -> Windows etc
> really sold that hardware, and probably made people want to clone it. Thus
> cheap commodity PCs became easily available.

CP/M 86 perhaps?  You could get it for the PC when the PC was first
released.

In those days the barrier to writing an operating system was really
not great.  You can actually grab the source for CP/M these days.
It's pretty tiny.  Remember that QDOS (the original name of MS-DOS
before it was acquired by Microsoft for $100,000) was written by one
man in 2 months[1].  It was even called the "Quick and Dirty Operating
System".

(Note I'm not arguing that Mr Gates isn't very smart.  He's obviously
very smart indeed.  Perhaps he deserves AN honour for that.)

> but people still keep on buying and stealing :) his products.

This is not a valid argument when dealing with proprietary lock-in.
See previous posting about monopolies.

Rich.

[1] http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/dos.htm

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Richard Jones, CTO Merjis Ltd.
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