[Klug-general] Bill Gates is a Funny, Smart Conman

[Stuart Buckland]

On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 10:16 +0000, Karl Lattimer wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-01-15 at 09:30 +0000, Karl Buckland wrote:
> > Peter Childs wrote:
> > > If Bill had not given us windows some body else would have given us 
> > > something else much much worse.
> > >
> > > Mind you looking back the Atari, Amiga and early Mac were better than 
> > > 3.1 in there day..... Saying that how much is my working Atari ST with 
> > > 1Mb of Memory and 20Mb hard disk worth now....
> 
> Probably more than an IBM PC or clone running windows 2.0 (which I
> believe was the same generation as the first Atari ST)
> 
> > > Peter.
> > It is certainly debatable whether anyone else would have provided 
> > something better. I'm glad it wasn't Apple, otherwise they'd be 
> > controlling our software AND hardware. Can you imagine how painful that 
> > might be?
> 
> This has turned into quite an interesting causality question... What
> would the world have been like wrt operating systems if Sir Bill of
> Seattle didn't exist.
> 
> Interesting links in the causal chain
> 
<really big snip>

If we're speculating....

Had Gates and Microsoft never existed I wonder if OS/2 could have become
the dominant OS.  It was certainly big in business for a while.  

Of course it could also be argued OS/2 would not have existed (as we
know it) without Microsoft.

Stu


-- 
Stuart Buckland <stuart at nightime.org.uk>