Date: Fri, 10 Jun 2005 23:42:14 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Darwin...was, Re: Better than politics!

At 01:40 PM 6/10/05 -0400, Robert MacIntosh wrote:
>>From: "Michael Walsh" <MJW at press.jhu.edu>

>>Microsoft was far better at marketing themselves than any competitor.
>>
>>My immediate thought is that Microsoft was very very clever in having
>>their software bundled with IBM machines, and with the open architecture
>>of the IBM-PC, DOS, then Windows. became the default "standard", mainly
>>with those folks who wanted to, so to speak, putthe key in the ignition
>>and drive away. (None of this manual transmission stuff...)
>>
>It is worse than that. When IBM decided to develop the desktop style
>machines, the got really, really lazy and had some fast talkers develop the
>operating system. It's name - DOS, as in MS DOS. We have IBM to blame for
>Microsoft.

You're both sort of right.  I was into computers years before all that
happened, so I was reading the industry mags and BYTE at the time and
remember how it went, pretty much.  I've also seen interviews that went
over it later.  It was something like this:

o Bill gates started Microsoft with MS Basic.  He was busy porting it to
all sorts of machines and making a name for his company in the BASIC
interpreter market for PCs (note that this is a generic term, not a
trademark...).

o IBM was resisting getting into the PC market...they were a mainframe
company and didn't want to make toys and game machines.  Their customers
were asking them for it, the industry was talking about them "legitimizing"
PCs for business use, etc., so they eventually decided they had to do
that...that was around 1980.

o IBM got a bunch of their designers who were computer hobbyists together
and asked them what a PC should have.  They listed all their most cherished
desires, like a cassette interface, and maybe a floppy disk if that was
possible, and an 80 column screen, etc..

o IBM looked at the list and told them to build it...but they had to have
it to market in 18 months...which meant 12 months max for design and
debugging.  They panicked.  In order to speed up development, they decided
to re-use existing designs.  One of the guys had just worked on a cash
register, so they started there.  They doubled the bus width to 8 bits,
increased memory size, and brought the processor lines out to sockets for
I/O expansion cards.  They originally planned to use the 8086 processor,
which was 16 bits internal and external, but for cost reasons ended up
using the 8088 which is 16 bits internal but 8 bits external.

o Somewhere along the way they started looking for an OS.  CP/M was all the
rage at the time, but it was an 8 bit OS for the Z80 and 8080 chips, and
lacked fancy features like subfolders (user areas weren't very usable).
CP/M had been ported to the 8086/8088 by Digital Research (I think that's
who it was...) and IBM went to them for their OS...they planned to run
CP/M-86.  DR started giving them a hard time over the terms
though...wanting big royalties, and to keep the source code secret, etc.,
so IBM wanted some leverage to use in the negotiations.  That's where Bill
Gates comes in.

o IBM was already talking to MS about MS-BASIC...you had to have BASIC on
your PC in those days or nobody would buy it.  They asked him if he could
do an OS for them too.  Gates said he didn't know anything about writing an
OS (which history has shown to be a true statement), and IBM said they had
OS people they could lend him.  That's when Gates remembered a guy at the
local computer hackers club who has done a variant of CP/M for the
8086/8088.  I believe that guy's company was Seattle Computing or something
like that.  Bill called the guy up, and asked if he wanted to sell his OS,
and if so, how much.  The guy said something like $50,000 and Gates
agreed...then went back to IBM and said he had an OS for them...MS-DOS.
IBM negotiated the rights to the source, and a customized version to be
called PC-DOS, and DR was more or less out of the picture.  CP/M-86 was
available on early PCs, but IBM was pushing PC-DOS (which *was* better than
CP/M-86).

o With money from the sales of MS/PC-DOS through IBM, and then the clone
makers, MS grew like a weed, and the rest is history.  When Windows came
along Gates tried to claim it wasn't part of the deal with IBM to share
source code.  IBM disagreed and it went to court and Bill lost.  So long as
Windows was just a front-end on MS/PC-DOS it was part of the deal...that's
why Win-95 was born.  IBM tried to counter with OS-2, but they really
didn't understand the PC marketplace very well and it didn't make it
outside of corporate users, and with only that market to rest on, it pretty
much died from lack of support.

The PC is a kludge.  It was a hideous design in both hardware and software,
and there were better computers out at the time (The Victor 9000 for
example, which, except for the expansion slots, had everything the IBM
would eventually get years later (1.2 meg quad density floppies vs. the
IBM-PC's 160K single side, single density ones, an 800x600 monochrome
screen with graphics capability...IBM was lower res with no graphics other
than character style, 256K standard RAM vs. 64K standard, etc.).

There were better machines out shortly after it too, like the Macintosh and
the Amiga, but IBM was the big gorilla on the block, and once the clone
makers managed to win the law suits over their reverse-engineering the BIOS
so they could sell machines that ran MS-DOS and all the other software for
the IBM-PC and the 3rd party hardware makers could make expansion cards
without a license from IBM, the prices dropped and the IBM-PClones became
the standard...despite their serious shortcomings in design and capability.
 IBM tried to stop this with the MicroChannel bus in the PS-2, but was
soundly ignored.

The problem was that most of the folks buying PClones didn't know squat
about computers.  Neither did the journalists writing all the articles
extolling its virtues.  They just quotes the marketing materials and made
stuff up.  Both just figured that IBM did know computers, so anything they
put out must be good, and so they bought them.  Meanwhile, all the geeks
were shouting the truth, with detailed lists of the flaws and shortcomings,
but nobody listens to the experts...except other experts.  Eventually the
geeks gave up and started businesses catering to the flaws...so we got
companies selling graphics adapters, TSR programs, disk defragmenters,
communication software, repair services, anti-virus programs, etc., etc..

After 25 years of effort, MS finally has an OS that's just about up to 1980
state of the art...except in the areas of security, device driver support,
and a few others...but since they are still selling mostly to Joe Sixpack
and the experts who are told by their technopeasant managers what to buy,
they are still doing well...for now.  The geeks quietly went off and
started the open software movement, and now have an OS and all the
associated bells and whistles that is more efficient, more powerful, more
secure and more open than anything MS has...and it's free.  Linux is
growing fast in the server market, and starting to make some inroads on the
desktop among those who know computers.  It finally has what business
insists on: a company to call when anything goes wrong.  Actually there are
several of these companies (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc., etc.), and most of
them are a lot easier to reach than MS is when things go wrong.

Anyway, that's the way it's looked from here.

-- Mike B.
--
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates '81