Date: Sat, 11 Jun 2005 15:37:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Darwin...was, Re: Better than politics!

From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com> wrote:

> o Bill gates started Microsoft with MS Basic.

Right.  Which he stole from the school he dropped out of.

I never used that Basic, but I did use Microsoft Fortran in 1979-1981.
I found bugs in the compiler.  This sort of thing was unheard of at
the time.  If your program didn't compile, the problem was in your
program, not the compiler.  Just as, if an operating system crashed,
either the operator had done something very stupid, or there was a
serious hardware problem.  So I was astonished, and took considerable
convincing that a professional software product from a real company,
as contrasted with something a teenager had written in his spare time,
had serious bugs.

I concluded that Microsoft was a crappy company with shoddy products
and with no future.  (I got two out of three right.)

> 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.

There's an urban legend that Gary Kildall, the head of DR, was out
flying when IBM came calling about CP/M-86, and that that's the only
reason they went to Bill Gates instead.

> The PC is a kludge.  It was a hideous design in both hardware and
> software, and there were better computers out at the time ...

True.  For instance you had to do something weird if you wanted to
address more 64k of memory.  The speed, 4.77 MHz, seemed blindingly
fast at the time, however.

> 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...

Not to mention efficiency, reliability, and being crash-proof.  They
completely ignored decades of industry experience and decades of
academic studies, and remade all the old errors from the 1950s, 1960s,
and 1970s.  They also made some completely new ones.  Chief among
which is the anti-concept of "open".  It doesn't mean anything to
"open" a file.  It means one thing to display the contents of a file
in ASCII on a screen, another thing to treat the file as audio and
play it on a speaker, and a third thing to treat the file as a program
and run it.  This anti-concept has resulted in people attempting to
view what they believed was a text file, and instead running a program
which took over their computer and conveyed copies of that program
disguised as a text file to other computers.

It didn't have to be that way.  The cause of viruses and spam isn't
the ubiquity of Windows, any more than it's inevitable that bookcases
will all fall over when you have a lot of them in one place.

> Linux is growing fast in the server market, and starting to make
> some inroads on the desktop among those who know computers.

Actually, in my experience, Linux only appeals to Windows refugees and
their followers.  Those of us who never went down that path tend to
prefer the various BSDs, VMS, etc.