Re: [NTLK] [OT] It's MS-DOS 6.22 day!

From: Lord Groundhog <LordGroundhog_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue Jun 23 2009 - 19:42:51 EDT

~~~ On 2009/06/23 19:34, Abraham Limpo at abraham@familialimpo.net wrote ~~~

> ... everyone that has voiced his
> opinion was rather... negative.
> Although Microsoft has become almost a monopoly, the thruth is that thanks
> to microsoft the PC market is as thriving as it is. By licencing the
> Operating System to clone manufacturers, we avoided precisely what happened
> with the Commodore Amiga, the Atari ST or the Apple Macintosh, -or the
> newton- and that is to tie the software to the hardware.
>
> That way even if IBM stops making PC, Dell or another company will be
> manufacturing it, as long as a software company provides the necessary
> software.
>
> The computer market would be rather different if Microsoft wasn't here.
>
> 2cts by
> Abraham Limpo Martinez
>

At the risk of being awkward and contrary and all that, I'd like to say
that, perhaps most folks have been negative, but my negative attitude to
M$-DOS is for the less direct reason.

I dislike monopolies, I admit (can't even stand the board game), but my real
and abiding complaint against M$-DOS is that it was the triumph of bundled
mediocrity over excellence and customer choice. M$ used its monopoly so it
could give us, not the best DOS that could be offered at the time, but the
laziest they thought they could get away with. What you're calling
"licencing the OS to clone manufacturers" was in fact the imposition of a
per processor licence, sometimes with the additional stipulation that they
couldn't offer alternative OSes. And because M$ used OS bundling as part
of their leverage with the pc manufacturers (and when necessary, as a
hammer), they got away with a lot. So in a way you're right: they didn't
tie the software to the hardware, they tied the hardware to the software.
That's different.

Also, it was known at the time (and came out much later in court) that M$
invented and milked claims of "incompatibilities" to scare users away from
DR-DOS and other competitors. When that didn't work they tried to create
incompatibilities -- and they didn't get that right either.

Do a comparison of the two DOSes at each stage of their development, and
you'll find that DR-DOS was by far the better of the two at any given time.
Far superior memory management (dynamic), on-the-fly file compression,
multiple DOS-prompt consoles with task-switching, login security, and so
much more.

What did M$-DOS have? An inferior OS, and a campaign of innuendoes, lies
and fakery to make people think DR-DOS would put them at risk of messing up
their computers. In a fair, feature-by-feature fight, M$-DOS lagged badly
behind DR-DOS and couldn't compete. So they went the route of predatory
practices.

True, the computer market would be different if M$ hadn't been there: it
would have been improved by the unstifled competition.

Just thought I'd mention it.

 
Shalom.
Christian

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

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Received on Tue Jun 23 19:43:02 2009

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