On Sunday 22 July 2007, David Boles wrote: >on 7/22/2007 8:21 PM, Les Mikesell wrote: >> David Boles wrote: >>> Let's cut the hyperbole. If Windows is really as bad as you say it is why >>> does 90% of the world use it? ;-) >> >> Because, at the time that market share was established, AT&T owned unix >> and you couldn't buy it for less that $1,000 a seat. They just didn't >> get the concept of a mass market. Even though back then Windows really >> was that bad, real OS's compete with the price. > >Really? I have said that I am not a techie only a user of a tool. > >Can you name me one personnel computer that would run then, or will today, >a true Unix OS? I don't think there is such a beast David, primarily because, at least for the release of 3.2 that I had, on a machine cbs used for network messages at one time, was m68k only, and actually ran on what looked like a pc, the AT&T 6300. It had a 68010 cpu in it IIRC. Its fav pastime was making smoke, poor cooling. I'd stored the copy of 3.2 that came with the machine in my office thinking it was safe there, but when the drive died, and the tech came to fix it, we found that someone had inserted all those 5.25" floppies into my office's coco and typed dskini(0). He wasn't too happy but based on having the about 2 feet of paperwork intact, pretty much proving it was a legal copy, he got out his own copy and installed that. I raised hell and stuck a brick under one corner of it & changed the lock on my office door, which lasted till the owner came by one night several years later and tried his master key & it didn't work. The puzzling thing is that AFAIK, I was the only one there who knew enough about a coco to know that the command to format a disk was dskini(0). And I damned sure didn't do it. But we had a hot shit janitor with spare time & keys to everything too. >Oh. And since AT&T, you said this I don't know this - actually don't even >care - owned Unix would you have expected them to give it away? > >You can have the last word on this subject. I will stop here. I have more >important things to do at the moment. AT&T were cast iron bitches about Unix, and only those who knew about it were willing to put up with their 'everybody is a thief' attitude. I used to use their long distance service cuz it worked better than anybody elses, but when they decided to get out of the business a few years back they started playing with the billing books and I canceled the service. They dutifully sent me a bill for $0.00 every month for almost 2 years. Now they want to get back into similar business by hook or crook, probably the latter, and I wouldn't piss on them if they were on fire. Make no mistake about it, their intentions are to buy back the monopoly control Judge Green broke up 2 decades & change ago. As long as BushCo is running the place it _will_ happen. Bet the whole farm on it. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Don't look now, but the man in the moon is laughing at you.
