On Mon, 2008-03-31 at 08:42 -0700, Les wrote: > Actually, Microsoft was a late comer to personal computers. I own > (still) an Altair 8800B, and owned a > Morrow Microdecision before that, both on CP/M. And prior to that I had > systems that ran various other OS's > that were a bit more limited, and one straight bootstrap system for > which you had to furnish an OS of your favorite > flavor. Microsoft did not create, or really enable personal computers That was part of my point, too. Those of us who've used personal computers before Windows ever existed, and systems other than DOS, recognised it for the annoying crap that it was. And they're not the groundbreakers that some would believe. It took years for Microsoft to understand the notion of having, say, a system way of printing. That the OS talked to the printer, and all applications talked to the OS to print. Prior to that, you had a plethora of (really bad) printer drivers for each application that needed to print. It took years for Microsoft, and those creating programs for their OS, to realise the need for data portability between applications. i.e. We don't need a gazillion picture types, we need to be able to open a picture in a gazillion different programs, without conversion. It took years for Microsoft to understand networking (I still think they're far from it). It took years for Microsoft to start to understand security. They're way behind the ball in any number of areas. There's places that still use very old mainframes for that reason. If you're talking "personal" computers, I think things like the Amiga and the Mac did far more for trailblazing personal computing than the IBM compatible ever did. -- (This computer runs FC7, my others run FC4, FC5 & FC6, in case that's important to the thread.) Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
