On Sat, 9 May 2009 22:51:37 -0500, "Ralph Mowery"
wrote:


"Jeff Liebermann" wrote in message
.. .

I beg to differ. Microsoft bashing seems to be the national sport in
computers. Yet, they're the most successful computah company in
history. In addition, they did it without any ties to proprietary
hardware. They must be doing something right.


Microsoft got so big the same way Walmart did. They put out a cheeper
product.

They weren't always the biggest and baddest company in town. The
software departments of the major big iron makers were much larger
than MS in both manpower and revenue for most of the 1980's. Any one
of them could have produced a consumer grade operating system and
usable apps at the time and wiped MS off the map. They didn't because
they didn't believe that there was money to be made in essentially
consumer retail (i.e. off the shelf) operating systems and apps. They
also didn't know how to do it. I still recall the DEC Rainbow, where
customers were expected to buy pre-formatted floppies from DEC at
outrageous prices.

MS may also be very economical for OEM PC operating systems and
desktop apps. However, I note that a superior and totally free
operating system, while quite popular, has not produced much of a dent
in Microsoft's OS dominance. MS is also not currently the cheapest
OS. Apple OS/X Leopard retails for $130 while Vista Ultimate is $219.
Digital Research had a much beter product when IBM produced the PC.
I think
they wanted about $ 150 for it and MS wanted $ 50 for their product. They
basically put DRI out of business and also some other companies that had
their ideas incorporated in to the MS product line.

Yep. In 1981, CP/M-86 was better than PC-DOS 1.0. I was there.
CP/M-86 sold for $150. PC-DOS 1.0 sold for $60. Most of the early
IBM PC 5150 adopters bought both. I vaguely recall paying about
$4,000 for mine. $100 difference wasn't going to make a huge
difference.

CP/M-86 did more, but was more difficult to use. PC-DOS (er... QDOS)
was crude and simple. At the time everyone was waiting for DRI to
clean up the OS or at least make it more user friendly, while PC-DOS
was treated as a temporary expedient so IBM could sell PC's that were
suppose to run mostly apps in BASIC. Also note that PC-DOS included
MSBASIC, while CP/M-86 would sorta run the older CP/M-80 apps. CBASIC
came later. The IBM PC 5150 came with cassette BASIC in ROM. However
BASIC in ROM was not easily accessible from CP/M-86. Within months of
introduction, there were literally hundreds of new and ported apps for
PC-DOS arriving at Computerland. Meanwhile CP/M-86 was still
struggling with porting CP/M-80 apps. I had customers running some
bookkeeping application on CP/M-86 well into the late 1980's. It was
a struggle under CP/M-86. When they finally purged the machines and
switched to PCDOS, things went more smoothly. For example, relinking
the CP/M-86 operating system to install a new device driver was not my
idea of fun. With PC-DOS, it was just adding a line in config.sys.

All this has something to do with ham radio antennas, but the
connection escapes me for the moment.






--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558