[Coco] RE: [Color Computer] Linux a cousin to OS-9

[Jan Vanden Bossche]

Hallo

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "James the Animal Tamer" <emucompboy at yahoo.com>

> > Windows has not been a help to the Tech world its been a hindrance
>
> Up 'til September 1995 I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly.
>
> Windows 95 actually worked, and people could use it, [..] Bill
> would say that his company provided a useful standard
> interface so ordinary people could use computers.

Why do you elevate everything that MS does to a standard ? AFAIK, MS didn't
invent anything. They adapted, extended and sometimes corrupted things
invented by other people.

> You know it wasn't perfect.  You know it wasn't complete.  You know it
> looked a whole lot like OS/2 2.0.

And a lot like a Mac. 'Been there, done that', remember ?

And it looked superficially like OS/2. That is, on the surface, it looked
like an OO based OS. It wasn't. The Workplace Shell, WPS from OS/2, the GUI
was really object oriented. It still isn't matched by anything available on
MAC, Windows or Linux, for that matter, AFAIK. If you weren't running
anything fancy on your OS/2 post 2.11, the WPS was the biggest thing you
were running. But you didn't realise how big it was.

E.g.:
- make a shortcut to a file on the desktop
- using standard OS/2 tools, move the file somewhere else
- click the shortcut
- the file is opened from it's new location
What does Windows (any flavor) do ?

That was OO, more than 10 years ago.

> But consumers and programmers didn't
> flock to OS/2 2.0 the way they flocked to Windows 95.

Ah, I have a nice story about that:
A computer/bookstore in Belgium in the early 90's sold both Windows and OS/2
software and books. When Win95 was launched, MS said to the store owner that
they were not going to get a reseller's discount, unless they stopped
selling OS/2.

Is that the company you want to do business with ? Is that fair competition
? Is that the american way ? Do you realise that - together with anti-MS
feelings, anti-US feelings are on the rise too ? And annoyance with one
could easily spread to the other. Really. It does.

> I bought a nice scanner recently.  It came with a CD that had nice
> applications that under Windows (98 SE and newer).  There weren't any
> other CDs, with applications for competing operating systems.  That's
> the whole useful standardized interface working for me.

No, that is exactly the monopoly at work.

Who said here: nobody's pointing a gun at your head to buy MS ?  If you want
that scanner to work, you have to/must buy MS. And the producer of that
scanner has gotten the warning from MS: only develop for Windows, or we
won't support YOU. In the anti-trust trial, several examples of that way of
forcing an OEM's hand came up. Even IBM.

They're not pointing the gun at you, that is right. But they are pointing
the gun at the suppliers, your suppliers. And by forcing them to limit their
scope, they are limiting you. Don't you see ? Even if MS was the best OS,
the best program, it still wouldn't be right.

> and now I've gone way way off topic.

Greetings from the TyRannoSaurus
Jan-80



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