Date: Fri, 29 Aug 1997 09:16:52 +0100 (BST) From: Robin Melville <robmel@innotts.co.uk> To: Peter Korsten <peter@grendel.IAEhv.nl>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Since the MicroSloth(tm) jokes have been flowing... Message-ID: <l03110700b02c3896b083@[194.176.128.199]> In-Reply-To: <19970825211642.11606@grendel.IAEhv.nl> References: <199708251617.MAA01380@i4got.lakewood.com>; from Bill Pechter on Mon, Aug 25, 1997 at 12:17:31PM -0400 <Pine.BSF.3.96.970825103752.341J-100000@fallout.campusview.indiana.edu> <199708251617.MAA01380@i4got.lakewood.com>
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At 9:16 pm +0200 25/8/97, Peter Korsten wrote: >Bill Pechter shared with us: >> > >> > But MS didn't write DOS. It was written by Tim Patterson at >> > Seattle Computer Products and MS bought it for $50,000. Um, but was more or less a direct pinch from Digital Research CP/M (incidentally a far superior product). We ran DR Concurrent CP/M on an 8086 serving 8 dumb terminals running Wordstar, an in-house database, and an 8K menuing user interface I wrote in assembler 8). Worked OK <giggle>. >> Probably the best buy in computing. MS is worth Billions due to >> that one deal. The big deal was selling this turkey to IBM. >Uh, MS may have become big with DOS, they only became huge with >Windows 3.0. No, sadly they already had the monopoly in consumer Intel PC OS by this time. >They make mice, joysticks, games, compilers, office packages, server >products, a lot of gimmicks to tie all of it together, but the bulk >is still coming from Windows being shipped with about every PC in >the world. The big nail in the computer-bio-diversity coffin was MS Office. For all its faults (flaky/bloated/oversold) the Word & Excel parts of this package are about as good as you can get for doing the things most businesses actually /use/ computers for. With Lotus/Wordperfect sinking fast, where is the competition? <sigh> Robin ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Robin Melville, Addiction Information Services Nottingham Alcohol & Drug Team Tel: +44 (0)115 952 9478 Fax: +44 (0)115 952 9421 work: robmel@nadt.org.uk home: robmel@innotts.co.uk Pages: http://www.innotts.co.uk/~robmel (home page) http://www.innotts.co.uk/suba (UK substance misuse pages) ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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