dltaylor@cns.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Dan Taylor) (04/25/91)
Do you really believe that the management at either IBM or Microsoft has the "smarts" to do that on purpose? What really made the Intel/IBM joke- box go was the collective stupidity of the CP/M-80 community, starting with Digital Research, and including every hardware manufacturer I can remember. Even though CP/M-80 (and MP/M-80, which was much better than the early MS-DOS, IMHO), had a binary standard for applications, if you stuck to 8080 opcodes and BDOS, not BIOS, calls, there was no common media for packaging applications. The 8", SS SD, 128-byte sector format was pretty portable, but everybodys DD and DS DD formats were different. Worse, once 5.25" drives came out almost nobody used a common format, and 8" drives weren't packaged with, or even available for, many systems. This doesn't even take into account there were some platforms where the BDOS and BIOS locations weren't where they were supposed to be. So, if you were a software vendor, like MicroPro (no catcalls, please), PeachTree, etc., you couldn't package a product for easy, cheap, sale and support. However, since the stupid PC only had one format, originally, packaging was easy. And, if IBM was building the box, it was probably going to be around for more than a couple of years, so you could build PC-specific (not MS-DOS) software. There were a few fairly nice MS-DOS boxes around early on, like the Tandy 2000, but since they were so much better than the PC or XT, they weren't strictly compatible, so, no soft- ware vendors supported them, and they died. By the way, the same type of stupidity has brought the [234]86 UNIX/XENIX base to the forefront in sales. If the 68K/UNIX vendors had had a media and system call compatible standard, like we're getting 8 years later, the software base for the 68K could have been so large that PC UNIX would be almost non-existant. Instead, we get an A3000UX with very few commercial applications "ready-to-roll", and software vendors looking at the System V/386 market, and salivating. Dan Taylor /* My opinions, not NCR's (obviously). */
nwickham@triton.unm.edu (Neal C. Wickham) (04/26/91)
In article <908@cns.SanDiego.NCR.COM> dltaylor@cns.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Dan Taylor) writes: >Do you really believe that the management at either IBM or Microsoft has >the "smarts" to do that on purpose? What really made the Intel/IBM joke- > >Dan Taylor >/* My opinions, not NCR's (obviously). */ I always wondered w IBM wasn't more protective of their name. Computers were and are marketed as 'IBM compaible' or as 'IBM clones' all over the place and I am almost sure that IBM could have easily stopped this. I can remember when the IBM PC comercials were some of the most fequently run comercials on TV. That cost millions of dollars and then IBM let everyone and their dog sell IBM compatibles. Constrast that with Apple Computer and the suits brought against microsoft and HP. Also, how else can you explain the 68000 being around for so long before Intel finally spit out the 2. Contrast that with the more competitive 386vs 68030 and the 486 vs 68040 we see now. Did you ever hear about all the coruption that was involved wit the trans- continental rai? It cost the country millions of dollars and involved most members of congress who owned stock in phoney companies who won phoney contractson the railroa. This stuff goes on all the time. Big time coruption is the american way. NCW