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From: Louis Epstein on 22 Apr 2010 17:09
FreeBSD 3.1 and Windows 3.1 could both run (if not happily)
on a 386SX with 5 MB of RAM.

FreeBSD 7 can run on a 486 with 32MB,
but Windows 7 needs a 1GHz Pentium III with 1GB.

If code bloat were taxable,could Microsoft cure
the USA's deficit?

-=-=-
The World Trade Center towers MUST rise again,
at least as tall as before...or terror has triumphed.
From: Tim Daneliuk on 22 Apr 2010 17:38
On 4/22/2010 4:09 PM, Louis Epstein wrote:
> FreeBSD 3.1 and Windows 3.1 could both run (if not happily)
> on a 386SX with 5 MB of RAM.
>
> FreeBSD 7 can run on a 486 with 32MB,
> but Windows 7 needs a 1GHz Pentium III with 1GB.
>
> If code bloat were taxable,could Microsoft cure
> the USA's deficit?
>


I'm a very long time FreeBSD user, but this comparison is absurd. Try
running FBSD7 with a full desktop like KDE or Gnome on a 486 with 32MB
and see how that works. Then make sure you are backwards compatible
with every obscure peripheral, old API, and other miscellaneous cruft
left around since the era of FreeBSD 3.1 and make sure you're running
a browser, anti-virus, anti-spyware, and auto updating system. Oh, and
make sure that the majority of your users have to do little or nothing
to configure sound, video, NIC, and so on.

Windows - for millions of people - is "good enough" technology. It's
far from perfect, but then again people use it in stupid ways - always
logging in as an admin will full permissions leaps to mind. Could
Windows have been better? Yes - in fact, it almost was. When Cutler
designed NT it was to *replace* the old Win stuff. But economic
reality triumphed and he and his team were forced to jam a Win32
compatible GUI on top of an otherwise pretty decent OS. FreeBSD,
Linux, et al were free to do whatever they wanted, as elegantly as
their contributors desired simply because ... there was no overarching
commercial pressure for many years. (These days the Linux distros seem
to be trying to out-feature each other, thereby similarly starting to
bloat up their code base.)

Like I said, I've happily run FBSD going back to the 2.x branches, but
this constant sneering at Microsoft is foolish. Microsoft's success is
largely what drove Intel's commoditization of CPUs, memory, and glue
parts. Without some widespread de facto standard it would have taken
many years for this to happen ... and it might never have happened at
all. Bear in mind that FBSD and Linux both exist *because hardware was
cheap*. Without a Microsoft driving chip volume, the researchers and
hackers that have delivered all this stuff would never have had access
the the kinds of cheap platforms that we all now take for granted. I
promise you that the majority of us could not - in inflation adjusted
terms - afford an PDP-11 equivalent machine.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Daneliuk tundra(a)tundraware.com
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/

From: Indi on 22 Apr 2010 18:04
On 2010-04-22, Tim Daneliuk <tundra(a)tundraware.com> wrote:
>
> Microsoft's success is
> largely what drove Intel's commoditization of CPUs, memory, and glue
> parts. Without some widespread de facto standard it would have taken
> many years for this to happen ... and it might never have happened at
> all. Bear in mind that FBSD and Linux both exist *because hardware was
> cheap*. Without a Microsoft driving chip volume, the researchers and
> hackers that have delivered all this stuff would never have had access
> the the kinds of cheap platforms that we all now take for granted. I
> promise you that the majority of us could not - in inflation adjusted
> terms - afford an PDP-11 equivalent machine.
>


But you make it sound as though there was no other OS that would have done
the same thing had windows not come along (or had Bill & Co had failed at
their anti-competitive shenanigans). In fact there many other OSes (and
platforms). The winners, as is so often the case, were the best gangsters
-- not the best programmers.

--
Caveat utilitor,
indi

From: Tim Daneliuk on 22 Apr 2010 18:31
On 4/22/2010 5:04 PM, Indi wrote:
> On 2010-04-22, Tim Daneliuk <tundra(a)tundraware.com> wrote:
>>
>> Microsoft's success is
>> largely what drove Intel's commoditization of CPUs, memory, and glue
>> parts. Without some widespread de facto standard it would have taken
>> many years for this to happen ... and it might never have happened at
>> all. Bear in mind that FBSD and Linux both exist *because hardware was
>> cheap*. Without a Microsoft driving chip volume, the researchers and
>> hackers that have delivered all this stuff would never have had access
>> the the kinds of cheap platforms that we all now take for granted. I
>> promise you that the majority of us could not - in inflation adjusted
>> terms - afford an PDP-11 equivalent machine.
>>
>
>
> But you make it sound as though there was no other OS that would have done
> the same thing had windows not come along (or had Bill & Co had failed at
> their anti-competitive shenanigans). In fact there many other OSes (and
> platforms). The winners, as is so often the case, were the best gangsters
> -- not the best programmers.
>

Oh nonsense. This is the argument put forth by all the people that
couldn't beat Gates and Co. - Sun, Oracle, Netscape and so on. But
is is a false argument and has always been so.

There was essentially nothing commercially available that could have
done what was needed at the time Win 1.x was released. The Palo Alto
stuff was miles away from being a product. The Bell Labs stuff was even
further away. Gates won because he placed an early bet on GUIs well
before the hardware was remotely ready for it. Apple could have been
a contender, but Apple is even more closed off than Microsoft (and getting
worse every day judging grom their iPhone 4.0 terms). In short,
MS won because they were first. This is almost always the case with
innovative technologies. Note that "innovative" != "good" necessarily.
It means game changing, and that's exactly what Microsoft did by taking
the GUI out of the elites in the lab's hands and putting them in the hands
of the masses. You don't like Microsoft? OK. But give them their honest
due.

P.S. I was working for a very large IT consumer at the time all this was
happening and am painfully aware of just how few real choices existed
on the PC in those days. Lots of choice comes AFTER commoditization, not
before.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tim Daneliuk tundra(a)tundraware.com
PGP Key: http://www.tundraware.com/PGP/

From: Indi on 22 Apr 2010 19:09
On 2010-04-22, Tim Daneliuk <tundra(a)tundraware.com> wrote:
>
> There was essentially nothing commercially available that could have
> done what was needed at the time Win 1.x was released.

That's very silly. Win 1.x was a huge failure, and no-one used it.
By the time windows became semi-usable there was OS/2 -- a *vastly*
superior OS. I know you claim you were there and all but it seems to
me you don't really know your history.

--
Caveat utilitor,
indi

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