Rare Apple I computer sells for $216,000 in London

It's not enough for an alternative to exist. Talk to your average Windoze vict^H^H^H^Husers. They have been totally subjugated. It's like people living in a dictatorship - the average joe can do nothing about it, so he just shrugs his shoulders and gets on with life as best he can. There is no alternative.

"In politics, perception is reality."

You really ought to read "Nineteen Eighty-Four" again.

Charlie Gibbs wrote

And that is precisely what the govt was attempting to do when it proclaimed that MS couldnt include a free browser with their OS.

Thats a lie. Didnt stiffle google, twitter, facebook, ebay, etc etc etc.

Never in fact.

Nope.

psychopath.

Mindlessly silly.

Not that they ever have innovated, of course, but they'd like to know they could if they ever decided to.

You seem to have a rather one-sided view of the subject. It's been proven that M$ used predatory pricing tactics to prevent anyone preloading any other OS. By including their browser with their OS while preventing any other browser from being preloaded they were pursuing predatory tactics. They had the right to ship their browser on the same terms as anyone else, but bot by illieally tying it to their OS monopoly.

innovate

The only reason they didn't stifle these was because they didn't see them coming. Otherwise they would have strangled these the same way they did everyone else. I could make a long list of companies that they forced out of business, to name a few: Lotus (though still in a zombie state as part of IBM), WordPerfect, Digital Research, Novell, Borand, etc. They managed to force even IBM to exit the PC OS business, even though OS/2 was a great advancement on most of the M$ OSs that followed it: Win 3.1, Win NT for several releases, Win 95, Win 98, etc.

Indeed, DOS was not an innovation, it wasn't even orignally developed by MS. Indeed, Windows was not an innnovation, just a ripoff of Xerox and Apple. Networking in windows (remember Winsock?) derived from BSD. Network File Systems? First done by Novell with Netware. Where's NetBUI today (an example of innovation gone bad)? IE? First done by Mosiac, then Netscape. The Zune was not an innovation, nor was the Xbox, nor is their cloud.

Microsoft only innovates in monopolization techniques.

Furthermore it was originally close to a copy of CP/M.

Winsock wasn't from MS, it was put together by a group of people chatting on Compuserve - MS never even implemented the first version of it (that was left to Trumpet to do).

I think DEC FAL was a bit earlier (ie. earlier than PCs).

IE and Netscape were originally derived from Mosaic.

I think we are in strong agreement about how little innovation has come out of MS.

Scott Lurndal wrote

Thats a lie, there was a lot more too the later Wins than anything Xerox had.

Apple didnt even have multitasking for quite a while.

Nope, not with networking that even stupid users could use.

Nothing like how Win networking ended up.

Quite a bit of the detail was nothing like either.

How odd that Linux has used so much of the UI seen with Win.

there was also datahub ... done by san jose ... but a lot of the implementation was being done under subcontract with group in provo ... there was somebody commuting from san jose to provo nearly every week. when san jose decided not to follow thru with datahub ... they let the group in provo retain all the work they had done.

They had multitasking from the advent of MultiFinder in 1987 (or arguably even earlier with Switcher in 1985, but I don't know if Switcher allowed applications to actually execute instructions while backgrounded.)

Dunno what you consider "quite a while". Switcher was done on the Mac about six months after Andy Hertzfeld saw Memory Shift running on DOS. Switcher was out the door about 7 months before Windows 1.0.

Actually, yes. Winsock was a vast improvement on its successor, Win95 Dial-Up Networking. With Winsock the majority of the configuration was done on a single screen (all of it unless you needed a special dial script).

And even later Windows' network stacks acknowledged their BSD heritage in places like the HOSTS file.

IE was actually licensed from Spyglass, which in turn had licensed bits related to Mosaic from NCSA. So it was a lineal descendant of Mosaic.

Which I find frustrating, as if I wanted Windows on my desktop, I'd run that. -- Joe

Scott Lurndal wrote: [...]

and HP.

Nope, remote file access was done well before PCs - hence Novell/Netware - even existed. (BTW, upper-casing Network File Systems and spelling it that exact way, is a bad idea, because it implies

s/monopolization/extortion/

Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote

Pigs arse it was.

Pity about what happened later.

Much earlier in fact. But was nothing like what Win ended up with.

And then moved on a hell of a long way past that.

MS.

Just because a couple of clowns claim something, doesnt make it gospel.

There was a lot less to the early versions of Windows though, and I have yet to see anything like some of the later Xerox work on using 3D interfaces effectively rather than as a source of eye candy.

Windows didn't have real multitasking until Windows 95 and NT, prior to that it was cooperative multitasking just like MacOS from the Mac launch in 1984 until OS X. On the PC DesqView was better at multitasking MSDOS, Windows 2.x and 3.x programs than Windows was.

Of course real multitasking was around in a number of systems much earlier. It was hardly an innovation when it appeared in desktop computers, merely a result of the hardware becoming able to support it. The first real multitasking on a PC was probably Xenix on the 80286.

Windows didn't come with TCP/IP based networking from Microsoft until Windows for Workgroups 3.11 - of course there were TCP/IP stacks for MSDOS and Windows rather earlier from Trumpet and Crynwr among others.

Networking for stupid users arrived with DHCP which had nothing to do with MS, networking for really stupid users had to wait for cheap routers with DHCP servers installed and set up by default.

Linux is a unix like kernel it has no UI, or even utilities.

You are probably thinking of KDE or Gnome - a couple of X11 based GUI desktop environments that are fairly popular with people who started their use of computers with MS Windows. These environments are designed to make the transition from Windows easy by presenting a familiar interface to Windows users.

If you were to see my Linux box you would see something that looks and acts quite differently, but not as radically differently as say Ion or Ratpoison. One of the features of the unix family that is completely missing from Windows is *choice* of UI.

Nope, not seeing anything here pointing to innovation from Microsoft.

Actually, Netware was a ripoff of Xerox's network file system. I met someone once who claimed that some of the code was virtually identical.

Microsoft is a marketing company, not a technology one.

Utter garbage. I worked for Xerox for 11 years, and we fell about laughing at Windows. (If only we'd known.)

And if you want some evidence, have a look at this;

What were MS doing in 1982?

How odd that you have this back to front.

Quite so. I've never seen any innovation from SmallNFloppy. Maybe Ajax, if you're being kind. And I'm likely wrong about that.

Someone who had good reason to know, that is, not just some bloke in a pub.

QDOS was a pig's arse? -- Joe

Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote

Irrelevant to what is being discussed, innovation.

Irrelevant to what is being discussed, innovation.

Thats a lie.

Thats a lie, most obviously with hardware.

Nothing like, actually.

Irrelevant to what is being discussed, innovation.

Thats just saying that their innovation was better, not saying that MS didnt have any.

Irrelevant to what was being discussed, whether MS had that for the PC. Of course they did.

Using that mindless line, no one ever had any innovation with the PC at all.

Which just happened to be from MS. Funny that. Hilarious, actually.

Still not derived from BSD, as I said.

I wasnt talking about TCP/IP stacks.

Wrong.

Wrong again.

Mindless hair splitting.

Nope.

And the default with so many linux distros.

Irrelevant to that stupid claim about monopolisation.

Irrelevant to that stupid claim about monopolisation.

Irrelevant to that stupid claim about monopolisation.

Just because of your mindless bigotry.

Huge wrote

No one gives a flying red f*ck what you do or do not read.

Windows.

You couldnt have even seen THE LATER WINs at that time.

Its obvious which sank beneath the waves. Too much time spent laughing like village eejuts.

Doesnt say a damned thing ABOUT THE LATER WINs.

What is Xerox doing right now OS wise ? Sweet f*ck all, thats what.

Pigs arse I do.

Just because of those blinkers you keep wearing.

You're wrong about everything, as usual.

Charlie Asking Roddles to read, that is going too far. Your average preschooler only looks at pictures.

Roddles google ms dos the beginning In 1980, IBM first approached Bill Gates and Microsoft, to discuss the state of home computers and Microsoft products. Gates gave IBM a few ideas on what would make a great home computer, among them to have Basic written into the ROM chip. Microsoft had already produced several versions of Basic for different computer system beginning with the Altair, so Gates was more than happy to write a version for IBM.

As for an operating system (OS) for the new computers, since Microsoft had never written an operating system before, Gates had suggested that IBM investigate an OS called CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers), written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research. Kindall had his Ph.D. in computers and had written the most successful operating system of the time, selling over

Gee whiz Roddles wrong again. History not your strong point.....