[Foss-cafe] Commentary: Microsoft Invented Personal Computing?

[dep]

quoth Patrick Shanahan:
| * Timothy R. Butler <tbutler at uninetsolutions.com> [04-17-04 14:57]:
| > > > Bill Gates claimed last year that Microsoft invented personal
| > > > computing. Guest commentator Chris Olson presents the case
| > > > against that claim in this piece.
| > >
| > > I don't see that even needs discussion, since it is such obvious
| > > and utterly contemptible rubbish.
| >
| >   Well, the sad thing is a lot of people actually believe the
| > rubbish.
|
| You mean that they do not know that he *bought* dos ????   I thought
| that that was *common* knowledge.

there's more than that, really. gates and the crowd have claimed forever 
that msft, via dos, made computing accessible to the masses. which is 
nonsense -- the dos command prompt is no easier than the unix one and 
considerably less powerful. and there is little doubt that ibm would 
have released the pc with no operating system, so we can reasonably 
assume that it would have had one. of course, computing being brought 
to the masses came about because ibm used open standards in its 
production of the pc. (and for a nifty comparison, look at the success 
of isa compared to microchannel, which wasn't an open standard.)

what gates and allen and the msft crowd did was turn the masses away 
from the notion of network, multiuser operating systems to the 
standalone, single-user system (though ibm may well have nodded 
approvingly, because ibm didn't want the pc to compete with ibm's 
higher-end stuff); and poor msft has been trying to tack on such things 
as multiuser security, to little avail, ever since. the fact that they 
bought qdos and rebadged it and tacked basic onto it matters little, 
because the real damage was in producing systems capable of getting 
onto the network but poorly prepared to do so.
-- 
dep

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