To: Gersh Avery who wrote (8301 ) 4/29/2000 12:51:00 PM From: MonsieurGonzo Read Replies (4) | Respond to
> We all remember Microsoft...published the source code for the IBM PC BIOS . We had to learn BIOS because there was no other way to control the cursor and screen display. Through MS-DOS, there was only ANSI (think, "character-based HTML") and most of us thought of our monitors not as "consoles" hanging off of a computer but, "the computer". Most of my software friends had dropped out of NASA or defense/aerospace jobs, where many had programmed flight simulators - and these guys were now getting rich and famous creating video games - going directly through BIOS.hardware friends began assembling whole PC's from these clone parts, loading the boxes with WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, then marketing them to small businesses, replacing typewriters, servicing genuine IBM-PC's with less expensive parts (which is exactly how the mainframe world worked). The difference was, of course, that we could build a complete PC from non-IBM parts. Yeah, Microsoft had DOS, but - otherwise struggled with applications development; many of us thought Borland's PASCAL and C language compilers were better than Microsoft's software development tools.revolution was these cheap, open-source BIOS "PC's". By 1984, we thought it was ironic that IBM was being portrayed as "BigBrother" by Steve Jobs: to our mind, it was the Apple that was closed, overpriced and somewhat elitist. Steve's "Lisa" clone of the Xerox-PARC O/S failed but, the Mac blew everybody away.leverage of his DOS monopoly, it is unlikely that Gates would have been able to clobber WordPerfect and Lotus.clone parts, plug in MIL-SPEC Intel MPU+NDP chips, fast Japanese RAM and big American power supplies with heavy transformers and filter capacitors - stuff these into 19" standard racks, load our "vertical" applications on them and sell "industrial instruments " to factories.their monopoly: Pierre just refused to open up either the hardware to clone makers or the O/S+BIOS to us - and Gates was relentless. Windows95 was a huge success, in part because it worked well enough, in part because everybody had to go out and buy new PC's with faster Intel MPU's and loads of RAM to run it; iow, he made everybody else rich.strange {grin}. Most of us couldn't afford good UNIX rigs - workstations - we thought of them as "machine tools", computers that you used to design other computers and chips and circuit boards; "instruments" or, vertical application platforms running SPICE. otoh, most of us were hooked up via CompuServe or GE-NET or TeleNet, back when the internet was a heluva lot more than just the WorldWideWeb . Microsoft had almost no presence in this world - I think Gates had his hands full trying to make Windows a viable alternative to the Mac, as well as fend off what looked like a serious threat from IBM's OS/2.was "File Manager". But Microsoft was behind the curve and Netscape took off...application - it required Windows or MacO/S or UNIX to run - but also that it would become the operating system . Had Netscape made an "operating system" alliance with Apple or Microsoft, or perhaps even Sun or IBM - history would be quite different.?
