Andy, it may seem to you that you know a bit about OSes, but it doesn't seem that way to anybody else. Lord help me, I used DOS 1.0 (maybe 1.1, I forget). FAT was truly innovative, a single level file system for 256 kbyte floppy disks. That's right, only a top level directory. Of course, that wasn't Bill's innovation anyway, since he just bought it from the Seattle Computer guy. As far as I can tell, FAT is at the root of the integrity and uniformity of the Windows experience, a fragile and unprotected loser that seems to be synchronous to the core. Without FAT, I'd guess it'd be a lot harder for Windows to fall to pieces over time, as it typically does.
And yes, you could get Unix for IBM PCs, around the time you could get hard disks. From IBM, on about 100 floppies or something. Not that it made much difference. Most early Unix machines had about the same CPU horsepower as a decent 8086 machine, but you needed better peripherals, like, say, a hard disk, and it was pretty dicey without some kind of memory management hardware, which didn't happen till the 286.
For your reading pleasure, I offer this vaguely related quote, from infoworld.com
A unique look at software innovation was provided recently by Greg James in a letter to the editor published prominently by both the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the two largest dailies in Microsoft Town. James is the owner of a software company that competes (successfully, James says) with Bill Gates' Corbis venture in selling CD-ROMs of fine art. In his letter, he wrote:
"It would do people well to remember that Microsoft (for all its power and size) has never had a major success that was truly its own idea. It bought the original operating system [DOS] from another computer company, it copied Apple for its Windows operating system, it copied Lotus 1-2-3 and came up with Excel, it ripped off Netscape's idea for a Web browser, it came out with Word after WordPerfect, and so on and so forth. On the other side of the coin, when you look at all its own ideas or products (ones that have to stand on their own two feet) you have a different story: Bob, MSN, Slate, Mungo Park, and most of their entertainment products have been huge flops ... .
"An obvious pattern has emerged: If the idea is taken from someone else and assisted by or bundled with its operating system monopoly, it works. If it is an original idea and isn't supported by the monopoly, it fails (usually miserably)," James continued.
In its defense, Microsoft has some very skilled people who have brought out some very useful products. But James' chronology of Microsoft successes that have benefited from someone else's breakthroughs -- and failures that were Microsoft originals -- is thought-provoking. There are many examples of cases in which Microsoft has used hidden features of its OS to give its own applications an advantage over those of competitors. (A few examples were in my May 25 column, with more described at length in a special 1992 InfoWorld report.) Ideally, smaller companies should be able to innovate without fear that their work will eventually be absorbed for free into Windows.
As ever, Microsoft must be free to imitate, I mean, integrate, er, innovate! Yeah, innovation, that's the ticket, that's what Bill does best. He's just a humble software engineer, you know. He said so himself.
Cheers, Dan. |
