Linux Bloggers Wax Skeptical on the Post-Gates World

The BBC dedicated a program to Bill departure. I sort of wish I had caught it because it had me thinking. The premise was how big an impact did he have on the world. My thought was hang on, me and all my friends had computers when we were little. Every house seemed to have one. OK none were at that point GUI driven but we had them. Computers therefore were spreading regardless. Then ask anyone what is the biggest impact of computers in there life and everyone but one (so over 90%) said the internet. Now the internet came about to allow interaction between computers of differing otherwise incompatible sorts. So a common standard came.

What I am building to is was Windows actually irrelevant and in fact a hindrance to things because it allowed a mono culture and soul company take all the desktop share therefore eliminating the more competitive multicultural domain? If we had all continued with Ataris, Amigas, PC and Mac would things be more advanced.

Secondly how much do we owe Unix (BSD, Linux) and the other projects like Apache that brought the internet to us despite the mono culture. Then I think well it is done and we can't find out so who cares, one for the historians in a century to debate in the way the likes of Hobsbawm does about the "Age of Revolution"

Quoting:Secondly how much do we owe Unix (BSD, Linux) and the other projects like Apache that brought the internet to us despite the mono culture.

A lot, but personalities are news, not projects.

Agreed. I've argued for years, perhaps as much as a decade, that BG/MS have done nothing to advance the science of computing and instead set us back 10 years. They have introduced "innovation" after "innovation" that was at least a decade old in the Unix world.

There is one positive effect of MS winning the desktop wars. Their approach was more 'open' than IBM's would have been at that point in time. Had IBM won they would have been much more proprietary. In the end, IBM became huge supporter of open source due largely to their loss to MS.

I used to be a rabid Amiga user back in the day (and just teething on Unix-alikes), and really had to have a hearty chuckle when Bill Gates proudly proclaimed at the Win 95 launch event that Win95 was the first fully multitasking operating system in the world.

Really, Willy ?

@jacog: The funniest part of that is that Win95 wasn't really multi-tasking at all. It was the NT kernel later used in 2K and XP that could do actual multitasking. Win95, 98 and ME could not.

> personalities are news, not projects.

So very many people forget that journalism is just one of the lower rungs of showbusiness.

> Win95 wasn't really multi-tasking at all.

The Mac and Microsoft had to redefine the term so they could call themselves "multi-tasking", The came up with "cooperative multi-tasking" versus "preemptive multi-tasking", which is what everyone else meant by the term.

Of course, the Tandy Color Computer offered a multi-user, multi-tasking, real time OS long before Windows came out; in 64 KB. The Color Computer 3 upped that memory limit to 512 KB and added a full GUI. Microware's OS-9 was my first taste of a Unix-like OS, and what eventually led me to Linux.

Quoting:Of course, the Tandy Color Computer offered a multi-user, multi-tasking, real time OS long before Windows came out; in 64 KB. The Color Computer 3 upped that memory limit to 512 KB and added a full GUI. Microware's OS-9 was my first taste of a Unix-like OS, and what eventually led me to Linux.

...... and of course roughly simultaneous to 16-bit DOS/Windows 3.x was IBM's good old faithful OS/2, around before MS-Windows versions based upon the the NTFS core intentionally buried it. Those from Australia and other places may be interested in the 'OS/2 Site Australia', http://www.os2site.com/ Not certain if this is in any way GPL'd, but OS/2's current successor eComStation --- http://www.ecomstation.com./ --- is also supposed to be pre-emptively multi-tasking.

eComStation is proprietary. They maintain the upgrade path for OS/2, to newer hardware.

However, their demo CD is free to download.

Hey, my first home computer was a CoCo 3 running OS-9 level 2! It ran 32 processes (bank-switched memory, except for this one magic page) in 512 Kb of memory.

I never could understand why people bought official PCs - the software has ALWAYS BEEN WEAK.

And like jdixon, once I saw Unix (actually SGI's Irix) I was hooked.

Same with the Amiga... the A500 ran with 512KB of memory and had a fully multitasking graphical desktop interface. You think KDE4 is good at running clocks, you should have seen that thing run clocks. :P

I am amazed that that type of system eventually sunk in favour of generic PCs. I guess the more open hardware spec is what made generic PCs so popular.

> I guess the more open hardware spec is what made generic PCs so popular.

That plus the IBM brand name on the originals. That didn't mean anything to home users, but IBM's name carried a lot of weight with businesses.

Yeah... in fact, for a while the platform itself was colloqiually referred to as "having an IBM" ... later the phrase "IBM clone" started going around, and eventually it became just PC. PC is a pretty daft term as well, since it's considered not the same as having a Mac, yet a Mac is as much a "Personal Computer" as the thing referred to as a PC.

The name IBM could well have gone the way of brands like "Xerox". It's also annoying how "Photoshop" has become a verb. I "photoshop" a lot of things using The Gimp.

And now of course "PC" is used to refer specifically to Windows machines, thanks to Apple.

Quoting:And now of course "PC" is used to refer specifically to Windows machines, thanks to Apple.

I don't get it. How are Windows machines "Politically Correct"?

They don't discriminate against what viruses they allow in.... Although that BSOD could be viewed as offensive to blue people...

Smurfs?

Quoting:Smurfs?

Probably so. Word is that MS may have financed this. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MAYrF1PDks