At 12:05 PM 3/15/98 PST, you wrote:
>Sorry for any whitespace, folks...
>When was this interview taken?
Early 80s, 82? I don't have time to find it right now, but maybe I'll post
it here some time next week, at least the relevant parts. IIRC, his vision
included PCs with big disk and RAM so the need for efficiency wouldn't get
in the way of cranking out titles after title of bloatware.
>>advocated "Top 40" bloatware from day one. No one should be
>surprised--I
>>mean, Microshaft has always intended it's products to be "toasterware,"
>as
>>easy as plugging toast into a toaster--that is, if you want to write a
>>letter to Aunt Minny or play Solitaire from 9am to 5pm every day.
>I don't quite see what you mean..
I mean it's "software for the the masses," everything's a black box. If the
Win 95 registry gets hosed, re-install the whole OS (I've yet to remedy a
damaged registry by restoring a backup), then all your apps (10 or 15 in my
case); it's a full 10 hour project for me, even with Win95 and most apps on
CD, and any install diskettes loaded on a single Zip disk.
Linux/Unix OTOH, if it's screwed up, just figure out which script to fix or
re-install a library module or two. I've never had a blow-up on my IBM 5363
Sys/36 either. It's not a speed demon, but it is dependable.
[snip]
>I'll bet Win95 is compiled on Linux!
I think if there were only one target to go after, Gates would have the
"owners" of Linux in his board room tomorrow, trying to pressure them into
selling out so he could eliminate the threat. I wonder if he's tried to
romance Linus yet?
>But AFAIK, Gates's BASIC
>interpreter for the altair required a RAM add-on pack! Truly bloatware
>from day one. Why Gates decided to flip the switches on the front
>panel several thousand extra times mystifies me. Maybe that's why
>you're all getting Altairs with worn out switches;)
The other day I was moving one of the MS Office products from the orig.
install diskettes to Zip (was it Access 2.0?), and I noticed what looked
like an OS/2 EA file in the directory of one of the diskettes. I wonder if
that's from compiling/maintaining on an OS/2 box, or if it's from an
earlier version of NT?
--
David Wollmann |
dwollmann_at_ibmhelp.com | Support for legacy IBM products.
DST ibmhelp.com Technical Support | Data, document and file conversion for
IBM http://www.ibmhelp.com/ | legacy file and media formats.
Received on Sun Mar 15 1998 - 15:20:08 GMT