Arrrgh! Micro$h*t again....

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Sun Mar 15 17:59:57 1998

<I mean it's "software for the the masses," everything's a black box. If t
<Win 95 registry gets hosed, re-install the whole OS (I've yet to remedy

It's why win3.1 is the windowing system on my dosbox. It's stable enough
for me and my standard is VAX/VMS (24x7x365 and it's no joke!). But I had
to work to get it that way.

<damaged registry by restoring a backup), then all your apps (10 or 15 in
<case); it's a full 10 hour project for me, even with Win95 and most apps
<CD, and any install diskettes loaded on a single Zip disk.

Windows(3.x, 95, ???) is the only OS that ever needed to reload to fix!
VMS files that are that critical can be protected to the stars if need be.

<Linux/Unix OTOH, if it's screwed up, just figure out which script to fix

While I'm not excited about linux yet, I've never seen it eat itself
either.

<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 int
<selling out so he could eliminate the threat. I wonder if he's tried to
<romance Linus yet?

Wouldn't do him much as the OS is PD and even if successivve versions
weren't it would be hard to lock that market.

<>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;)

HUH? What? The altairs needed 4k of ram to run 4k basic and 8k to run
8kbasic. Basic8k for altair was only about 6100 bytes. THere were
smaller basics but all of them gave up something, like floating point
or strings.

As to the switch flipping, that was due to the crummy MITS 88ACR that
would often require several tries to get a clean load. After it BASIC
loaded the switches were an artifact though to could input data via port
FFh under program control. To beat the need to pound switches I put a
small 64byte bootrom on a board and copied the loaded image to phase
encoded digital tape(home brew) to get from the slow error prone 300baud
to a zippy and I may add very reliable 4800. Don't blame the cow for
soggy cereal.

I would say that 8kbasic was the first decent software product from MS
though it was soon to change in the early 80s.

FYI the Extended BASIC interpreter for CP/M-80 and the BASCOM Compiler
for CP/M-80 were excellent products. Neither were bloatware by any
standard.


Allison
Received on Sun Mar 15 1998 - 17:59:57 GMT