Marketing /formerly ...

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Mon Oct 12 06:46:19 1998

< No, those running MS software are doing so mostly because MS was
< the only game in town way back when... not hard to be 'best' when
< you're the only one... also not hard to be 'worst'...

Back to the original topic some. History. MS was not the only game
in town. DRI, later Novell, now Caldara offered CPM86 and it decendants
such as CCPM and DRDOS until MS crushed them. Caldara is still at it
with Opendos (DRdos decendant).

< Personally, I avoid MS-anything like the plague... I have a linux
< system which has been up for more than a week straight... running
< W95, I'm lucking if I *don't* have to reboot several times a day
< either because the system has simply crashed, or wedged itself...

I'm no fan of MS but I run a ton of CADD, FPGA and cross assemblers
unavailable for Linux or freeBSD. The system that I must run it on
is MSdos6.22/WIN3.1 that generally has an up time of months between
reboots. The last down time was for a fan replacement. I've never run
w95, but I've seen systems that can achieve that as well. My other half
has a laptop for work that seems to be solid enough. None of the
MS OSs are great products, they work ok though and when the system is
configured with stable hardware and software. I've also found that
linix or freeBSD tends to beat the daylights out of hardware and find
even minor problems that seem to get by under MSdos/win but cause it
to crash intermittently. Most of the complaints I've heard of MS
dos/winders can be leveled at Linux or other unice as well. My pet
peave is that most of the PC unice are limited about what hardware
they run on and like win95 also will not be happy with a minimal 8meg
of ram.

Now what has this to do with old hardware. Unix has been around for
some time, some 25-30 years. It's still not the generalized platform
for applications software. I find that good low cost CADD tools are
non-existant and most require Xwinders which is a memory hog and yet
another potentially cranky item. So until I can find a good CADD,
schematic capture, PCB routing, XAble and Xilinx FPGA package for PC
unice for under a few hundred $$$ MS wins. That defined the market.

Allison
Received on Mon Oct 12 1998 - 06:46:19 BST