Sun SPARCstation 2

From: John Foust <jfoust_at_threedee.com>
Date: Fri Feb 16 20:29:57 2001

At 11:49 PM 2/16/01 +0100, you wrote:
>>>can't Microsoft get it right with thousands of programmers, 800+MHz
>>>processors, hundreds of megabytes of RAM, and gigabytes of disk space?
>>Because they lack orginality and would rather swallow up
>>whatever smaller companies actually come up with original ideas?
>>Less time spent on R&D that way.
>
>Amen. Just in the Amiga market, they swallowed Blue Ribbon, LZX (.CAB) and
>ASDG. A real waste, too.

Blue Ribbon happily sold out to Microsoft. Keep in mind that
a "big" Amiga company was typically smaller than any
Microsoft team on a sub-project, so one can hardly cry foul
when a product was swallowed never to be heard from again.

I'm not aware of any connection between ASDG /Elastic Reality
and Microsoft. ASDG sold out to Avid... again, quite willingly.
Their products were barely marketed there and languished.

I'm not aware of the connection between .CAB and LZX. Did they
buy a technology or just hire the person?

Another Amiga/Microsoft connection was the RIFF file format,
which was IFF with Intel endian.

There's also the interesting twist of Microsoft and Amigoid
company Hash Enterprises. Microsoft acquired them, tried to
work with them and failed, and miraculously disgorged them.
Microsoft wanted their animation tools to make idiocies
like "Bob" and the dancing paper clip. They live happily
today at www.hash.com .

The "Martin's Minutes" section of their web site is a
true web treasure. See June 14, 2000 #305 for a bit of his
story about getting into bed with Microsoft.

- John
Received on Fri Feb 16 2001 - 20:29:57 GMT

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