In comp.os.linux.misc Jeroen Wenting <jwenting at hornet dot demon dot nl> wrote: > Without Microsoft 90% of us would never have seen a computer more powerful > than a ZX-81 and 90% of the rest of us would never have used only dumb > mainframe terminals.
Uh - when microsoft produced dos 1.0, or whatever it was, I was sitting at my Sun 360 workstation (with 4M of RAM, later upgraded to 8M), running SunOS 3.8 or thereabouts. And a mean game of tetris it played too. Chess wasn't worth the humiliation at level 5. I believe every researcher in britain got one as a matter of course, but they only replaced the perq machines that everyone had had to put up with before then. The vaxen running hpux or so were plentiful too, and had fine monitors, tending more to the PC shape. We'd made our own word processor machines and spreadsheet automatons before that. It didn't take that many components, just a good engineer and a room full of lackeys with soddering irons. The BBC were selling kits too (what were they? Ataris?), not that I ever fell for that. Maybe five years earlier I'd designed and built my own computer from scratch using the MC 6802 chip as processor. Somebody really should have told me about assembler - I wrote in machine code, flashing the code into prom with a 100ms pulse from a 16V battery. Goodness knows how much memory I had ... maybe a few KB. I think the Suns were abut $30000 each when they first appeared, but prices dropped rapidly so that after maybe three years the standard price was about $8000. PCs had appeared and came in at about $4000, if I recall right, so there was a price differential but it wasn't huge, especially when a Sun could support a whole research team via vt100 lines, and a PC was a one-person job, thanks to the o/s. Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
