In comp.os.linux.misc Peter T. Breuer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > 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. Yep, Atari 400/800, Atari ST/etc, Commodore VC20/C64, there were quite some systems much more stable/powerful then anything M$ had to offer. > 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 $4000, if I > recall right, so there was a price differential but it wasn't huge, > especially when a Sun could support a whole research team via vt100 > lines, and a PC was a one-person job, thanks to the o/s. The only thing positive about M$ entering the market, probably due to their ineffective programming style they pushed Intel into producing pretty fast while cheapo CPUs. Ironically exactly this is the key to Linux/*BSD success in the unix server market. ;) -- Michael Heiming (X-PGP-Sig > GPG-Key ID: EDD27B94) mail: echo [EMAIL PROTECTED] | perl -pe 'y/a-z/n-za-m/' #bofh excuse 387: Your computer's union contract is set to expire at midnight. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
