In comp.os.linux.misc Jeroen Wenting <jwenting at hornet dot demon dot nl> wrote:
> "Peter T. Breuer" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[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 how many people who now have $500 PCs ($200 of which is the cost of the > OS) would have been able to afford those? Well, I almost bought my Sun workstation after three years, as it had depreciated to nearly nothing in value! As I recall, it would have been about 2000 pounds then if I had decided to buy it. That was a bit more than the price of a new 286 at that point. But it had scsi disks! And 8M of ram instead of just 640KB! And a huge monitor (what were those sun monitor sizes?) instead of a tichy 640x480 PC screen. If I recall right, the first computer I bought (after the Sun) was an 8088 "portable". I sold it off almost at once in favour of a 386sx20 portable with 1MB of ram and 20MB of disk which cost more than 1000 pounds sterling. I was able to run linux on that machine, after upping its memory to 3MB. Peter -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
