Jonathan Drews wrote:
On Wednesday 29 August 2001 08:11 pm, you wrote:
Harrell, Tim wrote:
When I tried to suggest that it was indicative of how inferior Windows
Supposedly America has the greatest economy in the world. with guys like Bill Gates running our businesses, I don't know how the hell we did it. Maybe it's true that a sucker is born every minute. Bill succeeded because Apple was taken over by a Pepsi Cola salesman and run into the ground.
I would disagree that Bill "succeeded" because of Apple or IBM mis-steps and we all have reasons to not particulary like Bill and what he does sometimes but he succeeded in providing a operating platform that was GUI based sufficiently "open" and accepted in the market place where most everyone could play. I've been around the "PC" since 1977 and have a quite a museum colllection of hardware including TRS-80's, Apples, and even a KIM-1 with the expansion chasis. The Commodore/Pet was no slacker nor the Amiga. I bemoaned Radio Shack when they gave up the market in 1982 to IBM just because they were stuck in a world of 64 column monocrome displays, a maket they owned with over a millions computers installed base, several magazines dedicated to the product, and tons of software that was either free or inexpensive. It was interesting that the Radio-Shack TRS-80 was, like Microsoft, a love/hate affair and I can tell you that the TRS-80 was a wonderful little box with its entire computer bus exposed on that one little connector on the back, the world was mine as an engineer and sometimes programmer. I even used my TRS-80 to trouble shoot PDP-11 Computers in real time but a lot of people hated the TRASH-80! OS/2 is/was a great operating system. OS/2 could run Windows better than Windows was the IBM mantra back about 1993 without having to use something like VMWare and yet IBM could only attract a handful of vendors, specifically, only one decent word processor, DeScribe, if I remember correctly and even they went away... Incidently, in 1993 or thereabouts, OS/2 version 2.1 Extended Edtion could have 16 Windows applications all running concurrently and not crashing, multitreaded, mulitasking, on a 386 with a nominal amount of memory and still doing all the communication/IBM connectivity things that OS/2 was famous for. I think OS/2 might have invented the service pack but who knows, it was a joint effort with Bill at the time. Over in the HR department, Linux/Apache/PHP may get you in the door as system administrator or web developer, but as Office2000, PageMaker, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, etc. get you much further than Star Office and the Gimp albeit the powerful tools that they are. As for what I do, I am responsible for providing the desktop (read Windows 9x) environment to over 8000 workstations in a K-12 evironment running Office97/2000/XP in a connected world across a multiplicity of platforms and networking topologies where Word does not change fonts when you backspace, Excel doesn't lock up, and you don't reboot the PC everytime you walk by. The school district mantra is Preparing todays student for tomorrow's world and right now, that is a "Windows" world, whether you or I like it or not. And while Linux makes great servers, I am not ready to replace our Novell severs in providing File and Print services along with NDS based single point of administration user security including application management and desktop policies enforcement with either Linux or NT but we use both in providing application and internet services. And we don't run WindowsME! :-)) Clint