On Sat, 14 May 2011 19:13:20 -0400, Jack Stein
wrote:

On 5/14/2011 12:39 PM, wrote:
On Fri, 13 May 2011 20:45:15 -0400, Jack
wrote:

On 5/13/2011 7:57 PM, HeyBub wrote:
Jack Stein wrote:

How so? What's the problem between a willing buyer and a willing seller?

The problem was and is simple. The buyer was blocked from buying
competing products at the store. MS forbade retailers from selling
competing operating systems with threat of removing the retailer as one
of there markets. The result of these tactics left the consumer with
being willing to buy a home pc with the worlds worst operating system,
or whistling Dixie.

Not completely true. As a manufacturer we COULD sell competing OS, but
DOS had to go with the machine.

Who said DOS had to go with the machine? God? Big Brother?

It was part of our OEM agreement with Microsoft. We got the "right" to
supply OEM software with the computers we produced and sold, but on
the condition that the DOS licence went with EVERY computer we sold of
that line. We paid a" per machine produced" licence to Microsoft. The
price per machine was SIGNIFICANTLY lower than the normal "retail
package" licence, which was also available to us at
wholesale/distributor pricing.
OEM software is licenced to the MACHINE, while retail licenced
software is/was licenced to the OWNER.

We sold a LOT of computers into the
SCO Unix and Xenix world, as well as the old business basic and
another pre-dos OS that I can't remember the name of, worlds. They
had to have DOS in the box, but that was small potatos compared to the
cost of, say, windows 7 professional, today.

Small potatoes my ass, it's the very reason most of the world is stuck
with the worlds worst OS.

Small potatoes was in the neighbourhood of $7 to $10 at cost, if I
remember correctly, in the days of DOS 4.0 / Windows3, 3.1, 3.3, and
4.0
Retail was closer to $60 if I remeber correctly (it's been a few
years, obviously)

The result of this corrupt bull**** is the world is stuck with the
worlds worst operating system, whilst the dumb ass users think they
are getting one virus after another, the truth is its the operating
system.

The world is not "stuck" with Microsoft. There are many others: about 50
flavors of Linux, Unix itself, Macs, BSD, and one announced just this week
from Google. If people WANTED a different operating system, they can, most
often, get it for free! As it is, people are voting with their wallets and
the vote is 90% for Microsoft.

Because applications work with it - the overwhelming majority of all
available software on the world market today, from ANY supplier, will
run on Windows.

Well, when OS/2 was the only working version of Windows, everything
worked with OS/2, including DOS and Windows.

OS/2 was NEVER the only working version of Windows - and in fact was
NOT WINDOWS. OS/2 was championed by IBM - and suffered some of the
same issues as the IBM produced version of Windows (was it 3.1????)

You couldn't buy it easily
however, because MS would raise holly hell with any large retailer that
carried it, or installed it.

Microsoft PRODUCED OS/2 in the first place, then passed it on to IBM.

The biggest reason OS/2 failed was because IBM refused to
supply/include drivers for such "esoteric" devices as non-ibm
printers.OS/2 was used bu IBM to drive sales of it's harware. It died
a very slow and painful death like may proprietary OS before it (like
CPM and GEM, for instance), but took a much longer time to die.
That OS/2 survived to 2006 in IBM Guise and continues on as Serenity
Systems' eComStation V 4.5 says something for it's design.

IBM was not particularly interested in
selling it either, imnsho because rather than get busted again for
running a monopoly, they wanted MS to run to OS end of the business.
This became clear when after several years of non OS/2 marketing by IBM,
they pulled the plug exactly when OS/2 was reaching critical mass of 1
million copies a month, despite all efforts to stifle the market.

I am NOT willing to use any Microsoft product, yet I have never bought a
PC w/o a microsoft operating system. Whilst I despise Microsoft I
"willingly choose" to buy and run the worlds worst OS because there is
little choice unless you want to swim upstream all day long. I have
been a Unix administrator and am more familiar with UNIX than 99.999% of
computer users, and I am smart enough not to swim up stream, there is no
chance that the other 99.999% of PC users could figure out how to use
something like Unix. My wife gets ****ed when Firefox upgrades itself
because something changed. Microsoft took advantage of this by
illegally and immorally forcing its system on unknowing consumers.

Forcing? You can always "swim upstream"

When IBM decided to stop selling OS/2 (They never really actively
marketed the product) and Microsoft deliberately made WIN98 incompatible
with OS/2 for no reason other than to kill OS/2 (Certainly with IBM's
blessing) I was given no choice but to use the worlds worst OS.

Win 98 deviated from the old windows and OS/2 design for very good
reasons - that IBM did not fix OS/2 says more about IBM than it does
about Microsoft.
Microsoft separated their NT development from the old OS/2 (IBM and
Microsoft started out working together on the NT package under the
OS/2 banner back as early as 1988) and NT leaprogged ahead of OS/2 in
virtually all of the areas that mattered.


Most
users never had any choice because it was next to impossible to by a PC
with any other OS installed on it. My wife had trouble turning the
computer on, let alone removing the operating system, and installing
another one. Most people are in my wife's category of PC users, and far
to computer illiterate to realize they have been HAD. Instead they
think they are too ****ing dumb to make a computer work consistently, or
think they got another non-existent virus.

Any computer customer in the "free world" can buy all the components
required to build a computer, and assemble it, following relatively
complete and simple instructions, in half an hour or less.

And I can buy all the components to put a spaceship on the moon. Most
people I know have trouble immediately after locating the on switch, and
generally buy a new computer after their lame ass MS registry gets so
****ed up nothing works right, and other than rebooting every five
minutes, they give up and buy another computer.

He can run whatever flavour of whatever OS he wants on that machine, with no
interference from Microsoft or anyone else - and it can be totally
"intel free" if he is stupid enough (inmy opinion) to go that route.

Stupid enough why? Because 99% of all the software he can buy at Best
Buy only runs on the latest garbage release of the worlds worst OS?

NO, dummy. That has nothing to do with "intel free" computers. You
OBVIOUSLY have a burr up your butt about Microsoft, which blinds you
to all other issues.

"intel free" generally means AMD today, although in the not so distant
past it also included Power PC and other Motorola processors - which
even Apple has abandoned in favour of Intel.

There are small computer shops in every reasonably small town that
will assemble the computer for you for a relatively small cost - and a
dozen or more "geeks" in every populated area of any consequence that
will do the same.

Meaningless gibberish. The only real competing product with MS was OS/2
because it ran all the software DOS ran, including Windows, and ran it
better, far, far better.

But the protected mode was broken, and IBM never fixed it, to my
knowlege. You could crash an entire OS/2 machine with a "protected
mode" dos app.
NT fixed that, with VM technology that has left OS/2 in the dust in
many, although not all, ways.
It was windows that worked. MS and IBM made
sure you couldn't easily buy it, and when millions of people began
finding ways of obtaining it, and using it in spite of IBM and MS
efforts to sit on it, they (IBM and MS) deliberately killed it. Had MS
not practiced anti-competitive and illegal marketing practices, who
knows what wonders the PC world could have moved into. For certain,
OS/2 was at least 20 years ahead of windows, and so far, windows still
had not caught up to what OS/2 was in 1994.

All it takes is someone with the balls of Steve Jobs to do what IBM
was unable/unwilling to do and produce a machine and OS (it COULD be
an updated version od OS/2) that would runall DOS, Windows/ OS/2, and
Apple programs on the same machine.

(By the way, Windows Server 2008 R2 already pretty well allows you to
do that with Hyper-V)