On Tue, 17 May 2011 11:40:41 -0700 (PDT), "J. Clarke"
wrote:

On Monday, May 16, 2011 12:44:02 PM UTC-4, Jack Stein wrote:
On 5/15/2011 4:50 PM, George Watson wrote:
Jack wrote:

Wrong, I'm grumbling because most all retail outlets sold ONLY MS
operating systems. They did this because of illegal marketing practices
of MS.

I have taken the liberty of snipping out
the early 'argument' as the attribution is all fukd up
and confusion thus reigns.
Attrib being screwed over - I would point out - by
clueless users using Usenet dumb software and
being totally ignorant themselves of how to present
their two bits so it can be read as a digest.
For me that says plenty about *their* credibility
as to "topic".

Excellent point!

And I say on that, you (Jack) are blowing good
time in showing anyone in RW the true light on
the story. Me too, I guess:-/

Thanks for that, but I only waste my time when I have time to waste.
Someone said I have a burr up my ass over MS, and they are right. I was
in the game early on and because I was intimately familiar with dos,
UNIX and OS/2, and computing and programing was my passion all through
the beginning of home computing, I do not speak out of ignorance. I was
deeply involved in the OS wars during the BBS years and I've heard all
the bull**** many, many times. During those days the only support MS
had from the gear heads were those either ignorant of UNIX and OS/2 or
earning a living from MS garbage products.

If you do not know - comp.os.os2.advocacy -
is a forum where some sense remains amongst
all the trolling.

I gave up on all that crap long ago, all that's left for me is a "burr
up my ass".

I agree totally with your comments on early IBM policy,
having been caught myself with PCDOS and two very
expensive (at the time) machines and software installs
to run a network.

My ideas over IBM, MS and INTEL being in cahoots as an illegal cartel
are mine only, and is just a suspicion. IBM was burnt badly by the
anti-trust people in the past and they easily could have owned
EVERYTHING and in no way needed Gates to develop their PC OS, other than
to prevent more monopoly problems. Proof of this is when MS was unable
to develop windows to work correctly, and IBM needed an OS that worked,
they developed OS/2 in just one year, and it came out near perfect, I
think totally perfect.

HUH? OS/2 was a joint product of IBM and Microsoft, the contract was signed in August, 1985, and a product didn't ship until December, 1987. That's more than two years.

Further, it didn't have anything to do with being "unable to develop Windows to work correctly". The contract was signed before Windows shipped. In addition, OS/2 didn't even have a GUI until release 1.1 almost a year later and it didn't actually run Windows applications until 2.0 shipped in April, 1992.

Gates and is dimwit programmers still haven't
figured it out.

Gates bought his operating system from Patterson for $100,000 AFTER IBM
bestowed the contract on Gates, instead of DEC and cpm. Why would IBM
do something so dumb? Do you think you could get such a contract with
any company to sell a non-existent product?

Why would IBM "bestow a contract" on DEC? That's like Ford "bestowing a contract" on Chevy. And what did DEC have to do with anything anyway? You seem to be confusing Digital Research and Digital Equipment Corporation. The two were unrelated. CP/M was a product of Digital Research, not DEC. And there were several problems with Digital Research--the first is that they didn't actually have a product--the PC shipped in August, 1981, while CP/M-86 didn't ship until January, 1982. The second was that Gary Kildall wanted to charge more than IBM was willing to pay. The third was that he failed to show up at a critical meeting and offended IBM. There were, doubtless, other problems. He thought he had the world by the tail and blew one of the biggest opportunities anybody has ever had. If he had met IBM's price point and done what he had to do to have a product out the door when IBM wanted it, he'd be the one we all hate and Bill Gates would be a side note. Bill Gates gave IBM
everything they asked for, did what he had to do to deliver a product, and the rest is history.

I think they did it because they could control Gates, but not DEC.

DEC wasn't involved at all.

Not the first point Stein is confused on - - - - - - - -

I
think the reason IBM did not market OS/2, and why they pulled the plug
on OS/2 when it reached critical mass was OS/2 did not fit in with their
plans for the cartel. OS/2 of 1995 would work perfectly fine, far
better than XP right now today on today's machines. Instead, the cartel
uses garbage that needs upgraded constantly, needs tons of attention to
keep working and so on. IBM, INTEL and MS all win over, and over while
the public has been screwed, over and over.

OS/2 works fine, however IBM couldn't get anybody to buy it. It did run most DOS code well. My 32-bit APL interpreter broke it though.

Prior to that experience I did sit in front of a MAC
for a short while in 1991 as a "mature age cadet"
draftsman. Coming from the DOS machine I myself had
worked through a lot of command line structure to get
a spreadsheet printed on our dot matrix printer, MAC
was akin to sunshine after a drenching cloudburst.

Well, after using DOS for several years, and wondering why I couldn't do
what I wanted, I ran into UNIX, and wow, that was exactly like sunshine
after a tropical storm of DOS. Later, OS/2 was more like what WINDOWS
should have been all along, not as robust as UNIX, but simple to use,
and everything worked dependably.

Well, if you didn't like DOS, you wouldn't like CP/M. Trust me on this.

That's for sure!!!!!

The job didn't work out and I started my own company
and thus paid for the "rip off" from those selling "Windows"
on IBM frames. Cost me thousands over the next
five years and a few good employees.
WordPerfect was perfect.. compatibility wasn't so hot :-/

Word imperfect was "perfect"??? You must have used different versions
than I did! And don't even mention their companion "data imperfect"

Now WORD STAR wasn't a bad product.

There were quite a few good word processors, and MSWORD was is one of
the worst. It reminds me of some of the screwed up posts people make on
this (and all) newsgroups, with attributes a mess, proper quoting
ignored and so on. Yes, you can do stuff with it but the interface
really sucks.

If you know how it works it's not bad, if you try to fight it it's terrible. We went with it for one reason--it had full, configurable, well documented support for the laser printer that we had.

snip