Scott Dorsey wrote:
William Sommerwerck wrote:
If Windows (and to a lesser degree, the Mac OS) didn't exist, there would
likely be a plethora of operating systems, and people would be complaining
"Why can't we have a single standard?".

And this was what it was like in the seventies and eighties. And, overall
it was a good thing because it encouraged people to make their applications
portable.


Portability is pretty expensive. And given how dissimilar platforms
are, it is of mixed value, IMO.

Very basic functionality is quite different from platform to platform.


I think having a heterogeneous environment is a good thing for a lot of
different reasons, not just because it makes malware propagation more
difficult but also because it forces people to think about the compromises
being made in their implementations.


People don't generally like to think about implementations when they
don't have to.

It also means that people developing more complex systems based around a
computer (like a DAW for instance) have more choices.

I don't really think we'd have had DAW programs at all had it not been
for Mac and Windows as platforms. Maybe something lire RADAR, but it
wasn't priced to sell. Maybe something like the Amiga, although
it was pretty limited.

Often those systems
have requirements which are very different than those of "general purpose"
computing appliances and it is good to have such choices available when they
are needed.

Agreed; although it's not clear that the propagation of such systems
would have been ... satisfactory.

The last thing I read about the Linux standards group for audio/
multimedia , they were still designing the basic atoms of things.


--scott



--
Les Cargill