On 10/4/2015 7:54 PM, Robert Green wrote:
"Don Y" wrote in message
...
On 10/3/2015 10:39 PM, Robert Green wrote:

As someone said in a movie once, "A man's got to know his limitations."
Would I try to run a leading edge graphics program on a clone? Probably
not, but I also saw plenty of people with legit IBM's and MACs go
through
some serious tsuris trying to get things to work. The SW of that period
had
extensive "complexity" issues exacerbated by a rapidly evolving HW base.

The bigger problem was the fact that the OS didn't isolate the
applications from the hardware. So, you had the CP/M mentality bleeding
into
the PC world -- developers thinking they could freely play with aspects
of the underlying hardware "at will". Until those aspects didn't exist
in some variant of the machine they *expected* to encounter.

It's hard to believe that MS, Intel and ARPA both thought we would all be
one big happy family of computer users and security wasn't really necessary.
Hence the net and PCs have been insecure from the ground up for a long time.

The 'net was initially an elitist tool. Effectively "invitation only";
you counted on someone ELSE to get you *onto* it so "behaved responsibly".
You always had someone who was effectively your benefactor (remember "bang"
routing for mail??)

The PC's problem was that it was underpowered to start with. It
was just a fancy CP/M machine -- single user, etc. Security was
commonplace in bigger systems (MULTICS, etc.) but too troublesome to
implement on a tiny dog like a PC (XT).

And, of course, MS was never an innovator. So, they just looked at
CP/M and figured "good enough"...