En el artículo , The Natural Philosopher
escribió:

The time is around 1995. I am in Glasgow to connect a SCO unix machine
to a dial up modem to get some email flowing into a legal firm of about
60 lawyers.

Heh. About the same time I got called out in a great panic to the
finance department of a university in Cheshire whose mini (forget what
make, but about the size of four washing machines. Not IBM) running
Unix was displaying the message 'lp0 on fire' on the console terminal.
They had called the fire brigade out.

When I arrived, I talked to the worried beancounters, wandered over to
the huge line printer used for printing cheques and payroll, cleared the
paper jam, put it back online and off it went.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire

The whole firm runs off one PC running SCO unix, via serial lines and
wyse 50 terminals. It all works for what they want to do. Word
processing, database of case files and so on.

It is administered part time by a young lawyer who is 'interested in
computers'

And occasionally the firm that supplied the machine and the software.

He reckons it may cost as much as £5000 a year for the whole firm of 60
lawyers - less than £100 a year per desktop..

Lawyers and solicitors are notoriously tight-fisted.

Its a personal toy operating system that was fine for hobbyists and
games

95 and 98 (running in top of DOS) were. NT onwards (new kernel) was
much better.

, which is what Bill Gates had in mind, but it never was and still
isn't an industrial strength solution.

They poached Dave Cutler from DEC to develop the NT kernel. You can see
the influence of VMS everywhere in NT. Actually, I also see it in RISC
OS and other OSen.

It all went to pot when M$ started doing stupid things like running
graphics drivers in ring 0 to improve performance, leaving the kernel at
the mercy of crappy drivers.

That doesn't make it good, just profitable and commercially successful.

That's it in a nutshell.

Beta was technically superior to VHS, but VHS won the video format wars
because they flooded the market and became the de facto standard.

Most people would consider, expense apart, a Macintosh running OSX to be
a better computer.

It runs FreeBSD, so yes.

Microsoft is dying.

The corpse is desperately thrashing around trying to force Win10 on
users.

I probably know more about computers than 99% of the population, but I
would never think of myself as 'knowing about computers' Its a vast
subject

Indeed. Anyone who claims to know "all about computers" is a liar.

MY VAX friend is committed to running VMS or Unix, because that's all
his computer WILL run. Unless he writes a new operating system for it.

I run OpenVMS on an Alpha emulator (on Windows, heh) for fun. Not
exactly the most user-friendly command line, but then it is a very old
OS.

If you want to
'understand computers' I am afraid its a process that wont stop until
computers show as much development potential as a horse and cart.

+1. It's hard work, if not impossible, trying to keep up with
developments in the industry.

But I very much doubt anyone will be buying a windows PC for domestic
use in 5 years time.

+1.

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(='.'=) Bunny says: Windows 10? Nein danke!
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