On Oct 18, 12:25*pm, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet wrote:
On 10/18/2011 10:06 AM, wrote:









On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:12:57 -0500, Leonlcb11211@swbelldotnet *wrote:

On 10/17/2011 7:52 PM, wrote:
On Mon, 17 Oct 2011 17:12:36 -0700 (PDT), * wrote:

On Oct 18, 10:36 am, "
* wrote:

gouge the public with30% profit margins. Jobs rips his customers off
with a 40% profit margin. XOM rips us off with a 10% profit margin.

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:25:01 -0500, Leon wrote:

90%.. Sorry!!! Misread everything. I was thinking mark up percentage.

As long as there is a cost involved a GP margin above 99.9% is all but
impossible.

If I buy an item for $1 and sell it for $2, that's a 100% *markup*. If I
sell it for $10 that's a 1000% markup, and if I sell it for $100 that's a
10,000% markup.

Even if my overhead is fifty cents, I'm still doing quite well at a
$10.00 price.

This may not be a profit percentage, but it's what most folks would
consider a profit.

--
Intelligence is an experiment that failed - G. B. Shaw

Larry Blanchard wrote:
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:57:21 -0400, m II wrote:

Yup, Motorola kept reducing the instruction sets down to 27? on the
68000 while Intel kept bragging about the millions of instructions on
it's messy internal architecture. People writing code for Intel hated
it!

Then came along the Z-80 with it's block memory move in one
instruction. Trouble was, that a 6809 with code for a memory move
loop could move the block faster and with less setup instructions
and time.

We all learned the long and hard way.

I always thought the Nat'l Semi 16032 and its relatives had the best
instruction set of the micro chips, but my real favorite was a
mainframe from the '60s, the GE4xx series. Not a lot about it on the
web but a little at:


Mixed thoughts there Larry 0 GE4x was not a microprocessor based machine.

--

-Mike-

On 10/18/2011 11:03 AM, Jack wrote:
On 10/18/2011 8:34 AM, Leon wrote:
On 10/17/2011 10:45 PM, Jack wrote:
On 10/17/2011 4:20 PM, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
Jack wrote:


I think the first (significant) version of windows that (didn't) work
was 3.1.

I had win 3.0 and for me the free 3.1 upgrade was a significant
improvement. I never had any thing earlier than 3.0.

I don't think that changed even a little until XP came out,
which works marginally if you don't mind occasional meltdowns and
periodic registry explosions.

GoBack saved my butt on many occasions.


XP still is not a patch on the ass of OS/2
WARP. I never used Win Vista ver 7 so can't comment other than retailers
were offering XP and free future upgrades because Vista sucked. Hard to
imagine it sucked worse than previous versions of Win, but that was the
word I got.

Every one complains about something. I had the most luck with XP
and because it was such a vast improvement over 95 and 98 in being
stable many did found it not necessary to change or upgrade. IIRC ME,
2000, and Vista did not have enough persuasion to change many XP users
minds. Had Microsoft continued to support XP it might still be very
popular. I am using 7 now and it seems as stable as XP but has a lot of
short cuts that make using it a bit simpler to use. I don't care for
Vista my self but every one that uses it likes it, but...I think every
one that I know that uses it did had not used XP extensively. I think
since XP it all depends on what you are used to using.

On 10/18/11 2:42 PM, Leon wrote:
On 10/18/2011 11:03 AM, Jack wrote:
On 10/18/2011 8:34 AM, Leon wrote:
On 10/17/2011 10:45 PM, Jack wrote:
On 10/17/2011 4:20 PM, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
Jack wrote:


I think the first (significant) version of windows that (didn't) work
was 3.1.

I had win 3.0 and for me the free 3.1 upgrade was a significant
improvement. I never had any thing earlier than 3.0.

I don't think that changed even a little until XP came out,
which works marginally if you don't mind occasional meltdowns and
periodic registry explosions.

GoBack saved my butt on many occasions.


XP still is not a patch on the ass of OS/2
WARP. I never used Win Vista ver 7 so can't comment other than retailers
were offering XP and free future upgrades because Vista sucked. Hard to
imagine it sucked worse than previous versions of Win, but that was the
word I got.

Every one complains about something. I had the most luck with XP and
because it was such a vast improvement over 95 and 98 in being stable
many did found it not necessary to change or upgrade. IIRC ME, 2000, and
Vista did not have enough persuasion to change many XP users minds. Had
Microsoft continued to support XP it might still be very popular. I am
using 7 now and it seems as stable as XP but has a lot of short cuts
that make using it a bit simpler to use. I don't care for Vista my self
but every one that uses it likes it, but...I think every one that I know
that uses it did had not used XP extensively. I think since XP it all
depends on what you are used to using.

I used and supported everything from various flavours of DOS and Windows
in a corporate environment. XP was by far the best and easiest, over
its predecessors. Vista was fine, given the right hardware, MS
seriously messed up on its minimum hardware requirements, given the
right hardware Vista ws fine, but Win7 is a joy to use.

Win8 looks like it is going to be another bucket load of crap though, at
least according to the latest developers release. Had it running in a
virtual machine, couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

--
Froz...


The system will be down for 10 days for preventive maintenance.

On Oct 18, 4:15*pm, FrozenNorth
wrote:
On 10/18/11 2:42 PM, Leon wrote:







On 10/18/2011 11:03 AM, Jack wrote:
* On 10/18/2011 8:34 AM, Leon wrote:
* On 10/17/2011 10:45 PM, Jack wrote:
* On 10/17/2011 4:20 PM, wrote:
* Jack wrote:

* I think the first (significant) version of windows that (didn't) work
* was 3.1.

I had win 3.0 and for me the free 3.1 upgrade was a significant
improvement. I never had any thing earlier than 3.0.

I don't think that changed even a little until XP came out,
* which works marginally if you don't mind occasional meltdowns and
* periodic registry explosions.

GoBack saved my butt on many occasions.

XP still is not a patch on the ass of OS/2
* WARP. I never used Win Vista ver 7 so can't comment other than retailers
* were offering XP and free future upgrades because Vista sucked. Hard to
* imagine it sucked worse than previous versions of Win, but that was the
* word I got.

Every one complains about something. I had the most luck with XP and
because it was such a vast improvement over 95 and 98 in being stable
many did found it not necessary to change or upgrade. IIRC ME, 2000, and
Vista did not have enough persuasion to change many XP users minds. Had
Microsoft continued to support XP it might still be very popular. I am
using 7 now and it seems as stable as XP but has a lot of short cuts
that make using it a bit simpler to use. I don't care for Vista my self
but every one that uses it likes it, but...I think every one that I know
that uses it did had not used XP extensively. I think since XP it all
depends on what you are used to using.

I used and supported everything from various flavours of DOS and Windows
in a corporate environment. *XP was by far the best and easiest, over
its predecessors. *Vista was fine, given the right hardware, MS
seriously messed up on its minimum hardware requirements, given the
right hardware Vista ws fine, but Win7 is a joy to use.

Win8 looks like it is going to be another bucket load of crap though, at
least according to the latest developers release. *Had it running in a
virtual machine, couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

That's like me and MacOS10 LION. A genuine WTF is THIS escaped from my
mouth....loud.
Loaded Snow Leopard and restored from my back up drive. Took over an
hour with a big sigh of relief.
Why can't these people leave well enough alone?

Then there was the 1802 RCA COSMAC CPU. A fellow CPUist, back then,
had one of those and we used to compete writing code (hand assembly) to
see who could do job X with less bytes of code. Man! That was a
primitive CPU with 16 16bit registers and not much else. No predefined
programme execution pointer, no 16 bit operations, even though all 16
bit operations, 8 bit working register. It was like writing microcode
but after you wrote standard call and return routines (subroutine
calls) the thing really kept up with any other 8 bit CPU.

I thoroughly enjoyed bit twiddling and miss the speaker buzzes and
light flashing.

One job we did was both wrote control software for a line printer
mechanism we picked up surplus. Timing counting and interrupt handling
was all great innovation using a massive 1024 bytes to get real
UPPERCASE printouts for hardcopy. We saved at least $3-4K each for a
dot matrix printer and had a lot of fun! The RCA 1802, with it's
primitive instruction set kept right up with anything I could do on a
Mot 6800 in byte count and speed.

Hadn't heard of a Nat SemiCon CPU before. Sounds like it was a
"minicomputer" back then.

-----------------
Larry Blanchard wrote:
I always thought the Nat'l Semi 16032 and its relatives had the best
instruction set of the micro chips, but my real favorite was a
mainframe from the '60s, the GE4xx series. Not a lot about it on the
web but a little at:

-------------
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:57:21 -0400, m II wrote:

Yup, Motorola kept reducing the instruction sets down to 27? on the
68000 while Intel kept bragging about the millions of instructions on
it's messy internal architecture. People writing code for Intel hated
it!

Then came along the Z-80 with it's block memory move in one
instruction. Trouble was, that a 6809 with code for a memory move
loop could move the block faster and with less setup instructions
and time.

We all learned the long and hard way.

Remember the first twenty Windows versions? Until Win NT Windows could
deal with interrupt I/O processing. An interrupt would cause a semi
fore flag to the O/S and then when the O/S had time it would handle the
semaphore, as if, the hardware interrupt had just happened. When a
flood of input events would happen, half the input events would be lost
if he CPU was busy doing something some other code writer thought was
the most important thing to do or some idiot didn't know that a
multitasking system had to be called from your own code every few
milliseconds or your printer would stop. Gawd! Windows was a POS and
couldn't come anywhere near other O/Ses from the late 70s.

If IBM hadn't cause the market to jump back into the 8 bit 70's with
their PC Bill Gates might be a gutter boy still retraining to write
code without any education. He must sit back, with all this multi CPU
stuff and wonder WTF? are they talking about!


------------------
"Jack" wrote in message ...
Gates is a multi-billionaire because IBM bestowed the DT/PC market upon
him. They did this despite the fact he had NO OS at the time they
contracted with him. They contracted with him because his (rich) mommy
was friends with the heads of IBM, and he was smart enough, even though
he dropped out of college, to prevent competition from eating his
lunch.
He was rich enough to be able to pay Patterson 100g's for the OS he
bought off him.

Had Gates and company been "competent" we would all be running OS/2 or
something even better, and I would be happy as hell Gates was the
richest MF'r on earth.

--
Jack
Add Life to your Days not Days to your Life.
http://jbstein.com

Hey Caputo...**** off back to your failed Usenet business.

and stop bottom posting. Get with the modern times

------------
"Dave" wrote in message
...

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:06:17 -0400, Jack wrote:
closed on all competing DT/PC OS's. Gates and IBM made certain of
that,
and the home PC market has been paying the price ever since.

Poor put upon Jack. He's realized that Gates and IBM have been out to
get him personally all these years. It must really suck to be Jack.

On Oct 18, 4:27*pm, Robatoy wrote:

That's like me and MacOS10 LION. A genuine WTF is THIS escaped from my
mouth....loud.
Loaded Snow Leopard and restored from my back up drive. Took over an
hour with a big sigh of relief.
Why can't these people leave well enough alone?

Where's the money in that...err...sense. I meant where's the sense in
that?

They need the money. Do you have any idea what a billionaire
Buddhist's burial goes for these days?

R

On 10/18/11 4:27 PM, Robatoy wrote:
On Oct 18, 4:15 pm,
wrote:

Win8 looks like it is going to be another bucket load of crap though, at
least according to the latest developers release. Had it running in a
virtual machine, couldn't get rid of it fast enough.

That's like me and MacOS10 LION. A genuine WTF is THIS escaped from my
mouth....loud.
Loaded Snow Leopard and restored from my back up drive. Took over an
hour with a big sigh of relief.
Why can't these people leave well enough alone?

They both appear to be going in the same way from different angles,
Apple is adapting the iPad, IPhone interface to work with OSX, and MS is
trying to bolt a touch interface to windows so they can have one
interface for PCs and tablets.

Even Ubuntu Linux has done it with their POS interface of late, I do not
want my paws all over my monitor, let me use a mouse and a physical
keyboard.

Oh, and get off my lawn, you hippee. :-)

--
Froz...


The system will be down for 10 days for preventive maintenance.

On Oct 18, 4:55*pm, "m II" wrote:
Hey Caputo...**** off back to your failed Usenet business.

and stop bottom posting. Get with the modern times

------------"Dave" *wrote in message

[snipped for brevity]

Don't worry about ****Noodle over there, Dave... (Caputo is his
imaginary friend...ssshhhhhh)

On Oct 18, 5:11*pm, RicodJour wrote:
On Oct 18, 4:27*pm, Robatoy wrote:



That's like me and MacOS10 LION. A genuine WTF is THIS escaped from my
mouth....loud.
Loaded Snow Leopard and restored from my back up drive. Took over an
hour with a big sigh of relief.
Why can't these people leave well enough alone?

Where's the money in that...err...sense. *I meant where's the sense in
that? *

They need the money. *Do you have any idea what a billionaire
Buddhist's burial goes for these days?

R

If you include his favourite ride (GulfstreamG650).. it get very pricy.

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 14:24:53 -0400, Mike Marlow wrote:

I always thought the Nat'l Semi 16032 and its relatives had the best
instruction set of the micro chips, but my real favorite was a
mainframe from the '60s, the GE4xx series. Not a lot about it on the
web but a little at:


Mixed thoughts there Larry 0 GE4x was not a microprocessor based
machine.

Well, I did say it was a "mainframe", but I see what you mean. I guess I
should have said the 4xx had my favorite instruction set of all
computers, main, mini, or micro.

--
Intelligence is an experiment that failed - G. B. Shaw

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:40:40 -0400, m II wrote:

Hadn't heard of a Nat SemiCon CPU before. Sounds like it was a
"minicomputer" back then.

Nope - a micro. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS320xx

--
Intelligence is an experiment that failed - G. B. Shaw

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:15:40 -0400, FrozenNorth wrote:

Even Ubuntu Linux has done it with their POS interface of late

Amen! I'm running 10.04 and will continue to do so. At least until it
loses support in April of 2012.

Some have suggested the latest version of Mint as a replacement.

--
Intelligence is an experiment that failed - G. B. Shaw

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:53:10 -0400, m II wrote:

or some idiot didn't know that a multitasking system had to be called
from your own code every few milliseconds or your printer would stop.

That's cooperative multitasking. You mean they didn't use preemptive
multitasking? That's a serious question - I know very little about
Windows internals. I used to know a fair amount about the innards of
Unix, but since retirement I've even gotten obsolete on that.

--
Intelligence is an experiment that failed - G. B. Shaw

On Oct 19, 3:38*am, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:
wrote:

IKWUABWAI?

Pure stupidity. *You are either a 20-something text adict or you are simply
too lazy to type a comprehensive sentence - expecting everyone else to
either understand or to look up your "acronyms".


Bingo.

On 10/18/2011 11:24 AM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Larry Blanchard wrote:
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:57:21 -0400, m II wrote:

Yup, Motorola kept reducing the instruction sets down to 27? on the
68000 while Intel kept bragging about the millions of instructions on
it's messy internal architecture. People writing code for Intel hated
it!

Then came along the Z-80 with it's block memory move in one
instruction. Trouble was, that a 6809 with code for a memory move
loop could move the block faster and with less setup instructions
and time.

We all learned the long and hard way.

I always thought the Nat'l Semi 16032 and its relatives had the best
instruction set of the micro chips, but my real favorite was a
mainframe from the '60s, the GE4xx series. Not a lot about it on the
web but a little at:


Mixed thoughts there Larry 0 GE4x was not a microprocessor based machine.


Actually, the first microprocessor on a single chip was the Four-Phase
Systems AL1 chip. It was developed by the Four-Phase founder, Lee
Boysel in 1969. It took a law suit against TI to get it recognized as such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Phase_Systems

There were other microprocessor designs around that time, but the AL1
was the first actually produced.




--
"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to
blame somebody else." -John Burroughs

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:20:13 +0000 (UTC), Larry Blanchard
wrote:

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:40:40 -0400, m II wrote:

Hadn't heard of a Nat SemiCon CPU before. Sounds like it was a
"minicomputer" back then.

Nope - a micro. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS320xx

National also had a PACE (16 bit) and SC/MP (8-bit) micros. I used the PACE
for a few years in the mid-late '70s. I liked the instruction set but it was
a little on the slow side (16-bit data word with only an 8-bit ALU). It was a
takeoff of the DataGeneral, IIRC.

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 23:29:34 +0000 (UTC), Larry Blanchard
wrote:

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:53:10 -0400, m II wrote:

or some idiot didn't know that a multitasking system had to be called
from your own code every few milliseconds or your printer would stop.

That's cooperative multitasking. You mean they didn't use preemptive
multitasking? That's a serious question - I know very little about
Windows internals. I used to know a fair amount about the innards of
Unix, but since retirement I've even gotten obsolete on that.

Yes, early Win's multitasking was cooperative. OS/2's was preemptive and
therefore much more responsive when doing certain tasks.

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:33:32 -0500, Leon lcb11211@swbelldotnet wrote:

On 10/18/2011 9:56 AM, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 07:34:11 -0500, Leonlcb11211@swbelldotnet wrote:

On 10/17/2011 10:45 PM, Jack wrote:
On 10/17/2011 4:20 PM, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
Jack wrote:

True, they were found in violation of the Sherman Antitrust act, in
court. My guess is that had them on pins and needles when they opened
the PC/DT market.

They were on "pins and needles" in every market. It wasn't because of the
CDC, and like, suits, though. The '56 consent decree really
handicapped them.
It wasn't removed until '00, or there abouts.

The reason monopolies like MS are bad is by definition,
competition is excluded via control of the market. When competition is
stifled by a monopoly, progress stops, quality stagnates and people
are
forced to pay what the monopoly says they will pay. MS is a perfect
example of this, providing crap at a 30% mark up to over 90% of the
market.

...and just what 90% of the market wants.

And you know this how?

People voting with their wallets, AKA market penetration.You couldn't
give
OS/2 away (sadly) and still can't give Linux away.

It was next to impossible to buy a copy of OS/2. Most every PC was sold
with DOS/WIN installed.


You could NOT get anything else installed unless
you bought from some geek down the street. Retailers did not install
OS/2 or anything else, and if they tried, MS would pull their license or
remove the fake discount MS gave them. Worse, the retailers rarely had
copies of OS/2 to sell, either because IBM didn't provide them copies,
or, because again, fear of MS punishing anyone that sold something other
than MS OS.


You might want to think further back. Initial PC's had no OS installed.

Define "OS". ROM BASIC was installed on all IBM PCs. If "OS" == Disk, then
you're obviously right.

OS that which you entered commands that the computer could understand,

ROM BASIC qualified that far.

yes the one on a disk.

Well, ROM BASIC wasn't on a disk. ;-)

Back in the mid 80's PC/DOS not to be confused with MS/DOS was a very
common OS that came with many if not most, if they were not IBM PC's.
My ATT 6300 came with that software. Also, many comnputers back then
only had floppy drives, a 10 meg HD was a $500 option,

Early PC/DOS *was* MS/DOS. There was a split, later, but up until at least
V3, they were identical. The best version was IBM's DOS7.

Don't doubt that since both were nearly identical.

There were a few commands, and later shells that differed. Just enough to
differentiate the two. OTOH, there was a pretty big difference between MS/DOS
6.x and PC/DOS 7.x.

IIRC MS/DOS was only coming on IBM and Windows did not start showing up
on PC's until hard drives were common and version 3.0 came out.

IBM sold PC/DOS. Some dealers may have sold MS/DOS instead. There were
Windows versions before 1.0, but didn't sell well.

Really, I thought that IBM was only coming with the MS version.

PC/DOS was IBM's brand for DOS. After 3x (IIRC) they were rather different
things.

I do recall buying a different OS back then that was about $25 IIRC.

Which OS? IIRC, PC/DOS was about $50.

I really cannot remember for sure but .... DR DOS may be??? I guessing
here. I did not use it past trying it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

Could be, later. Later on, DR-DOS was free and was often shipped with tools.

On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:38:20 -0400, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

wrote:


IKWUABWAI?

Pure stupidity. You are either a 20-something text adict or you are simply
too lazy to type a comprehensive sentence - expecting everyone else to
either understand or to look up your "acronyms".

I can't help it if you're net illiterate, as well.

zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:38:20 -0400, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

zzzzzzzzzz wrote:


IKWUABWAI?

Pure stupidity. You are either a 20-something text adict or you are
simply too lazy to type a comprehensive sentence - expecting
everyone else to either understand or to look up your "acronyms".

I can't help it if you're net illiterate, as well.

Not at all net illiterate. Just not as lazy as you when it comes to
actually typing out what I mean to say. At that - your cute little acronym
is childish at best. And you consider yourself to be literate - in exactly
what way?

--

-Mike-

Nice but after my time. I never did any low level coding on 32 bit
anything. 32 bit was considered a minicomputer and only a dream for a
CPU but later the definitions changed and they seemed to disappear. IC
pin spacing started that .05" spacing and I dropped out of the hardware
building hobby. Without PCB design there was no way to play with the
stuff! Then I became a "user" later.

------------

"Larry Blanchard" wrote in message
...
Nope - a micro. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NS320xx

--
Intelligence is an experiment that failed - G. B. Shaw

It (OS2) definitely should have won out but then so should have
Motorola CPU and support chips.

--------------
wrote in message ...
Yes, early Win's multitasking was cooperative. OS/2's was preemptive
and
therefore much more responsive when doing certain tasks.

Bull****!

-------------
"Mike Marlow" wrote in message
...
Pure stupidity. You are either a 20-something text adict or you are
simply
too lazy to type a comprehensive sentence - expecting everyone else to
either understand or to look up your "acronyms".


--

-Mike-

in 1511307 20111018 150617 Jack wrote:
On 10/18/2011 2:56 AM, Bob Martin wrote:
Tim Daneliuk wrote:

Then IBM entered the market
and Microsoft came with them, for the first time producing an OS.

Until IBM entered the market, the market was bare.

You might want to mention that to the several millionaires that
were made producing OSs long before MS/IBM entered the party.
I personally know at least one.

There were operating systems LONG before the PC came along.

Yeah, and little market for DT/OS's until Gates bought his for the IBM
PC from Patterson for 100g's. Once that happened, the door was soon
closed on all competing DT/PC OS's. Gates and IBM made certain of that,
and the home PC market has been paying the price ever since.

UNIX was developed by Kernighan and Ritchie around 1975, long before
Gates bought his OS for the PC. Before that, things were rough, caveman
like. So rough, they decided to develop a low level programing
language, C, just to help code the OS. Pure genius, unlike Gates, who
is more of a dunce compared to these two. Windows still hasn't caught
up to UNIX after quarter century of work by the competent jerks at MS.

I was thinking of main-frames ...

Mike Marlow wrote,on my timestamp of 19/10/2011 3:46 PM:

Not at all net illiterate. Just not as lazy as you when it comes to
actually typing out what I mean to say. At that - your cute little acronym
is childish at best. And you consider yourself to be literate - in exactly
what way?


Please don't encourage this idiot.
It's a well known troll, using a well known compromised education server, run by
a bunch of teutonic incompetents.

In article , says...

On 10/18/2011 12:08 AM, m II wrote:
Sorry Gates was not writing any O/S for the 6800 or anything back then.
He certainly didn't write OS-9, CP/M or MP/M.
Execution and access traps were non-existent in microprocessors back
then and self modifying code would not violate the traps back then. I
believe the 80386 was the first acclaimed "real" microprocessor that
could error out on violations of memory boundaries similar to mainframe
machines. Self-modifying code would get you kicked out of any recognized
University for heresy at any time in history. Real coders just don't do
it and keep a job.

Gate wrote very little code as he wasn't very good at it. He was a
marketing genius in the right place at the right time. Another time in
history he might have been a flop doing the same thing. His stuff was
impressive from the outside but very dirty inside.
...

If he wasn't the code author, then hardly fair to blame him for being
the author of whatever, is it?

You're just nuts...

An aside, but FWIW, the '286 had a full set of protection mechanisms--
what it lacked was the ability to virtualize itself and run code written
for a machine with protections disabled in a protected virtual machine.
Unix System V ran fine on the 80286 with all the protections in place,
but there wasn't a way to run a DOS box under Unix other than by
switching the CPU to unprotected mode and back. And there was a bug in
the hardware that caused problems with that switch--Novell, AT&T, and
others managed to work around the bug, but somehow Digital Research
never did and lost a lot of momentum as a result.

m II, I believe that United Technologies, which counts among its subsidiaries Pratt & Whitney and Sikorski, counts as a "decent sized business" and they had company-provide Apple IIs before IBM shipped their first PC.

On Monday, October 17, 2011 11:45:59 PM UTC-4, Jack wrote:

It was next to impossible to buy a copy of OS/2.

I bought several copies at the Electronics Boutique store in the local mall. It was not at all difficult to obtain.

Most every PC was sold
with DOS/WIN installed.

So what? Anybody who wanted something else just had to buy it and install it, same as today.

Worse, the retailers rarely had
copies of OS/2 to sell, either because IBM didn't provide them copies,
or, because again, fear of MS punishing anyone that sold something other
than MS OS.

Electronics Boutique was a retailer. And they were not the only one that had OS/2 on the shelf.

IBM wanted MS to develop a system that they could use for their ATM
machines, and DOS/WIN was crap (still is) MS either was too dumb (my
guess) or had some other lame reason to not be able to deliver. (I
recall it said that MS told IBM it was not possible) IBM then did it
themselves in about a year, and it was awesome. IBM killed it's
development when it was selling a million copies a month despite their
lack of support. My opinion is they never wanted that part of the
market because of the "pins and needles" mentioned above. At the time,
there was an obvious, and uncomfortable disconnect between IBM OS/2 team
and the rest of the company. It became clear IBM had no intention of
moving in on MS, why is open for speculation.

If you think that IBM needed Microsoft to develop an OS for them you're clueless. IBM was shipping 32-bit preemptively multitasking protected virtual operating systems when Bill Gates was still in high school.

Microsoft bailed on OS/2 because Windows was making much more money for them, pure and simple.

And if IBM was selling a million copies a month then it must have been more available than you claim.

On Tuesday, October 18, 2011 12:33:32 PM UTC-4, Leon wrote:

snip

Really, I thought that IBM was only coming with the MS version.

You could buy PC-DOS or MS-DOS. PC-DOS came in a gray binder that said "IBM" on the cover, MS-DOS came in a green binder that said "Microsoft" on the cover. The only functional difference was that the one that said "Microsoft" on the cover included a BASIC interpreter that would run on a machine without ROM-BASIC while the one in the IBM version required ROM-BASIC.

IBM never bundled the green binders with their own machines, but you could buy the grey binder version without a machine.

I do recall buying a different OS back then that was about $25 IIRC.

Which OS? IIRC, PC/DOS was about $50.

I really cannot remember for sure but .... DR DOS may be??? I guessing
here. I did not use it past trying it out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:46:38 -0400, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

wrote:
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:38:20 -0400, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

zzzzzzzzzz wrote:


IKWUABWAI?

Pure stupidity. You are either a 20-something text adict or you are
simply too lazy to type a comprehensive sentence - expecting
everyone else to either understand or to look up your "acronyms".

I can't help it if you're net illiterate, as well.

Not at all net illiterate.

Obviously not true.

Just not as lazy as you when it comes to
actually typing out what I mean to say. At that - your cute little acronym
is childish at best. And you consider yourself to be literate - in exactly
what way?

At least I know the common Usenet idioms.

On 10/18/2011 8:27 PM, zzzzzzzzzz wrote:

Yes, early Win's multitasking was cooperative. OS/2's was preemptive and
therefore much more responsive when doing certain tasks.

Yeah, like if DOS or Windows applications crashed, OS/2 protected its
environment and all you had to do was close the session that was running
the dos or dos/win app and reload the app. Also, you could run DOS
apps, win apps, OS/2 apps and print from any of them at the same time
w/o any noticeable slowdowns, as well as cut an paste between all of
them on a 486 yet. Disk and memory access was in the terabytes, disk
fragmentation was non-existent and on and on and on. All over 15 years
ago. WIN ain't near what OS/2 was then, but everyone is happy as hell
with win... yuck!

--
Jack
Add Life to your Days not Days to your Life.
http://jbstein.com

On 10/19/2011 10:29 AM, wrote:
On Monday, October 17, 2011 11:45:59 PM UTC-4, Jack wrote:

It was next to impossible to buy a copy of OS/2.

I bought several copies at the Electronics Boutique store in the local mall. It was not at all difficult to obtain.

Most every PC was sold
with DOS/WIN installed.

So what? Anybody who wanted something else just had to buy it and install it, same as today.

Worse, the retailers rarely had
copies of OS/2 to sell, either because IBM didn't provide them copies,
or, because again, fear of MS punishing anyone that sold something other
than MS OS.

Electronics Boutique was a retailer. And they were not the only one that had OS/2 on the shelf.

Egghead also said they sold OS/2 but they never had it on the shelf. I
never heard of Electronics Boutique, but I believe you.

IBM wanted MS to develop a system that they could use for their ATM
machines, and DOS/WIN was crap (still is) MS either was too dumb (my
guess) or had some other lame reason to not be able to deliver. (I
recall it said that MS told IBM it was not possible) IBM then did it
themselves in about a year, and it was awesome. IBM killed it's
development when it was selling a million copies a month despite their
lack of support. My opinion is they never wanted that part of the
market because of the "pins and needles" mentioned above. At the time,
there was an obvious, and uncomfortable disconnect between IBM OS/2 team
and the rest of the company. It became clear IBM had no intention of
moving in on MS, why is open for speculation.

If you think that IBM needed Microsoft to develop an OS for them you're clueless.

Nothing I said should give you that idea. IBM contracted with Gates for
the DT/PC OS. They could have written it themselves with no problem.
Why they contracted with Gates is pure speculation, but NEVER did I
say it was because IBM couldn't do it themselves. My GUESS is IBM
didn't think the PC market would do anything, and if it did, they didn't
want another anti-trust suit, so they contracted with a dip**** they
thought they could control.

IBM wanted Gates to develop OS/2 so they could use it as the OS for ATM
machines, which had to be stable, unlike DOS/WIN. When Gates couldn't
deliver after years of trying, IBM did it themselves in less than a
year, after Gates said it was impossible to do what IBM wanted.

Now, I think between MS, IBM and INTEL, they have a cartel and it will
take an act of god to get them to do more than rip everyone off.

IBM was shipping 32-bit preemptively multitasking protected virtual operating systems when
Bill Gates was still in high school.

Doesn't change the fact they contracted with Gates to provide an OS for
their PC. Gates didn't even HAVE one at the time. IBM could have gone
to Patterson themselves and bought the OS instead of Gates. I don't
know why they didn't, but the most likely story I heard was Gates mother
was in with some IBM big cheese.

Microsoft bailed on OS/2 because Windows was making much more money for them, pure and simple.

MS never could get OS/2 to work. IBM took the project off of MS when
they failed to deliver. IBM dropped OS/2 when it started to threaten MS
corner on the DT/PC OS market. Why they did this is speculative, my
feeling is the anti-trust thing, combined with the cozy cartel
IBM/MS/INTEL has going for them.

And if IBM was selling a million copies a month then it must have been more available
than you claim.

All I know is you could not buy a PC at any retail outlet (other than
possibly IBM, not sure about that) with OS/2 installed. None of the
retail stores around here sold OS/2, I know that because I had to get my
copies directly from IBM. The sales numbers were being reported by OS/2
user groups, I don't know where they got their numbers but I was
following them closely because I was keenly interested. IBM did little
to no retail marketing of OS/2, and most of the noise about it came from
delighted users, and the OS/2 user group. The user group got some, but
very little support from IBM. It was obvious to me that IBM was not
interested in competing with the company to which they bestowed the
DT/PC OS market. IMO, had they wanted to, they could have crushed Gates
and MS like a grape.

--
Jack
Add Life to your Days not Days to your Life.
http://jbstein.com

On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 16:24:30 -0400, Jack wrote:

On 10/19/2011 10:29 AM, wrote:
On Monday, October 17, 2011 11:45:59 PM UTC-4, Jack wrote:

It was next to impossible to buy a copy of OS/2.

I bought several copies at the Electronics Boutique store in the local mall. It was not at all difficult to obtain.

Most every PC was sold
with DOS/WIN installed.

So what? Anybody who wanted something else just had to buy it and install it, same as today.

Worse, the retailers rarely had
copies of OS/2 to sell, either because IBM didn't provide them copies,
or, because again, fear of MS punishing anyone that sold something other
than MS OS.

Electronics Boutique was a retailer. And they were not the only one that had OS/2 on the shelf.

Egghead also said they sold OS/2 but they never had it on the shelf. I
never heard of Electronics Boutique, but I believe you.

EB was a chain similar to GameStop (a store in every mall). So similar that
GameStop bought the competition.

IBM wanted MS to develop a system that they could use for their ATM
machines, and DOS/WIN was crap (still is) MS either was too dumb (my
guess) or had some other lame reason to not be able to deliver. (I
recall it said that MS told IBM it was not possible) IBM then did it
themselves in about a year, and it was awesome. IBM killed it's
development when it was selling a million copies a month despite their
lack of support. My opinion is they never wanted that part of the
market because of the "pins and needles" mentioned above. At the time,
there was an obvious, and uncomfortable disconnect between IBM OS/2 team
and the rest of the company. It became clear IBM had no intention of
moving in on MS, why is open for speculation.

If you think that IBM needed Microsoft to develop an OS for them you're clueless.

Nothing I said should give you that idea. IBM contracted with Gates for
the DT/PC OS. They could have written it themselves with no problem.

Actually, the couldn't. It would have cost *far* too much.

Why they contracted with Gates is pure speculation, but NEVER did I
say it was because IBM couldn't do it themselves. My GUESS is IBM
didn't think the PC market would do anything, and if it did, they didn't
want another anti-trust suit, so they contracted with a dip**** they
thought they could control.

For the anticipated 25K units? No, the reason they didn't write it themselves
is that it would have cost 100x too much. The PC was a "skunkworks" project,
flying under the RADAR of the monster. The whole design team was only a few
people.

IBM wanted Gates to develop OS/2 so they could use it as the OS for ATM
machines, which had to be stable, unlike DOS/WIN. When Gates couldn't
deliver after years of trying, IBM did it themselves in less than a
year, after Gates said it was impossible to do what IBM wanted.

ATMs were *one* application for OS/2. There were *many* others.

Now, I think between MS, IBM and INTEL, they have a cartel and it will
take an act of god to get them to do more than rip everyone off.

They "have" a cartel? IBM isn't even in that business anymore. BTW, Intel
and MS hate each other.

IBM was shipping 32-bit preemptively multitasking protected virtual operating systems when
Bill Gates was still in high school.

Doesn't change the fact they contracted with Gates to provide an OS for
their PC. Gates didn't even HAVE one at the time. IBM could have gone
to Patterson themselves and bought the OS instead of Gates. I don't
know why they didn't, but the most likely story I heard was Gates mother
was in with some IBM big cheese.

I've never heard that story and I worked for the beast. Any citations?

Microsoft bailed on OS/2 because Windows was making much more money for them, pure and simple.

MS never could get OS/2 to work. IBM took the project off of MS when
they failed to deliver. IBM dropped OS/2 when it started to threaten MS
corner on the DT/PC OS market. Why they did this is speculative, my
feeling is the anti-trust thing, combined with the cozy cartel
IBM/MS/INTEL has going for them.

Baloney. IBM withdrew it when it was clear there was no money to be had.
There was no money to be had because they didn't want to spend the $200M
needed to market it. IBM was in tough shape in the early '90s, borrowing
money to pay dividends.

And if IBM was selling a million copies a month then it must have been more available
than you claim.

All I know is you could not buy a PC at any retail outlet (other than
possibly IBM, not sure about that) with OS/2 installed.

There were retail outlets, both storefront and Internet, that sold PCs with
OS/2 installed. Dell, HP, and Gateway didn't, if that's what you mean.

None of the
retail stores around here sold OS/2, I know that because I had to get my
copies directly from IBM. The sales numbers were being reported by OS/2
user groups, I don't know where they got their numbers but I was
following them closely because I was keenly interested. IBM did little
to no retail marketing of OS/2, and most of the noise about it came from
delighted users, and the OS/2 user group. The user group got some, but
very little support from IBM. It was obvious to me that IBM was not
interested in competing with the company to which they bestowed the
DT/PC OS market. IMO, had they wanted to, they could have crushed Gates
and MS like a grape.

Wrong.

On Oct 20, 6:48*am, Jack wrote:

Yeah, like if DOS or Windows applications crashed, OS/2 protected its
environment and all you had to do was close the session that was running
the dos or dos/win app and reload the app. *Also, you could run DOS
apps, win apps, OS/2 apps and print from any of them at the same time
w/o any noticeable slowdowns, as well as cut an paste between all of
them on a 486 yet. *Disk and memory access was in the terabytes, disk
fragmentation was non-existent and on and on and on. *All over 15 years
ago. WIN ain't near what OS/2 was then, but everyone is happy as hell
with win... yuck!


When OS2 2.0 came out, before even Win4 saw the light of day, I
started using it and never stopped until nearly 2001 - when I finally
had to give up on it due to Gerstner's lack of any commitment. Still
got OS2 Warp cds, kept it just in case I ever need a reliable desktop
OS again.
The workplace shell was the best desktop I've ever seen, and I include
Linux and OsX in that weighting.
Well... "consumer" OS history is a long litany of major technical
errors aided by "marketing".

zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:46:38 -0400, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

zzzzzzzzzz wrote:
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 12:38:20 -0400, "Mike Marlow"
wrote:

zzzzzzzzzz wrote:


IKWUABWAI?

Pure stupidity. You are either a 20-something text adict or you
are simply too lazy to type a comprehensive sentence - expecting
everyone else to either understand or to look up your "acronyms".

I can't help it if you're net illiterate, as well.

Not at all net illiterate.

Obviously not true.

To you - and I've reached the point where what is obvious to you has become
meaningless to me. So... **** off.



Just not as lazy as you when it comes to
actually typing out what I mean to say. At that - your cute little
acronym is childish at best. And you consider yourself to be
literate - in exactly what way?

At least I know the common Usenet idioms.

Ohhhhhh... good for you! You are such a freakin' hero...

--

-Mike-

Jack wrote:

Disk and memory access was in the
terabytes, disk fragmentation was non-existent and on and on and on.

Oh please! In theory only. You just destroyed your credibility with two
simple statements there Jack.


--

-Mike-