Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 20:07:47 +0000 From: stuart henderson <stuart@internationalschool.co.uk> To: postmaster@microsoft.com Cc: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG, chat@openbsd.org, "well it can't hurt :-" <God@internationalschool.co.uk> Subject: and why not... Message-ID: <19980122200747.24501@outofsite.internationalschool.co.uk>
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To the postmaster: I would be grateful if you could forward this message for me; I don't have access to your internal email system. This is a very serious suggestion offered freely in the best interests of both Microsoft Corporation and the people of the world. ======================================== For the personal attention of Bill Gates ======================================== Please spare me a moment and read on. Why are you wasting so much of your support department's time and budget by using MS-DOS as the kernel for Windows 95? By using the features provided by the forthcoming Intel binary compatability systems, you could distribute a single upgrade package for all major Intel UNIX environments. By taking advantage of the generous BSD licensing terms, you could also distribute a fully packaged system with integrated installation scripts as you now do. The only difference from your existing "full product" and "upgrade" packages would be the base OS. Why not take advantage of the fully featured modern multitasking OS kernels with inbuilt high performance, high reliability I/O and virtual memory subsystems that are now available? The window managers (GUI's) available for the X Window system (the UNIX equivalent to GDI) are worlds apart from Windows 95. Many different GUI's are available to operate under "X" but most are deficient in the human interface department; this is exactly where Microsoft's best expertise lies. Nobody else has done so much to bring the benefits of computing to the attention of the human race and the media, and you have certainly made a lot of money from it. Surely it's now time to give something back by making Windows 98 a truly great chimera, rather than yet another in what seems an endless stream of upgrades to the weak MSDOS kernel. Both technically and commercially, it could make excellent sense. Jaron Lanier at Wired seems to have come up with the same idea judging by one of his comments on page 62 of 6.01 (January 1998 edition). I shall close here in the hope that this has given you food for thought and would like to thank you for your time. I hope it has been well spent. Stuart
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