Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 15:50:12 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> To: David Gray <David_W_Gray@tvratings.com> Cc: FreeBSD Chat List <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: How did the MSFT monopoly start? Message-ID: <20010808155012.N78395@wantadilla.lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B13070AC3D5@nmrusdunsx1.nielsenmedia.com>; from David_W_Gray@tvratings.com on Tue, Aug 07, 2001 at 08:42:54AM -0400 References: <01D4D419B1A4D111A30400805FE65B13070AC3D5@nmrusdunsx1.nielsenmedia.com>
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[Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] Your MUA created alternate long and short lines, and omitted the original text. On Tuesday, 7 August 2001 at 8:42:54 -0400, David Gray wrote: > I was working in a large (then) electronics co. in the early 80's... > > There were two pivotal events in the Microsoft saga. One was DOS > 3. The other was Windows 3. Let me elaborate... > > The company I was working for built products for the IBM > plug-compatible mainframe market (as a sideline, actually.) One of > our products was a 327X compatible display system. It had a > completely proprietary communication scheme, so it was really only > compatible at the channel attachment level. In the early 80's came > the IBM pc. It took the market by storm (never underestimate the > power of the cachet of those three letters). It was decided the > latest version of our display was going to be PC compatible (sort > of.) The problem was that the design people started with *too* clean > of a slate. They built the thing with DR-DOS in mind. It worked > rather well, but everybody wanted MSDOS, so they could run FOO. So, > we licensed DOS from Microsoft, and rolled our own. Oh, did I > mention we weren't *too* compatible? That was deliberate - this > company had an announced strategy of locking customers in. And we > even sold a few of these little things, with our very own DOS > 2.2. You weren't exactly alone with that scenario. Just about all the bandwagon machines from other established manufacturers were subtly different, because that's the way we did business in those days. When the el cheapo commodity clones came out, we looked down on them because they had absolutely no originality. You'll still see vestiges of this approach today with Compaq, who seem to insist on being incompatible. Greg -- When replying to this message, please take care not to mutilate the original text. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/email.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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