From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Mar 13 21:52: 5 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com [206.29.169.15]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6B57F37B718 for ; Tue, 13 Mar 2001 21:51:59 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) Received: from tedm.placo.com (nat-rtr.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com [206.29.168.154]) by mail.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com (8.11.1/8.11.1) with SMTP id f2E5puN22310; Tue, 13 Mar 2001 21:51:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from tedm@toybox.placo.com) From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" To: "Mike Meyer" Cc: Subject: RE: FreeBSD and Linux (More Questions!) Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 21:51:56 -0800 Message-ID: <003701c0ac4a$e0a76cc0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook 8.5, Build 4.71.2173.0 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <15021.60337.447884.803919@guru.mired.org> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3155.0 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Mike Meyer >Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2001 1:43 AM >To: Ted Mittelstaedt >Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: RE: FreeBSD and Linux (More Questions!) > > >Ted Mittelstaedt types: >> The computer industry is NOT like it was 20 years ago, it is 1000 times >> vaster. I can remember when I was 15, and it was actually possible at >> that time to "know everything worth knowing" at least in the PC desktop >> arena (although we didn't call them PC's then) That is why the >userbase at >> that time was so adamantly for standardization on a single platform and >> software OS - because we all felt that the market was still graspable, >> and we wanted the standardization to keep it graspable. > >You had a different userbase than I did. I remember there being a >half-dozen different PC choices, most of them miserable, and few - if >any - of them good. Of course, most of the people I hung around with Actually, what happened was the S-100 people were pretty pushy about standardization, then the PC people came in and for a few years there everything was proprietary - Commodore, Ti, Sinclair all those weird ones - for a couple years the userbase that had chafed under the S-100 restrictions thought they were in the Golden Age of the PC because of all the wonderful choices. That quickly went out the window when people realized that nobody really had a killer architecture, and when IBM started pushing the PC the market was very ready to go back to the olden days and start hammering on standardization again. >also remember working with snow white and the seven dwarfs, and >already knew that interoperability was something you got in a computer >line, at least until the manufacturer decided to play shell games to >kill the third party hardware market. > I don't remember if there was a lot of crossover between the mainframe and PC people back then - I think the markets were pretty foreign to each other. > >The internet used to be the one place where interoperability was >important. I'm already miss it. > Sigh. Yes, the one thing that seems to remain a constant is there's always some yokel that has the world's greatest plan to release a proprietary solution, force everyone to switch to it, then lay on the beach the rest of their lives being paid for doing nothing. It seldom works but every once in a while it does, just enough to encourage the rest of the idiots to attempt it over and over. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message