Slashman wrote on Aug 14, 2011, 00:50:
Bhruic wrote on Aug 13, 2011, 21:09:
I didn't say that at all. I just said we wouldn't be as far along as we have been, and it's true.
Because in your alternate no-MS universe, it's totally impossible that some other company could have stepped in and filled MS's role. If MS hadn't have done it, someone else would have. The reason we didn't have anyone else doing it is because MS monopolized the system so badly. You can say "we wouldn't be as far along", and yes, there's no way to prove you wrong, but I could say "we'd be farther along without MS", and there's no way for you to prove me wrong. Rather pointless speculation.
I'm not so sure that's accurate either. Apart from Apple, no one seemed to want to play in the personal computer space at the time. There was Commodore and Amiga...but I can't say that they failed because of Microsoft's monopolizing.
Microsoft's monopolizing became a factor afterwards when people began to realize that there was a goldmine in the 'average joe' having his own PC.
I'm not going to ever sing MS praises, but I don't think it's their fault that they have no real competition in the personal desktop space. They've done a lot of crud with the power that they do have...but I think they got it because no one else was trying to grab it at the same time.
I had just started my computer programming career in 1982. Personal Computers started with the Atari, Commadore, Texas Instruments, and Radio Shack. Apple was not a part of the PC revolution because their computers were too costly...the lowest price was like $800 back then when those other 4 dropped down to $250 for an Atari, $150 for the TI, and under $100 for a Commadore VIC20 and Radio Shack's Color Computer (COCO). But, for the most part these were mostly just game consoles with some home office style applications and a BASIC interpreter with an audio cassette storage outlet to save user created programs.
Each of those 4 Personal Computers had their own operating system, but some versions of their computers included CP/M which was a contender for the IBM PC operating system. It wasn't until IBM PC clones hit the market that operating systems really started to narrow down. There were eventually only two: CP/M and MSDOS (a version of IBM's PCDOS). CP/M had already been in use for years in various business computers and stand-alone word processing machines. MSDOS was mostly restricted to IBM computers. One of the reasons that MSDOS did so well was the fact that it was what IBM PCs used...and home users were frustrated with the first 4 "game consoles" and the limited applications available. They saw that there were hundreds if not thousands of programs available for MSDOS that would run on the clones and interested home users. CP/M had an equal number of applications, but most didn't run on the Z80 or 8086 and/or were for a specific business need that home users weren't interested in.
Now that the story is over...the last sentence is why we can't get another OS to totally replace Windows...it has too many applications available. Linux and open-source in general has come a long way and is currently a viable option. But, any operating system starting out would take like a decade to build up the number of applications available to make it worthwhile.
Heck, I could make an operating system better than Windows or Linux...I made a good start in school and changed the designs of my project to make it more stable. For example Windows and Linux both place the clean-up routine in the application pool instead of the system pool...which is why when an application crashes the entire system sometimes becomes unstable. But, nobody would use Rockn-OS even if it's better because there's no application software for it...other than what I could provide unless I could convince other developers to make builds for it. I suppose I could develop an OS that would run Windows or Linux executables, but I don't have enough spare time to do the reverse engineering or the political/marketing clout to get a license to run them.
No...we are stuck with Windows and Microsoft or Open-Source ala Linux. A link to some of this info is:
here and some more specific to gaming is here:
here
Let's Rock!