NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/comp/os/os2/advocacy/11019

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-29 | 5.9 KB

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From: [e-mail] (RICHARD HOFFBECK)
Subject: Re: FCC will proclaim Microsoft is run by Communists! : )
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Date: Mon, 28 Dec 1992 23:11:00 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Bruce Dubbs) writes:
> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] writes:
> >In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Lowell Morrison) writes:
> >>
> >> Besides the 1983 promise to allow ME to use more than 640K on my AT still
> >> is waiting to be filled by MicroSoft.
> >
> >Why should MS be responsible for IBM's promises?
> >
> >>
> >> I have been in this industry since the Altair was the hot kid on the block,
> >> and I really don't know a lot of users who are happy with Microsoft.  Such
> >> statements as; "I bought this 386 with 8 megs of ram, why will this ****
> >> MS-Dog only allow me to use 640K without buying something else again" are
> >> rampant.  People are not happy with MS, they only buy MS-DOS because it is
> >> effectively the only game in town, and you gotta play and pay through the
> >> nose for the priviledge.
> >
> >It was IBM that decided to place the BIOS/Video/Disk ROM where it is, not
> >MS.  It was IBM that decided to go with the segmented architecture, not MS.
>              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> I hope you mean by this that IBM decided to go with Intel 8088 and not
> Motorola 68000 chips.  If we are given an 80x8x, we are limited to
> segmented architecture (in real mode).

At the risk of dating myself, the 8088 was state of the art for Intel in
1982 -- in fact the Z80 was considered to be fairly heavy duty for a
micro.  I'm not sure that its fair to blame either MS or IBM for the
640K limit since late '83.  There have been several OSs available that
would run a 286 or better in protected mode an give you access to all of
the memory that the CPU could support.  If I remember correctly SCO XENIX
for the AT came out within a couple of months of its release in late summer
or 1983. I was running UNIX in 5 megs of memory in late '86 on my home
machine.  The options were there but people usually said that the applications
were too 'ugly' or the screen update was too slow under UNIX/XENIX.

Granted the world might have been a better place if MS had come out with a DOS
286 in 1983 and told people that they would have to upgrade their applications.
But as I remember that period, it isn't clear that people would have
followed if they had to replace their applications.

>
> From my understanding, IBM did not think much of the PC at first and
> went for the absolute cheapest chips consistent with typical IBM
> reliability requirements (I've not heard of reliability complaints
> from any IBM machine--they may not have pushed the state of the art,
> but they are pretty reliable.)

What most critics don't take into account is that IBM has never been
interested in marketing (as compared to developing) state of the art
equipment.  The accounts that I've read have said that the development
team was given 12 months to have a production ready product which
boxed them into a fairly pedestrian design. You pretty much had
to slap together whatever hardware and OS you could find. I believe that
there was a CP/M-68K under development during that time, but noone told
IBM about it.

I also remember sitting through a presentation by Intel in Feb '83 about
'plans' for the 286 and 386 chips.  The rep made the comment that the main
reason that IBM went  with Intel was supply reliability -- Intel could produce
millions of 8088 chips in a fairly short time frame. Supposedly that was the
same reason that they went with the 8250 SIO chip rather than the better 8251
that a lot of CP/M machines used at the time. On the otherhand, there have been
times when Motorola has been unable to keep Apple supplied with the 680x0 chips
that they needed let alone the quanitites that IBM deals in.

During '83 I was using a Perq System 1 which was pretty state of the art
for the time with an 11" by 14" high res graphics screen, a couple of
megs of memory, hard disk and a micro-code reprogrammable CPU. But being
state of the art costs and at $30K they couldn't make a go here in the
states,  I don't know if Perq is still selling workstations (or anything
else for that matter) in the UK.  People aren't always willing to pay
for state-of-the-art.

>
> In fact, if IBM would have gone with Motorola, I don't think MS would
> exist today.
>

I don't know.  MS came out of the CP/M era with a very strong position in
languages and development tools.  They were the only game for BASIC and
FORTRAN for quite a while.  I don't think that DR or Ryan-MacFarland came
out with FORTRAN compliers until the fall of '84 or thereabouts. They've
also been pushing the WYSIWYG type environment for almost 10 years. I've
still got one of the original MS Mice that came with my copy of MS WORD
back in '83.  Back then it was a big deal that WORD would show you some
of the formatting like italics, boldface, underline, sub/superscripts, etc.
MS might not have been as big as they are today in a 68K world, but I suspect
that they would still be reasonably large.  There's no reason that MS
couldn't have hawked compilers, WORD and mice for 68K machines.

All the sudden I'm starting to feel old :-)

--rick