Patrick Elliott wrote:
> Neither did cars, until Ford, and frankly, Ford did it right, while 
> MS... didn't care about doing it right, so much as doing it profitable. 

And what makes you say this?

> Point was, it didn't have to be PC-DOS. 

Sure. But it was.  It had to be someone without a vested interest in one 
particular brand of hardware, tho.  You didn't see Sun porting Solaris 
to other peoples' chips until they realized they couldn't compete with 
Intel as long as Windows was the problem. (Same reason they wrote Star 
Office, same reason they've been battling Microsoft all along.)

 > Windows wasn't able to run on those either.

Windows ran on lots of machines where a fuller UNIX wouldn't. I'm not 
sure what "those" means, unless you mean 8080-class chips, at which I'll 
agree but wonder why you bring it up.

Windows could do a lot more with a lot less hardware. And it was PC-DOS 
compatible.

And PC-DOS was very compatible with CP/M, conceptually. Indeed, the 
original design was that you should be able to reassemble/recompile your 
CP/M programs for 8086 and have them run under PC-DOS.

> Even with the need to make some adjustments, there is still a basic 
> standardization to internals, and commands.

As with various versions of Windows. Yes?

> adaptions, most of its isn't going to flat out refuse to work right 
> because you plugged a Ford transmission into a Mitsubishi motor, in a 
> Chevy frame.

I see. That's why Apache and MySql and VI don't work at all under 
Windows, yes?  I was wondering why that was.

> But, my point is. You can't reliably project from "because it happened 
> this way.", to, "It needed to happen that way."

I didn't mean to imply it did. *Someone* had to come along and make some 
version of hardware a reasonable target for something like Linux before 
Linux could get popular enough to snowball.  Lots of people wrote 
operating systems for 8080-class machines, and none of them took off 
(except CP/M) because they were all written to specific machinery by the 
manufacturers of the machinery.  Once you had someone realize "Gee, we 
can write the software *without* building the machinery", that's when 
you start seeing "clones."

> drunken sailor on marbles. 

And while I admire your ability to turn a phrase, the hyperbole really 
doesn't manage to communicate anything of interest other than your 
distaste for Microsoft's products. You speak as if every day there are 
thousands of people dying from Microsoft products, or that every 
business that uses Windows goes broke trying to keep it running for more 
than a few hours.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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