In article <47f9149f@news.povray.org>, dne### [at] sanrrcom says...
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>  > Even if true, the real question is, "Was
> > the price paid to do so *worth* it, given other paths that may have led
 
> > to the same thing?"
> 
> Except they didn't. The world had the chance for 10 or 15 years, and 
> there were just as many competing incompatible brands when PC-DOS came 
> out as there were ten years earlier.
> 
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. 
That is the difference between visionaries getting involved with an 
industry, vs. those who just see a clear way to make a more cash.

> > PCs imho where inevitable. Had Microsoft not shown up, someone else 
> > would have. Eventually, some standard would have appeared. Likely, give
n 
> > the wide us of Unix, it would have been a *nix standard.
> 
> I disagree. UNIX puts too many requirements on the hardware for it to 
> work at the time.  What we *did* get that was vaguely standard was CP/M,
 
> which is what PC-DOS was based on.
> 
Point was, it didn't have to be PC-DOS. Windows wasn't able to run on 
those either.

> And, OK, which UNIX? Why do you think it would have been a standard, and
 
> which one, and would it really have led to there being fewer flavors of
 
> UNIX to program against? Even now, there's a dozen or more flavors of 
> UNIX in current use. We already *have* a "unix standard". You *still* 
> need autoconf, and it's broad enough Microsoft managed to implement it 
> in Windows (for some meaning of the word "implement").
> 
Even with the need to make some adjustments, there is still a basic 
standardization to internals, and commands. Windows new shell even 
borrows the later, in a form of Bash like shell, since their own sucked 
so badly. lol Look at cars. While there isn't much of a standard, and 
not *every* part is interchangeable any more between makers, you can 
still manage to weld together bits from different cars and have 
something that still functions, and you can take parts from dozens, and 
use them to build a car that "none" of the manufacturers would produce 
themselves, and odds are, despite some specific differences, and a few 
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.

Yes, fragmentations is bound to happen ones the "foundation" is there. 
The problem is, how you get to that foundation. MS kind of forced the 
industry to build from the top floor down, and as a result often the 
stuff on the lowest level doesn't always work reliably, while the OS 
itself *is* standard, so it "looks" like the building is intact, even 
though its shifting on the loose rubble on the bottom level, like a 
drunken sailor on marbles. *nix went the other way. The foundation is 
very close to the same, to a degree that it take relatively little to 
adjust core processes between them, the hardware, when there is 
documentation, and some sort of common interface, just works, without 
having to have 234 device drivers (including different versions, and 
multifunction devices, which may have 4-5 drivers), for 100 devices.

But, my point is. You can't reliably project from "because it happened 
this way.", to, "It needed to happen that way." We have hindsight here, 
and we still can't get out of the hole already dug, to try to fix the 
problems that arose due to how it did happen.

-- 
void main () {

    if version = "Vista" {
      call slow_by_half();
      call DRM_everything();
    }
    call functional_code();
  }
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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