At 06:23 PM 5/21/98 -0700, you wrote:
>Sure the DOS license was a big initial push, but to say it was solely
>responsible for the success of Microsoft is like saying the Model T is
>responsible for Ford having the best selling vehicle in America today.
True! You'd be leaving out the amazing stupidity of the american public. 8^)
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
roger(a)sinasohn.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California http://www.sinasohn.com/
In a message dated 98-05-22 23:07:27 EDT, you write:
<< What I'd really like is to start a good long discussion on Apple use and
lore. If somebody has the patience to start this with me, I'd appreciate
it. I've got other stuff I want to know about but this'll do for now. (: >>
great, lets get started. i first played with the apple //e in high skool and
subsequently failed computer science but its got me to where i am now. i have
every apple // model except for an original ][, //c+ and gs and i have plenty
of hardware and software to keep me using these computers for many many years.
at work i was playing around with MAME and some old computer emulators and
even found beyond castle wolfenstien which played JUST LIKE the apple version;
even the voices! i played plenty of that during classtime. i always wanted an
apple for myself when i was younger, and finally i can afford to get one; a
//e enhanced with duodisk drive and colour monitor; woo hoo!
david
A while ago I got a Kaypro 4'84 system for free and have been trying to bring
it back to a state of stability and usefulness. The system as a whole was in
good shape; my problems have been with the disk drives.
I had hoped it was "only" old, worn-out disks that were causing the problem
(and the disks are worn-out, as tests with 22DISK on a school PC show) but the
drives themselves seem to be flaky. (Either that, or the new Verbatim disks
I bought are substandard.) My worst fear is that the drives are corrupting the
disks somehow. (Can this happen even when no writing is involved?)
I have two spare drives; one is evidently SSDD and the other is DSDD -- I have
not tested them. Only the DSDD drive is really suitable. These are, IIRC,
96-tpi MFM drives. They are made by TEC. (Not the same as TEAC, I suppose.)
I would just put one in, except that I'm not sure if I need to do anything to
align them. Even if I did need to, I undoubtedly don't have the equipment.
Is alignment really important? What about on new drives?
Could cleanliness be a problem? (I cleaned the heads with a head-cleaning kit
a while ago; I put the dust cover on the computer for some time but stopped;
however, the keyboard latches in front of the drives anyway. I keep the doors
closed and the shipping inserts in the drives; I definitely have been careless
about the order of inserting/removing the inserts and opening/closing the
drives and turning on/off the computer.)
It's very unsettling to think of my software eroding as I watch. I haven't
found replacements for some of it. I've tried using 22DISK; there are two
problems with this: 1) It doesn't like my formats very much, and 2) I've been
using PC's in the computer lab and I don't trust those drives any more than
mine! I may haul an ex-roommate's Korean '386 box out of the closet if I get
desperate.
The Apple ][ disk drives I've seen have had flawless performance; even PC 5.25"
drives seem to do very well. I'm getting very tired of hearing my machine
go "grkgrkgrkgrk ... grkgrkgrkgrk ... grkgrkgrkgrk ..." (It's one of those
sounds that is instantly annoying and recognizable by pure instinct as a Very
Bad Sound. I wonder what a list of those sounds would look like?)
Thanks,
-- Derek
-----Original Message-----
From: Greg Troutman <greg(a)husic.com>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Friday, 22 May 1998 4:19
Subject: Re: [Rare systems] & Garry Kildor
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Desie Hay <desieh(a)southcom.com.au>
>To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
><classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
>Date: Thursday, May 21, 1998 1:09 AM
>Subject: Re: [Rare systems] & Garry Kildor
>
>
>>yes well, I can't spell, and I think that Garry Kildor could have been the
>>bill gates of today if he had played his cards right
>
>I'm sure a lot of people wish Bill Gates were in Gary's shoes (so to
speak).
>
>
well yes I suppose........but didnt Garry get killed in a bar fight a few
years ago???
No old Billy Gates has brought some good into this world............
but 99.9999% of what he has done is just to steal and steal..........
Sure the DOS license was a big initial push, but to say it was solely
responsible for the success of Microsoft is like saying the Model T is
responsible for Ford having the best selling vehicle in America today.
Microsoft was a development products company, not an OS company. When I got
here in 1988, I remember seeing a revenue pie chart at the company meeting.
We were at around 60-70% revenue from development products like C++ &
FORTRAN, with a big slice from apps like Word & Multiplan, and DOS revenue
was a tiny slice. In a decade where everything had to be written directly
to the hardware to get any speed out of the 8088, you can hardly say that
the DOS license had much to do with the success of the dev products.
Our first, all time most successful Windows app, Excel, that nuked the Lotus
1-2-3 monopoly through ease of use and customer demand alone, was _ported
>from the Macintosh_. How exactly could we have leveraged our ownership of
Windows to make Excel successful when it wasn't even written for Windows?
If IBM endorsing & bundling an OS makes it a monopoly, why is OS/2 dead?
etc.
Kai
-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Yowza [mailto:yowza@yowza.com]
Sent: Thursday, May 21, 1998 5:37 PM
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
Subject: RE: cat Xerox | Apple | Microsoft ?
On Thu, 21 May 1998, Kai Kaltenbach wrote:
> We weren't, and aren't, Orwellian characters,
> just folks trying to write software that people want to buy. Gee, I guess
> it worked! So sue us!
I think one reason Microsoft is being sued is that Microsoft software does
not compete on the merits of the software alone. Windows 3.0 was the
first almost barely usable/tolerable version of Windows. I'm not a Mac
fan, but if you look at something like the Amiga and AmigaOS from 1985, it
was such a clearly better operating system and windowing system PC
environment compared to Microsoft's offering that if Microsoft had to
compete on technical merit alone, they would have been out of business
weeks after the Amiga's introduction.
To suggest that Microsoft's success is due to writing software that people
*want* to buy is disingenuous. Microsoft's success is due solely to the
monopoly IBM gave them in 1982. To their credit, Microsoft is only about
five years behind the curve. If IBM had kept the monopoly to themselves,
we'd all be closer to ten years behind the curve.
-- Doug
If only he had some 20-amp 220-v current stored in a superconductor...
*sigh* can't always get what you want.
>
>Since there was talk here in the recent past of reviving one of these.
I
>found the following on comp.sys.ibm.sys3x.misc:
>
>> I have about 40 logic cards, all the power supplies and an 8 inch
floppy
>> drive from a
>> System/34. All are for sale for best offer. Could supply list of
numbers
>> if interested.
>>
>> Norm Helmkay helmkay(a)ibm.net
>
>Don't reply to me, I'm just an innocent bystander.
>
>--
>David Wollmann
>dwollmann(a)ibmhelp.com
>
>
______________________________________________________
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At 04:16 PM 5/21/98 PDT, you wrote:
>article says the Apple got their idea from xerox in 1979, and MS
>got their ideas from Apple, and now they have copied the Mac w/Win98
I quote from "The Mac Bathroom Reader" by Owen W. Linzmayer (a
non-technical history of the Mac):
"In return, Apple was allowed two afternoon visits to the PARC labs. When
Jobs first visited with Atkinson in November 1979, he saw with his own eyes
what all the fuss was about. He was so excited that he returned in
December..."
Actually, Jobs would have known all about it earlier if he had paid any
attention to Jef Raskin, who had been trying to get him to visit PARC much
sooner.
>The article in the link argues that Win98 is much worse than the mac,
>which I agree with. I am wondering about its statement that Apple
>knew all about GUI before 1979 with their Lisa. AFAIK, the lisa
>is ~1982...
I dunno about Win98 vs. the Mac; I haven't seen either Win98 or MacOS 8,
but yes, the way I see it, Apple stole from Xerox, Microsoft stole from
Apple, Apple sued lots of people and won, Xerox Sued Apple and lost, etc.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
roger(a)sinasohn.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California http://www.sinasohn.com/
In a message dated 98-05-22 11:32:19 EDT, you write:
<< back on topic though, what cassette unit could be connected up to the
original PC machines? Was it a custom IBM unit only (similar to the way
the C64's only accept Commodore tape decks), or could anything be used
if a cable was made up? >>
i asked an old ibmer at work, and he said there indeed was a fru number for
the cassette cable AND a tape deck! i'll have to remind him to look and see
what the numbers are.
david
The Ford analogy would be correct only if the purchase of the car allow
you on certain key roads and forced you to use only one brad of gas with
a funny nozzle. You could not buy the car without either.
<Microsoft's API monopoly allowed them to make mistakes and inferior
<products and not only survice, but flourish. This was an unprecedented
<advantage over ever other competitor, and continues to be so to this day
This was one of MS marketing ploys. The other was licensing.
<If Microsoft had to compete on an even playing field, I think they would
<have been a good match for Lotus, and they probably would have put Word
<Perfect to bed as well. But Borland? Geoworks? Novel? Netscape? Sun
<Next? Apple? Amiga? I think we would all have much better software and
<operating environments today if Microsoft had to compete soley on
<technical merit.
Early on MS was recognized as a language house (MSbasic, Basic compiler,
fortran, cobal...) They were good at that but applications was clearly the
market though getting tools out there was the first step.
<Too little, too late. IBM, famous for tying customers to proprietary
<systems, gave away both the PC architecure and the O/S platform.
Later on at first IBM PCs were seen as typical IBM and proprietary. This
gave rise to dos on s100 and machines like the z100.
<they own the browser market, they own the "API" (HTML, HTTP, etc.), and
<eventually they'll own the internet. I, for one, don't like that idea.
They also hold a peice of the internet backbone.
<Of course, I put all of my disposable income into Microsoft stock, becaus
<the strategy is *so* damn good. I love them as an investment, but I don'
<like the way they grab power, and most of the time, I don't like what the
<do with the power once they have it.
Reminds me of the oil industry in the early 1900s.
Allison
What exactly is the distinction between the "Series 0" and "Series 1?"
To me a no floppy 5150 16KB-64KB would be missing a floppy controller
and floppy drives.
Marty
______________________________ Reply Separator
_________________________________
Subject: Re: Prices to pay for old computers...
Author: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu at internet
Date: 5/22/98 11:10 AM
At 17:22 5/22/98 +1000, Desie wrote:
>yes I am talking about the original 16kb-64kb model............
>I wounder how many IBM PCs are still out there with only cassette input and
>16KB of RAM............
>no floppy drives.............
>oh well
Of the 16K-64K mb's there are reputed to have been two distinct series,
called "Series 0" and "Series 1." A 16K, Series 0, no-floppy IBM PC is
alleged to have sold at auction in the UK for over UKP 10,000 ....and my
intuition (but no more than that) detects an institutional buyer. (And not
auction like eBay -- auction like Christie's.)
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby engine(a)chac.org
http://www.chac.org/index.html
Computer History Association of California
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