Dave McGuire wrote:
On Apr 12, 2007, at 4:36 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
Sounds
like the PC-MOS I used in the mid-80's to build a multi-user
system using an IBM PC/AT with an expansion box that had one CGA card
per user. The expansion box had special cables for monitor and keyboard
(thick & bulky). This let me run DBase III, Wordstar 2000, etc. in an
office for up to eight stations. Each station appeared to have the
PC/AT to itself. Worked really well.
(WORDSTAR on 1/8 of an 8MHz AT == WORD on 500MHz Pentium)
Yep. Thanks, Microsoft.
-Dave
This is pretty silly. There is a lot to criticize microsoft for, but I
don't think this is one of those things. It is just normal market
forces. If MS could get as many $$ per copy selling wordstar, they'd do
that since it would take a lot less money to develop and support.
People like the promise of new doo-dads, even if they end up not using
them. Is that something MS should take the blame for, or the customers
who buy it?
Also, word does stuff that wordstar never did, and yes, it comes at a
cost. Word allows vastly superior control over layout than wordstar
could. Perhaps *you* don't embed spreadsheets in word documents, but I
(and others) often find it useful, vs having to say: please see blah.xls
for proof. The real time spell checker is useful. Etc. Yes, nobody
use more than 10-20% of the features, but there is a market slice using
just about every one of them.
I'm sure back in the day there were those who complained that wordstar
was bloated and all one really needed was electric pencil. And then
there were the old timers who complained about the screen oriented
editors as being overkill and good old line editing was just fine.
As a hardware analogy, many dolts have complained about how ugly the x86
instruction set is and that intel engineers are a bunch of incompetent
hacks for not "fixing" it. Yet at each step of the way, it would have
been ruinous for intel to break software compatibility with those ugly
warts that they started with. The 8086 was a stop gap between the 8085
and the 432; intel had no way of guessing that it would be even 1% as
successful as it has been. The fact that intel has kept the x86
instruction set competitive despite the warts in a testimony to their
smarts (architecture, design, and fab process), not their stupidity.
What were we discussing? :-)