Mr. Gates

Marvin said... | |What do you think might have happened if Mr. Gates had not done what he |did? It is really easy to knock something with the benefit of hindsight, |and most of us do that. Just be prepared for questions such as the one I |just asked :)! There were a number of people working on better versions of CP/M, better CLIs for CP/M, and other operating systems for the hardware. Any of them would have been much better for the PC. Additionally, Apple was already beginning to feel the heat and starting to do cooler stuff, as were Commodore, and any number of others. If IBM had bought a better OS, preferably from someone who cared about computers, we'd have probably all been better off. Had nobody been willing to sell IBM an OS, it would have taken them at least a year to roll their own, and I think the market would have been in a much better state by then, where IBM's mere presence would not have been as likely to destroy so many. I generally *do* try to think things through. Like I said, I was one of the people most upset with MS and with IBM at the time. So it wasn't just hindsight. 8^) -Miles, not afraid of the hard questions [Truth is worth the pain.]