20 May
2016
20 May
'16
9:24 a.m.
On 18 May 2016 at 21:40, Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
But, "Moore's Law" held that it
wouldn't be much longer.
Just one doubling of the speed of the Lisa's hardware would have been enough
to silence the speed complaints.
A general point, really.
One of Microsoft's strokes of brilliance was selectively exploiting
this. I think maybe it learned it from the 80286 OS/2 1.x d?bacle.
NT 3.1 was brilliant if a bit bulky and unoptimised. Fair enough, it
was a v1.0 OS. It was way way WAY too heavy for the average 1993 PC,
but power users played, partly 'cos it fixed serious problems with
Windows 3.1.
(You could run a Win3.1 16-bit app in its own memory space & thus
slightly get round Win3.1's terrible low resource limitations. Source:
my customers did it, and paid GBP 5K for a PC to run it on for that
reason.)
NT 3.5 fixed some of that and now the PC was ?3.5K or so.
NT 3.51 was pretty good and now the PC was ?2.5-?2K -- in other words,
accessible to a high-end power user. The Win3 UI kept the proles away
-- they wanted the friendlier Win95.
NT 4 brought the UI, and now, a plain vanilla high-end PC could run it.
The cycle sort of repeated with XP and Vista -- they were aimed a bit
above the vanilla cheapo turn-of-the-century PC and its successor. The
market caught up as they matured.
Selectively aiming a bit ahead of where the ordinary PC was allowed MS
to refine the OSes in public, so they were ready for prime-time by the
time that the market had caught up.
IBM, OTOH, aimed at the thousands of boxes /it had already sold/ and
so totally torpedoed its own product.
--
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