[NTLUG:Discuss] MS XP Throw it in the trash!

[cbbrowne@cbbrowne.com]

On Sun, 04 Nov 2001 17:08:08 PST, the world broke into rejoicing as
Mike Hart <just_mike_y at yahoo.com>  said:
> The WORST thing that microsoft has ever put out was DOS 4.0 It would
> proceed to corrupt your hard drive completely when you attempted to
> intall anything besides dos onto the computer..  it was on the
> market for about 3 weeks. Within 3 months, they issued several minor
> upgrades to it (4.0.x, 4.x) before giving up.  They then continued
> to ship 3.3x until DOS 5 came out about 18 months later.

Not even close...  See the bottom...

> The next worst thing they've put out was Bob.  It was supposed to
> replace windows 3 for home users with an 'office assistant' type
> character that knew you're needs better than you.  It was available
> for about a month before they pulled it.  Who here keeps office
> assistant running?  Need I say more?

Actually, there are two interesting things worth observing about
"Bob."

a) It was intended to be a cute AI "shell," and probably didn't really
   get completed.  There probably _are_ things that an automated
   "assistant" could do to make us more effective; perhaps by "Bob
   3.0" it could have been marginally useful.

b) Bill Gates wound up marrying the project manager for "Bob."

   Yup, she's had macro viruses named after her, and she ran the "Bob"
   project.  Melissa...

> Number 3 would be the original windows 98 (OEM version).  This
> version installs and runs great until you attempt to make any
> hardware changes, when it forgets to remove your old drivers, and
> you proceed to corrupt your registration database. Note this is the
> original 98, not 98B or 98SE.

> Windows 1.x ranks in there somewhere.  I never got to see a working
> copy of it, but the reviews were pretty bad, and it never seemed to
> make it to retail shelves around here. In the days of original
> windows, just about all of the competition had better reviews.
> Geoworks, OS2, PC-tools, and countless shareware 'menu' programs all
> provided better user interfaces than the trumped up dos shell they
> shipped as windows.  (if you run winfile.exe, that is the nth
> generation of original windows.)  The reviews I read said that dos
> 5.0 with dos shell in graphic mode was a far more stable and easier
> to use user interface than windows.

Worse than all of these I would put the DOS 6.1 'disk compression'
scheme.  It bit Microsoft _BADLY_, which was richly deserved:

  a) Lots of people got disks eaten by it;

  b) Microsoft apparently did naughty things, including code into it
     that belonged (in some manner) to the vendors of Stacker.  

Microsoft got quite severely spanked, at that time, for all of this.
People had barely gotten the 6.1 upgrade on its way before they were
informed that it was Crucially Important to install 6.2...
--
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" "@acm.org")
http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/nonrdbms.html
Why do they sterilize needles for lethal injections?