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

[Bug Hunter]

  Actually, you should look at Windows 1.0.  It was a nightmare.  Windows
2.0 was better, but still bad.  It cratered GEM, which was higher quality,
but Digital Research Inc. still had the big head, and GEM went nowhere.
Somewhere after that, the founder of DRI died, with the FBI supposedly
investigating the death.

  Windows 3.0 caused Apple to sue Microsoft.  After several years in the
suit (7,8??), Xerox sued Apple.  That is when the house of cards fell.

  A judge (the same one?) ruled that Xerox had waited too long to sue
Apple, so their stuff was in the public domain.  The judge on the Apple
suit then dismissed Apple's suit against Microsoft, and Windows 95 came
out that same year, with icons on the desktop (just like Apple!), and a
"start" menu very reminiscent of the Finder menu.

  This cleared the way for gnome, kde, and wine.  If you look at the
function calls inside windows, they are remarkably similar to Apple's
function calls.  They are even in Pascal, just like Apple's function
calls!! 

  This is too much of a coincidence for me, as a poorly written call
to a Pascal function will crash your machine.  DOS could handle poorly
written calls much better, for most (not all) cases.

  The Apple/Xerox/Microsoft lawsuit result is the biggest reason, in my
opinion, that the authors of wine have not been sued.


On Sun, 4 Nov 2001, Fred James wrote:

> Just to put it in perspective, could someone smarter than me, with a 
> better memory than mine, or just with more experience then me, please 
> give their opinion on which looked the worst at the time of its 
> introduction: Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT 4.0, or your choice 
> of versions.  A little trot down memory lane music, if you please, so to 
> speak.
> 
> Microsoft's claim to fame should be that they put computers on so many 
> desk (for which they should be praised), not that they ever put a 
> completed product on the market, or that they cared so much about the 
> consumer.  Large corporations don't seem have any way to judge who can 
> do what when they hire them, let alone what they actually need, in terms 
> of computers, otherwise we might see a lot less of Microsoft - and that 
> might be good, or it might be bad (hard to tell).
> 
> Anyway, they are not very interesting.
>