bapu
 
IIRC Windows was originally based on a Xerox OS that Gates asked if he could use and Xerox said "sure".

I'm sorry to point out that I don't think you are remembering this correctly. It was Steve Jobs who visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to see the work they had been doing with graphical user interfaces. It was there that he first saw a new device called a "mouse", which was used to drive an arrow on the screen to capture user intentions. Xerox did not just give away their IP during that visit, rather, they received options to purchase $1,000,000 in pre-IPO Apple stock.

bapu
Jarsve,
 
We will have to agree to disagree. I don't need to read about computing history. I'm 62 years old and I have been in IT since 1978. That is looooooong before Microsoft developed Windows but just about the time they got (think: stolen) DOS up and running on IBM computers.

 
I do hate to be a nit-pick, but again, this is incorrect. Microsoft licensed 86-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products and worked with SCP to produce PC-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC. Ultimately Tim Paterson of SCP became a Microsoft employee. Microsoft also helped IBM develop the first PC BIOS.
 

bapu
Guess what? back then (1978) there were other operating systems the least of which was Unix. If you go back even further in history you will find that before regions/countries were able to communicate and near light speed very similar "inventions" took place over thousands of years. How did that happen? People thought in vaccuums. It's not far fetched to say that if Bill Gates had died in car crash at age 14 someone else would have taken his place and the name may not even be Microsoft, it might be called SpringBoardComputing for all we know.
 
Based on that knowledge and understanding of history I say Microsoft is *not* the only outcome that enables us to be able to do what we do today. We would be here no matter what. Just some names would be different.
 
JMO.
 
BTW, I don't hate Microsoft.

I totally agree with this. I remember working on some accounting systems that ran (quite well) on CP/M on 8086 computers. Microsoft's technical contributions, while very significant, were evolutionary in nature rather than revolutionary. It should be recognized though that most PC's of the day booted right into MS-BASIC, arguably Microsoft's first operating system. :)
 
Microsoft's most significant innovation by far was to foster the creation of an ecosystem of hardware developers on the one hand and software developers on the other hand to create an extremely flexible platform that allowed everyone involved to profit. This was decidedly new in computing since almost without exception most vendors of the day maintained a very tight grip on highly proprietary designs in hardware and software, seeking to control the entire computing stack. It's likely that only a software company with no skin in the hardware game could pull this strategy off, and Gates was determined that Microsoft would be the one to do it.
 
Gates recognized right away that a hardware architecture with the muscle of IBM behind it, coupled with IBM's relative indifference to the PC compared to its bread and butter mainframe business could become a defacto hardware standard. Of particular significance was the availability of a PCI bus which allowed third party hardware innovation. He proposed to create a software architecture that would serve the same purpose for application developers, and further recognized that the network effect created by massive availability would drive Microsoft's success even in the face of the shiny pretty geegaws being produced by Apple.
 
I don't hate Microsoft either. :)
 

Jarsve
I have also a petition in the Insider Hub that they overhaul the WDM code. Feel free to like it there.

 
From the MS threads I've read, you would think that's all they are doing...

Dirty DOS!!!

charlyg
Dirty DOS!!!

Frig, if they can make Sonar and everything run in DOS and get rid of the GUI I'll buy it>denial.txt|more

Doktor Avalanche

Jarsve
I have also a petition in the Insider Hub that they overhaul the WDM code. Feel free to like it there.

 
From the MS threads I've read, you would think that's all they are doing...

They are doing a lot of work in the WDM and MIDI stacks so much of the short term latency benefits will be realized if you go with WDM. I think that's just the beginning. Pete Brown of the audio team at MS has posted about MS's new interest in evolving the audio stack and I suspect (and hope) that we'll see more some substantial work in the audio subsystem over the longer haul. We'll see but I'm optimistic.

kevinwal

bapu
 
IIRC Windows was originally based on a Xerox OS that Gates asked if he could use and Xerox said "sure".

I'm sorry to point out that I don't think you are remembering this correctly. It was Steve Jobs who visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to see the work they had been doing with graphical user interfaces. It was there that he first saw a new device called a "mouse", which was used to drive an arrow on the screen to capture user intentions. Xerox did not just give away their IP during that visit, rather, they received options to purchase $1,000,000 in pre-IPO Apple stock.

IIRC also means I many not be remembering correctly.
 
Thanks for the correction.

kevinwal

bapu
Jarsve,
 
We will have to agree to disagree. I don't need to read about computing history. I'm 62 years old and I have been in IT since 1978. That is looooooong before Microsoft developed Windows but just about the time they got (think: stolen) DOS up and running on IBM computers.

 
I do hate to be a nit-pick, but again, this is incorrect. Microsoft licensed 86-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products and worked with SCP to produce PC-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC. Ultimately Tim Paterson of SCP became a Microsoft employee. Microsoft also helped IBM develop the first PC BIOS.
 

However, in software sometime a deal is a steal, ya?

bapu

kevinwal

bapu
Jarsve,
 
We will have to agree to disagree. I don't need to read about computing history. I'm 62 years old and I have been in IT since 1978. That is looooooong before Microsoft developed Windows but just about the time they got (think: stolen) DOS up and running on IBM computers.

 
I do hate to be a nit-pick, but again, this is incorrect. Microsoft licensed 86-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer Products and worked with SCP to produce PC-DOS 1.0 for the IBM PC. Ultimately Tim Paterson of SCP became a Microsoft employee. Microsoft also helped IBM develop the first PC BIOS.
 

However, in software sometime a deal is a steal, ya?

Sure, in hindsight one might consider the deal MS got on 86-DOS a steal. But at the time? SPC was a dinky company and so was Microsoft. No one had even heard of either of these companies outside of a small circle of enthusiasts. Who knew what would happen? IBM could have yanked the project at any time and gone with C/PM instead. Ah, the good old days.

I owned an Osbourne Executive. I upgraded it to 2 mb of ram and a 20 mb HD. It started out with 64k and a floppy! Oh, and I had ALL of the cp/m programs on the HD. But  then again Wordstar was maybe 18k IIRC. SuperCalc might have hit 35k... Or my mind has a short..........
 
This is not a pic of MY Osbourne....