1 Jul
2016
1 Jul
'16
1:51 a.m.
On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 3:21 PM, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
That's an excellent point.
The VHS vs. Betamax argument may apply here.
Maybe
- I think of it in terms of economics. PCs and DOS
"won" because they were cheaper than any other solution to the a similar
task and it was good enough,
I suspect that, at the end of the day, this is the real reason for the
success of the PC. It's easy, as an engineer, to second-guess it and ask
why it couldn't have been "more" than it was, but I suspect a business
person would look at me funny. From a business perspective, it was wildly
successful (until the clone market undercut IBM so much they got out of the
PC business altogether). In economics vs technology, economics almost
always wins.
- Dan C.
Like VHS/Betamax it was good enough for many, many people - so economics
On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 2:31 PM, Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah...I guess you are right.
Surely a motivated team could have produced a floppy-only system capable of
...
why didn't they have a more capable kernel than MS-DOS?
I don't think they cared. or felt it was needed at the time (I disagreed
then and still do).
running
multiple processes, etc. It wouldn't be Unix, it wouldn't even
necessarily be a clone of Unix, but it could have been something better
than MS-DOS.
As Marc pointed out. The PC was fabulously successful for what it was
designed to be. They wanted something the run VisiCalc and later a word
processor for corporate America. We are programmers saw it >>could<< have
been more capable, but they did not really care. The system way, way
out did what it was planned. So it's hard to tell folks that did
something bad.
...
I'm not sure I would assert that their
success was due to good technical
decisions;
exactly.
...
The IBM brand added de facto legitimacy to the personal computer in the
workplace at a critical time when it was just starting to make inroads into
business: surely their success had a lot more to do with that than choosing
to use the 8088 and DOS?
Indeed.
Although I think a side story is that you did not mention is that IBM
allowed the system to be cloned. Remember at this same time, Apple out
Franklin computer out of business for cloning the Apple II. Because the
PC became a standard of sort, because their were choices in getting lower
cost systems, not just buying from IBM. That ended top cementing it,
drove the standard. But also at the time, Apple, who
had a better product
and actually was more polished than MS-DOS was, was >>perceived<< as being
for home use and DOS for business. IBM and MSFT and Intel did a great job
of convincing people of that idea. Add to it that it was cheaper, it was
a hard order to get businesses to consider Macs.
Which is different from Betamax.... business (TV stations/professionals
et al) picked the "better" system. But they did not here, they picked
the cheap one no matter what.
Clem