Hi,
On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 2:48 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 2:38 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 10:09 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 30, 2015 at 8:37 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> <sigh> This is OS development 101. Do you think a new OS intended as
>>> a followup to an existing product throws out the baby with the
>>> bathwater and does everything differently, so existing apps won't run?
>>
>> YES!!! Are you really this naive? I'm honestly not even cynical enough
>> for this. Lots of companies throw everything away, on purpose, and
>> expect everyone else to just deal with it. If they can get away with
>> it, they absolutely will do it.
>
> I'm not. It appears you are.
>
> Like everybody else in private industry, MS wants survive and stay in
> business.
Are you kidding me? They literally wasted $9 billion dollars on Skype,
which had absolutely nothing to do with their core business. This
isn't just expanding in normal circles, it's them constantly
overstepping their bounds. And it's their "right" (I guess?), but it
makes absolutely no sense (to me) as far as "business" is concerned.
They also definitely didn't "need" to buy Minecraft either. And a lot
of other things (XBox?) they didn't "need" as well.
(Granted, other companies make crazy purchases too, but it's not
always "normal" or "good".)
It's not all about survival or just making money. They have money.
They have customers. But they just can never sit still. They're never
happy.
It's ridiculous to pretend that everything they (or any other company)
do is only in the name of reasonable business demands.
> To do so, they have to make money. As a general rule, 80%
> of incremental revenue comes from doing more business with your
> existing customers. Do what you suggest and they stop *being*
> customers. Contrary to what you might wish to think, MS *isn't*
> stupid.
It's debatable whether they are stupid or not. I never said they were,
but I certainly don't understand or agree with some of their
decisions. I'm far from anti-MS, but I certainly don't favor them
above anyone else (even if I do, reluctantly, use Windows sometimes).
I'm just not interested in their weird ways of making me do a thousand
different things. They throw away more IP every year than most
companies own in a lifetime.
According to you, if I'm understanding correctly (probably not), they
are trying to keep and attract customers. But let's face it, they
throw away more customers than they gain. If only they could keep
customers. Well, they have the big businesses that are so entrenched
that they have no other choice. And end users couldn't care less as
long as they can play games, watch videos, and email. I just wish
there was some kind of (better) stability. I'm tired of the ol'
"Resistance is futile, upgrade or die" attitude.
> And when you are in an environment of incremental upgrade, which the
> computer business is, "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" can
> be fatal.
Obviously not. All the big movers do it these days. They hate legacy.
Haven't you noticed my cynicism before? "Legacy" is a dirty word. Why
else would they all constantly harp on "modern"? It's not a compliment
to say something is "obsolete" or "deprecated". For some reason, geeks
today can't live without daily declaring everything else "obsolete".
> Consider Netscape. They knew they needed to update their flagship
> Netscape Communicator" 4.x product. Instead of doing what they
> *should* have done, and refactoring their code base and developing
> from there, they chose to start from scratch on brand new code.
Sometimes that's unavoidable. I'm not saying they should or shouldn't
do that. It depends. My problem is when they throw everything away
(hardware, software, UI) just to be "new" and "different", even if
there was no need. And of course constantly attack all existing
customers for wanting to stick with what already worked. That kind of
destructive attitude (not from Netscape, just in general) is very
frustrating and annoying. That's not what I call "progress" or
"productivity".
> (The decision was made by a Netscape senior exec who was not a developer,
> and had no idea what he was asking for. Joel Spolsky, in his "Joel on
> Software" blog waxed eloquent about why it was a very bad idea.)
> Netscape code named the new project Mozilla, made it open source, and
> started hacking.
You also can't give developers free reign, they make bad decisions
too. It's a weird hybrid with the boss paying the bills and the
developer doing all the work. But nobody (apparently) believes anymore
that "the customer is always right". Nowadays, it seems more like,
"Make 'em upgrade or they can do without." (Over and over and over
again. Ad nauseum.)
> Time passed. More time passed. Yet more time passed. We finally got
> a Netscape 6 (skipping over what should have been Netscape 5), which
> was so buggy as to be unusable. As far as I could tell, they only
> released it to get *something* out the door to demonstrate development
> was actually occurring. Even more time passed, and we finally got a
> Netscape 7 that *was* usable. But meanwhile, AOL bought Netscape,
> folded the Mozilla project, and transferred the code, development
> servers, and several million in seed funding to the non-profit Mozilla
> foundation who became responsible for continued development.
AOL has (IIRC) declared the Netscape brand effectively dead. Also,
Firefox has rapidly (perhaps too much) updated over the past few years
to where it's nothing like it used to be. And it's certainly not a
perfect browser for all machines, by any means. Not that I've tried,
but it also has very steep requirements (to rebuild).
> Meanwhile, IE continued to build market share at Netscape's expense.
> Had Netscape done what they should have done, a new version of
> Netscape would have been out at least a year sooner.
Give me a break. IE did almost nothing. That was Firefox's big mantra:
"how can you trust IE after it stayed stuck in the mud for five
years??" And yet now that IE is back in active development, there's
still dozens of wars over this feature, that feature, skipping OSes,
etc. And MS is mostly focused on mobile device nowadays anyways. Heck,
I think they're even retiring the IE brand in favor of something new
("Spartan") because of their bad rep. Honestly, I don't know why MS
wants to make "yet another" web browser. We already have enough
options. But hey, it's their life, their time, their money. ("Just use
Firefox" ... but they don't want us to!)
> In the computer business these days, change happens at blinding speed,
> and time to market is critical.
Ridiculous. There's absolutely no reason to constantly upgrade
hardware, software, OS, and everything else every six months. Just
because someone "wants" to put out a new product doesn't mean it's a
wise enough investment to waste your time and money on, especially not
exclusively. "Blinding speed" is ridiculous. If anything, it takes
years to develop anything good, and yet even the best things are
obsoleted within a year or two, (again) making them almost not worth
using at all.
Time to market implies some kind of time crunch or desperate money
grab. I assume most companies aren't that unstable or greedy to do
that. Just being first doesn't mean anything, at least not as far as
market penetration. (VCPI predated DPMI, but obviously the latter is
much more popular.)
> If you are an OS developer, you do
> not, repeat DO NOT start over from scratch. You revise and extend
> existing code. If you try to start over from scratch, you will be
> *out* of business long before your brand new product is finished.
It depends. And no, most people don't follow that advice. And no, they
don't go out of business. I could literally give you dozens of
examples of where certain groups threw everything away and *forced*
users to deal with it. It's the exception, not the rule, that
compatibility exists at all.
>>> It includes it. Part of the problem for Windows 9X was maintaining
>>> backwards compatibility. It needed to be able to run old 16 bit DOS
>>> apps as well as apps written for Windows. Batch files were
>>> interpreted by COMMAND.COM, and COMMAND.COM was available.
>>
>> In Win9x, COMMAND.COM (a DOS MZ executable) was the sole shell. So
>> there was no other choice.
>
> There was if you installed a third-party product like 4DOS.
I knew you'd mention this, but that doesn't count, it's third-party,
it didn't come pre-installed. But even 4DOS was always a DOS (MZ)
program.
> Win2K/NT used NTVDM to provide a DOS environment for 16 bit DOS apps, but
> included COMMAND.COM to run them, with 32 bit CMD.EXE as the default
> shell.
NT isn't what we were discussing. I admit that XP (NT) didn't have
real DOS underneath at all, only a limited (buggy) NTVDM using V86
mode. I was talking about Win95, which didn't have an NTVDM (although
it did use V86 mode too), thus it was using "real" DOS. It was with
the advent of XP that Microsoft declared DOS "dead". It wasn't needed
at all anymore.
> (And if you ran a DOS app in that environment and shelled out
> of it, you were in 32 bit land talking to CMD.EXE at the resulting
> command line, not COMMAND.COM.)
Actually, I think CMD always (also) ran COMMAND for DOS programs.
> Every OS comes bundled with a default shell. The question is whether
> other shells are available. There were back in the CP/M days (ZCPR3),
> and continue to be.
My point was that it was a DOS (MZ) program, not a Win32 (PE) app.
Therefore if there was no DOS, there would be no shell, and you can't
live without a shell.
>> In fact, most of the 16-bit Windows stuff (since Win 3.0) was
>> DPMI-based. The 'D' stands for "DOS", so it can't live without it.
>
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Protected_Mode_Interface. It
> provided a way for 16 bit real-mode applications to run in Protected
> Mode on a processor that offered it, assuming sufficient RAM was
> available, by providing a tunnel from protected mode to real mode for
> real mode applications.
The Win16 (NE) subsystem heavily used DPMI itself (in its own
implementation) in Windows 3.0. So you wouldn't even have that much
without DOS. Obviously Win95 was slightly different, but it still
swapped heavily back and forth between 16-bit and 32-bit, but that's
par for the course for V86 mode. That was by design. But no, I'm not
sure if Win32 (in Win95) used DPMI directly or not. But DOS wasn't
"dead" in Win95, by far.
>>> COM and EXE files were programs run under the OS, and Windows supported the
>>> system calls those programs used. There would be no need to call the
>>> underlying DOS, because the required stuff was part of Win98.
>>
>> Wrong. If there was a bug in the underlying DOS, then that exact same
>> bug was also found under Windows. These were not two separate
>> implementations.
>
> See my commentary above.
I know you think that they so heavily patched it (at runtime) that
nothing was left, but that's not true. DOS was still alive and
present.
> If I'm writing a follow on to an existing OS, and I need backwards
> compatibility so my OS will run stuff written for the previous
> version, what *I'll* do is include the necessary code from the
> previous OS in the new OS kernel. I *won't* rewrite from scratch. If
> there are unfixed bugs in the previous OS code, they will be included
> along with the features.
That's not always possible. Sometimes you can't shoehorn new things on
old code. Look at NT, for instance. It had various "subsystems":
POSIX, OS/2, NTVDM. These were new ways of emulating foreign
environments. Of course, I think they're all dead in "modern" NT
versions. Microsoft just doesn't care (and doesn't want) to support
them. But of course Win95 was an entirely different animal.
> The fact that DOS bugs still exist in Win98 doesn't mean the DOS
> implementation provided as a real-mode loader is actually used once
> Win98 is active.
Yes it does! It's using the same exact code. Are you really telling me
that "Windows" (only) runs the DOS code in Win95? Do you really think
that IO.SYS (or whatever) is totally missing in RAM? Or are you really
clinging to the barest of explanations, that they just heavily patched
it on the fly?
>>> I repeat, DOS was a real mode loader, whose function was to load
>>> Windows. Once it had, Windows took over.
>>
>> Not at all. At least not in Win9x. A lot of programs (EDIT, DEBUG,
>> EDLIN) were still DOS programs.
>
> Will you for %DEITY'S sake stop being *deliberately* obtuse?
Give me a break. My point is that DOS was heavily entrenched, and you
couldn't remove it. It wasn't just "minimally" there, it was crucial
to the whole system. Without it, you couldn't run anything (esp. DOS
programs).
> Let's start with what we mean when we say OS. An example is Linux.
> Properly speaking, Linux is the kernel - vmlinuz. If it uses a Linux
> kernel it's a Linux system. (My old Linksys router was a Linux
> system.) If you install something like Ubuntu, it comes packaged with
> the standard set of Gnu/Linux utilities, but you do not need them to
> have a Linux system. For example, I have an Android tablet. Android
> is a Linux system, and there's a Linux kernel under the hood. It does
> *not* come with the standard set off Gnu/Linux utilities. If you want
> that functionality, you need to install an Android port of Busybox,
> and a terminal emulator to get a console and a command line. (I did
> so.) Android boots and runs just fine without the CLI stuff being
> present.
>
> EDIT, DEBUG, EDLIN and the like are the equivalent of the Gnu/Linux
> utilities on Linux desktops. They are not the OS itself. You can
> boot and run a DOS system (or a Win3.X/9.X system) without them being
> present, and never, ever have cause to actually *use* them, and the
> majority of people running Win9X wouldn't miss them if they weren't
> included.
"Windows" does NOT run DOS programs! I don't care how much you
pretend, but they absolutely did NOT reimplement all of the kernel
system calls for pmode. It just didn't happen. It would probably
"thunk" back to 16-bit to use the DOS versions, not newly rewritten
ones. Just because "some" stuff was "Windows only" or that "some"
drivers existed for "Windows only" doesn't mean that DOS wasn't active
and present (even if patched). It would still drop back to V86 mode to
call 16-bit code.
The fact that common "base" DOS (not Windows!) programs were still
included proves that they didn't see the need to (or else couldn't)
recompile for Win32 (PE) exclusively.
> The OS is the resident portion, loaded at boot, that sits between you
> and your programs and the hardware, and provides access to the
> hardware.
>
> The resident kernel portion of Win98 includes the stuff from in DOS,
> so that 16 bit DOS applications can run.
"Includes the stuff" ... no, Win9x directly uses the pre-existing DOS
kernel (even if patched and worked around to deal with GUI and pmode).
It did not reimplement all the DOS calls from scratch. NT is a
different beast, fully 32-bit, with a different file system (NTFS)
that DOS, in any form, cannot read. NT does not come with DOS
(installed or running) at all, only a very buggy subsystem (NTVDM).
> We needed hardware drivers for stuff like that because that's how OSes
> work.
I'm not sure of your point here. Win95 apparently supported either DOS
or Windows drivers.
>>> NT finally removed that requirement and could be booted without DOS,
>>> but the issues of maintaining backwards compatibility made getting
>>> there a one step at a time process.
>>
>> At one time, MS was fiercely loyal about compatibility. (Allegedly,
>> that's why IBM fired them from OS/2.) But that was the old days. Those
>> days are long gone. They really don't care as much anymore. For
>> example, they want Win32 to die in lieu of "Metro" (or "Modern UI" or
>> whatever they're calling it now).
>
> IBM didn't fire them. They *quit*. MS and IBM disagreed about
> direction. MS wanted to develop OS/2 solely for the new 386 platform,
> which had the address space and memory management something like OS/2
> really needed. IBM said "We promised we would support the 286, so you
> will create code for it." MS already had Windows under development,
> and decided to leave the OS/2 development partnership. The nail in
> OS/2's coffin came when IBM declined to support the new generation of
> 32 bit Windows apps.
Not according to Gordon Letwin (in old newsgroup message). He says IBM
fired them for not breaking compatibility and fully abandoning
Windows. He said IBM had a grudge against them.
MS was still selling DOS and Windows while they were developing OS/2.
Heck, OS/2 had already shipped (years before they were fired). Most of
the 16-bit (1.x) code was by MS. OS/2 was supposed to be the successor
to DOS. Remember that IBM hired MS in the first place to give them
PC-DOS (a CP/M clone for 8088) since CP/M-86 wasn't ready yet. MS
wanted IBM to keep buying their compilers, so they went along with it.
(They were also involved with Xenix for several years.)
Allegedly, MS was in charge of the "portable rewrite" of OS/2, what
later became NT. I think even early versions of NT 3.1 had an HPFS
driver (which is obviously an OS/2 file system), not to mention the
OS/2 (1.x textmode) subsystem that they kept around until after
Win2000.
I can't prove most of these facts. I know they claimed that RAM was
too expensive, some shortage in 1987, the 286 came out too fast, and
of course IBM did promise to support all those 286s they sold. I know
the 386 was very enticing to most programmers. I'm not surprised that
things went "386 only". IIRC, Windows 3.0 was the last to (partially)
support 8086 while 3.11 was 386 only. But let's be honest, most people
didn't even have (286 limit) 16 MB for many many more years.
I could be wrong. It's very complicated. Here's one reference (Gordon
Letwin's message, but only if you believe it was really him):
https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/comp.os.ms-windows.misc/-iNeep60eVE/Xl5ddAtJENcJ
"We still believed OS/2 2.0 could be made a success. But Win 3.0 was
*already* a big success. It seemed just stupid to us to kill a healthy
animal in the hopes of nursing a sick one into recovery! So given that
choice, we kept Windows and IBM kicked us out of the OS/2 team. Also
note that IBM insisted on no Windows API in the product, so we'd have
to drop Windows and abandon the apps. We'd seen how hard it was to
build windows critical mass and to just shoot all of those apps,
and all of those ISVs, and all of those users seemed completely out of
the question." -- Gordon Letwin (8/17/95)
> (The 286 had severe lacks, like an instruction to enter Protected
> Mode, but none to *leave* it. You got out of protected mode by doing
> a CPU reset.
LOADALL286 was undocumented but still existed (at that time). That was
used so much that supposedly all BIOS (up through 486) still had
emulation for it. I think even later IBM machines had special hardware
to make it faster. Yes, this is what Bill Gates originally called
"brain dead", but V86 mode on the 386 fixed it.
> There were attempts to get Unix up on 286 systems, by
> outfits *including* AT&T, and *all* had major problems centered around
> the differences between real mode and protected mode, and the lack of
> true virtual memory support. I don't especially blame MS for wanting
> to bypass the 286 and develop OS/2 for the 386, because the 386 *had*
> the required hardware support for the things a proper multitasking
> [and multi-user] OS needed to do. If IBM had done as MS asked, we
> might all be running OS/2 now.)
Xenix ran on 286s, didn't it? I don't know how well. I don't know what
was missing. I don't think the 286 was underpowered or incapable, but
certainly it wasn't designed the same as the 386, which only came
later (and was expensive and even Compaq/Intel-exclusive for a while).
>>>> Hasn't this already been discussed to death before? MS was later sued
>>>> (and lost) for illegally bundling their DOS with their Windows. I
>>>
>>> I don't recall that, and rather doubt there was anything illegal about
>>> it. MS owned MSDOS and Windows, and could use them and bundle them as
>>> they desired.
>>
>> Apparently not. They lost a lot of money. They claimed that it was
>> technically impossible to use any other DOS, but it was later shown
>> that was totally wrong. They just didn't want anyone else to compete
>> with them.
>
> Who lost a lot of money? Not MS. And there wasn't much hope of
> others competing with them.
I know this isn't gospel truth, totally verifiable, but it's all I've got!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS
"Between the Caldera-owned DR-DOS and competition from IBM's PC DOS
6.3, Microsoft moved to make it impossible to use or buy the
subsequent Windows version, Windows 95, with any DOS product other
than their own. Claimed by them to be a purely technical change, this
was later to be the subject of a major lawsuit brought in Salt Lake
City by Caldera with the help of the Canopy Group.[6][18] Microsoft
lawyers tried repeatedly to have the case dismissed but without
success. Immediately after the completion of the pre-trial deposition
stage (where the parties list the evidence they intend to present),
there was an out-of-court settlement on January 7, 2000 for an
undisclosed sum.[19] This was revealed in November 2009 to be 280
million US dollars.[20]"
> The earliest PCs were floppy based, and you booted from a DOS floppy.
> The DOS version you used was the one bundled with the PC by the
> manufacturer, but all were based on MSDOS.
Yes, MS had a deal with IBM to deliver the OS with their hardware.
That was PC-DOS. Other OEMs got access to MS-DOS.
But others (DOS) cloned the (CP/M) clone! So PC-DOS wasn't alone for
long. (Heck, after the IBM/MS split, they both diverged significantly.
So any PC-DOS after 5.x was IBM-developed only, hence major changes
and additions. And in fact DR-DOS 7.03 claims to be an IBM PC-DOS 6.x
clone, for compatibility reasons.)
> Fast forward a bit. Hard drives were increasingly available and
> affordable. By the Win98 days, you most likely bought a PC with a
> hard drive with Windows pre-installed by the vendor. The vendor
> licensed both DOS and Windows from MS. I am not aware of *any* vendor
> who sold systems bundled with DR-DOS who were not in the embedded
> market. DR-DOS was an after the fact replacement by people who wanted
> to run it. It did not come with the system they bought.
There is a lot of rumor about MS tactics here. I'm not trying to
disparage them (not even as much as is commonly accepted). I honestly
don't know the details.
We all know that "MS-DOS" was most popular, but I have no idea who (or
if) any major OEMs even had the option or wanted to bundle DR-DOS.
Though I can say for a fact that DR-DOS is a *very* competent DOS, so
it's not inferior at all (and even has some advantages, at least
compared to "classic" standalone MS-DOS 6.x).
> While you *could* run Win9X on top of it, next to no one actually
> *did*. Why should they?
First of all, if you have the ability to literally force people to run
two pieces of software instead of only one, then you get twice as much
revenue. DR-DOS has other advantages, and (don't quote me) could even
be cheaper. Also, DR-DOS claimed (at least for running Win 3.x) to be
"30% faster".
I don't see how you can misunderstand this. Sure, MS could bundle them
both, but why would they? Obviously they want to sell their own DOS,
but clearly some people thought that it was unfair (given their
monopoly status, I suppose).
Saying after-the-fact, in hindsight, that "well, it already comes with
MS-DOS, so who would buy yet another one?" is incredibly myopic. At
that point, the damage has been done.
>>> You could indeed boot Windows atop DR-DOS, but why bother?
>>
>> No. It was long known (and bragged about, "faster!") that DR-DOS could
>> boot Windows 3.1. That's not the issue. Microsoft intentionally
>> bundled their MS-DOS so that nobody else (e.g. PC-DOS or DR-DOS) could
>> run Win95. They purposely said it was impossible, but it was very
>> easily proven otherwise. This is similar to (but worse) than the old
>> AARD warnings.
>
> I repeat, why bother?
It's like asking why anybody uses compilers other than GCC. Why
bother? And yet they are (still) very big business, literally
thousands of dollars per copy.
> DR-DOS might well have been faster for Win 3.1, because Win 3.1 was a
> multitasking GUI shell on top of DOS, and used DOS for underlying OS
> functions like access to the file system. Win9X steadily reduced
> dependence on underlying DOS.
No, it didn't. By now you should know that. It was very similar to Windows 3.x.
> Win98 used DOS as a boot loader. I doubt the speed difference of booting
> Win98
> from DR-DOS vs MSDOS would be easily measurable, and once it was up, the
> differences
> would be irrelevant.
What's irrelevant is our opinions on this. It doesn't matter what I
think is better or cheaper or faster. It doesn't matter whether I
think it's illegal monopoly tactics or not. (Well, if they settled out
of court, then I can't even pretend that much.)
My point is that DR-DOS could technically run it, but they were shut
out. As you can see, unless Wikipedia is full of crap (not
impossible!), that MS had to pay a very huge sum for this. (I have no
idea about IBM's PC-DOS running Win95, and I'm surprised no one ever
bothered to find out.)
Oh, BTW, didn't you know that (again, allegedly) Novell DOS shut down
all development once Win95 was announced? So they gave up because they
knew they couldn't compete with MS bundling their own DOS. Of course,
DR-DOS has changed ownership so many times over the years, so it's
hard to keep track of who owned what and when. The last major release
(7.03 circa 1998) still says "Caldera".
>> I could be wrong, but I thought DR-DOS was meant to capitalize on the
>> MS-DOS craze. Since PC-DOS cloned CP/M, the makers of CP/M-86 decided
>> to clone DOS. (If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.) Of course, Novell
>> later bought DR-DOS and made a lot of improvements. (But it was
>> Caldera/Lineo who gave up on it.)
>
> Having developed a compatible version of DOS that could be embedded in
> ROM by OEM customers, it was a hop, skip, and jump for DR to package
> it as a retail product. Why not? OEM sales paid for doing it.
> Consumer sales were gravy. But using it meant installing it after
> the fact, unless you bought PC clone hardware that didn't *come* with
> an OS. If you bought IBM, Compaq, or other prominent vendor's kit, it
> did.
BTW, DR-DOS 7.03 had a (very limited) boot manager and explicit
support for dual booting [sic] with Win95. I had forgotten about that.
So it didn't officially "run" Win95 atop itself, but it was treated as
legacy (standalone) DOS, thus you could still boot between the two. I
think you would rename the DR config files to DCONFIG.SYS and
AUTODOS7.BAT (or similar).
In hindsight, it seems a little strange, but that's the way it was
done. Actually, I still have my (overformatted) 18 floppies for Win95
"upgrade", which can be upgraded from Win 3.0 (which is like two or
three floppies, not counting DOS? I can't even remember!). So that's
probably the main case for even having more than one DOS installed. (I
guess there could be bugs and incompatibilities between MS-DOS 6.x and
7.x, hence a good reason to dual boot, but I'm not aware of any major
obvious flaws that would directly necessitate it. Maybe if you wanted
to uninstall it later??)
>>> Most folks who got Windows got it as the next step beyond DOS, and
>>> wanted to simply install it and run it. They did not want to first
>>> install a flavor of DOS and then install Windows on top of it.
>>
>> It's the same kind of thing already. Win9x still had a separate DOS,
>> and I think it even still ran "WIN.COM"! But it's just (barely) hidden
>> where you think it's one single product (which just isn't true).
>
>>> And then, as now, people generally bought Windows PCs with the OS
>>> already installed by the vendor.
This was due to contracts (and discounts) given by MS. I think there
was a rule that they couldn't (and maybe still can't) sell a machine
without any OS at all, so they had to bundle "something". I think
that's why a (very) few still bundle FreeDOS (CD)!
>> There were preinstalls of all kinds of OSes, even OS/2. Heck, don't
>> forget that some versions of OS/2 could run Windows (3.x) as a
>> subsystem. Microsoft was still working on (and selling) all three
>> OSes, at the same time, for many years. Heck, couldn't OS/2 boot any
>> DOS, and not just MS-DOS [sic]?
>
> I recall the Windows version of OS/2. So tell me: *who* actually
> bundled OS/2 with machines? :-)
I don't know. I never used OS/2. But it did exist. I wasn't really
there, so I can't remember the details. I could be wrong, but I think
CWS told me that their networking stack cost extra, not to mention a
few other minor flaws. So it just didn't have the same success as
Windows for various reasons.
>>> I remember the early days when the PC was first out, and MSDOS/PCDOS,
>>> Digital Research CP/M 86, and the UCSD P-system were all fighting for
>>> a chunk of the PD market. MS won. The others lost. Deal with it.
>>
>> PC-DOS was far cheaper, AFAIK. Not sure about other advantages or
>> disadvantages.
>
> PC-DOS was IBM's licensed version for MS-DOS, based on MS code. The
> fact that IBM chose to license it and supply it with the systems they
> sold was a major factor in MSDOS becoming dominant.
I know all of that. But Wikipedia says PC-DOS cost $40 while CP/M-86 was $240.
> The other factor was availability of applications. People buy computers to
> perform
> tasks, and buy programs to run on the computer that can do those
> tasks. Early MSDOS looked a lot like CP/M under the hood for that
> reason. There was a fair sized existing market running 8 bit machines
> using CP/M, and an intent was to make it easier to port existing CP/M
> applications like WordStar and VisiCalc to the 16 bit PC environment.
Yes, of course. If CP/M had already been ported to 8088, DOS would've
never existed.
> There's an apocryphal story from back then that IBM was interested in
> licensing CP/M 86 for the PC, but DR's CEO was more interested in
> flying his plane than meeting with the IBM VP. Another story had DR
> talking to IBM, not liking the terms offered, and declining. That may
> have been a fatal error on their part.
Eventually they came out with CP/M-86, but it never caught on. The
other option was an UCSD P-System. Of course, MS was long known for
their compilers, so that probably helped them to sell more OSes, too.
(In fact, Letwin implies that was a major motivation for them to
develop DOS at all.)
>> I'm not talking about bad assumptions. I'm talking about explicit bugs
>> that MS refused to fix. So Quake ran just fine under Win95, but it
>> wouldn't run at all under NTVDM. Microsoft just didn't care. Of
>> course, soon after that, all the following id Software games were
>> "Windows only". Gee, I wonder why.
>
> Tell me why MS *should* have cared and *bothered* to make fixes in DOS
> for that case? Because *you* wanted it?
If they wouldn't fix genuinely broken behavior in NTVDM for the
biggest game developer in the world, then they were either very very
stubborn or just totally inept. Like I said, it worked fine in both
native DOS and (GUI) Win95. But it wouldn't work in NTVDM. I don't
know why, but NTVDM was just such a beast (compared to everything
else). Maybe NT wasn't as well-designed as we thought. Maybe all their
subsystems (now abandoned) really were too complicated to support.
Good idea but flawed implementation.
I don't know how you justify making id Software rewrite (and port)
their games to Win32 just because MS wouldn't fix their bugs.
(Granted, it's more complicated than that, but I don't see how making
one side do all the heavy lifting is fair.)
> And Id did the same thing every other game developer did. DOS was
> dying out. Windows was taking over.
You didn't even have a choice! It wouldn't even run unless you
targeted the only working API! I'm not (directly) saying that MS is
full of crap here, but clearly you can't pretend that literally dozens
of (unfixed) bugs had literally no effect on what system people target
and what software is developed!
> The persons buying and running
> the games would be doing so on Windows machines, so game developers
> wrote new games to run in the Windows environment, that did not assume
> they were the only thing running and owned the machine, because they
> wouldn't be and didn't.
You have no idea what you're talking about. Not all DOS games made
such bad decisions about direct hardware access. And not all Windows
games are totally isolated, well-functioning, well-designed either. If
MS invented DPMI but still can't be bothered to fix their own bugs,
then whose fault is it?? It's our fault for targeting and using what
they invented??
You're right, just use a Mac. Or Linux. That's totally acceptable.
They never break anything. Right?
> And the other point overlooked in discussions like this is "Who is the
> *customer?*"
>
> The customer is the entity that actually *pays* MS for Windows.
For leasing Windows. (You don't even own it anymore.) And there are
many restrictions, well beyond just "don't steal". And keep in mind
that you are only paying for minimal support, not new features, not
compatibility, not anything outside of a (very) narrow list of bundled
applications. Everything else, you're "on your own!"
> My current desktop is a refurb Dell box dual booting Ubuntu and Win7
> Pro. It came with Win7 Pro pre-installed. *I'm* not MS's customer -
> *Dell* was. *They* paid MS a license fee to install Win7.
That's great. But you can pay them all the money in the world, and
they still won't do what you want. That's not how companies work. You
pay them for a tiny (partial) privilege of using it (for a time, in
limited ways), not for literally everything and the kitchen sink.
> The other potential customer for MS is the Enterprise, represented by
> the CIO who will sign off on a site license for hundreds or thousands
> of machines. Hid company pays MS for that license. The employees
> using those machines aren't MS's customer. The company they work for
> is.
Give me a break. Will you please stop pretending that all of this is
"only" about money, or that "money" is their number one goal? "Well,
they're a business, of course it it." No, it's not!! They already have
enough money.
> It is possible for an individual to buy a shrink-wrapped copy of
> Windows to upgrade an existing system or install on a new one.
Non-OEM copies? And you can only "upgrade" select versions, and often
not without overwriting (erasing) everything, even user programs and
data. And, again, you aren't "buying" it, only leasing it. The (very)
limited rights to backup or downgrade are also very obscure.
> (The DIY gamer crowd who builds their own machines does so.) But that's a
> tiny fraction of the market, and most folks get Windows re-installed
> on the machine they buy.
Yes, I'm aware that "Windows only" is the majority. It also has
nothing to do with licensing nor money. Sure, some money is changing
hands, but money doesn't make the decisions. Money doesn't control the
world. And money certainly doesn't decide who does or doesn't support
xyz technology. Money is a tool used to control other people, but it's
very limited.
>> Speaking of "business", Valve doesn't seem interested in Windows 8 and
>> its exclusive App Store (nor the royalties they'd have to pay). This
>> is probably why they're working so hard on SteamOS (Linux-based).
>
> While Win8 may have an app store, I'm aware of no requirement to buy
> from it. Valve can still write games that will run on WinNT based
> platforms that users can buy, install, and play.
Not really. All "Metro / Modern UI" (aka, Win8+) apps 100% absolutely
(last I heard) have to be installed from the Windows Store, no
exceptions. And MS does get a cut of all sales there. And MS intends
the "legacy" Win32 to go away, eventually.
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