On Sunday 08 January 2006 09:34, Ted Roche wrote: ... > Yup, I thought Microsoft had a good plan in keeping Intel on the > straight-and-narrow and giving UNIX a run for its money with Intel- > AMD / PowerPC / Alpha / MIPS rollouts of NT. I saw NT demoed on Alpha > at Valinor in Manchester, and it was a snappy machine. Instead, the > multi-platform support just turned out to be another head fake, > causing their customers to waste a huge amount of time, resources and > effort chasing an opportunity that Microsoft wouldn't support. It > just amazes me the number of times that Microsoft has pulled the rug > out from under their own customers. > > Ted Roche
Yep, which is one of the many reasons that this former NT "guru" is now solidly in the Linux camp! But what can I say? For a while during the 90s, anyone with NT experience was heavily sought after and *paid well.* It was all about the money, nothing more. I had wanted to go Unix after the fall of Commodore/Amiga, but there were already too many Unix guys on the market! Had I not been newly married and a baby on the way, I might have stuck it out anyway. And for what it was, NT was at least 32-bit, and saved me from having to do really smelly 16-bit Windows development. NT was smelly enough, still carrying over the legacy bass-ackwards 16-bit Windows API and event model, which they should've by all rights dropped, burned, nuked and back to the drawing board to get it right. And Microsoft was notorious for its "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" technology 'adoption' principles. Anybody with half a brain knew this. Customers so foolish as to jump on anything not Microsoft Mainstream were doomed from the very beginning. Well, you were kinda doomed with the Mainstream stuff anyway, but at least you didn't get fired. ;-) Oh, I recall the NT-beta days with glee. If you managed to get by 5 minutes before you saw the dreaded "blue-screen-of-death", it was a miracle. By all rights it should've been called "NT-alpha", but that might have caused some confusion. :-) -Fred _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss
