On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Michael ODonnell <michael.odonn...@comcast.net> wrote: >> Anything old will have its share of historical accidents, to be >> sure. But there's reasonable design failings, and then there's >> design by the infinite monkey method. > > You have insulted an infinite number of monkeys. IBM used to > publish the source codes for their BIOS ...
The design of the IBM 5150 [1] is only the start of the problem. When everyone and their brother has to solve all sorts of problems, in all sorts of different ways, things get very messy. Note that I'm not saying there's a better way. Much like democracy: It's the worst form of government, except for all the others. Though I do think a little more foresight on the part of IBM and Microsoft both would have saved us all a lot of trouble down the road. But then it probabbly wouldn't have the cheap and quick solution IBM wanted, nor would it have been as accessible to third-parties, and thus it wouldn't have succeeded, and we would all be complaining about someone else's cheap design instead. -- Ben [1] Quite possibly the most appropriate model number in history. _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
