MS was notorious for rather poor code, on the whole. Excel was their first best-in-class product, if I recall. It came along rather late. MS specialized in 'good enough', but quickly, and high priced.
Get there first, don't (quite) get thrown out the door due to shoddy workmanship, and sweep up all the easy money, leaving somewhat sterile ground for your competition to grow in. That's MS's forte. > I never did understand how using programming space to write the complex > operations of CISC processors was any faster by using a RISC system, unless > the CISC chip was from Intel and took half an hour to change stacks or > something. Off-loading the complex operations onto the programmer is going > to cause more trouble (and errors) than complex instructions executed in > hardware on the chip, especially task switching. RISC was _all_ about putting the smarts in the compiler, and not in the hardware. By making the hardware simpler it could be made faster. The theory was that it was more faster than the more instructions it took to get there. It was easier at the time to scale RAM for greater density than to scale hardware for greater speed. It was not a wrong decision. Programs got a bit fatter, but what _really_ bloated things up was all the A/V code that was showing up at around the same time. That effect completely swamped RISC bloat. The only thing keeping it real, so to speak, is battery-operated equipment. Apple's choice of the ARM for the Newton was all about the MIPS/mW rating of the ARM, which kicked everything else's ass. -- Jim _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
