History of The PC - How We've Progressed
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Actually MS does compete in the Enterprise market. I believe that DELL uses MS's Windows 2000 to run it's buisness/website. Ebay runs on MS Servers, or it may have at an earlier point if I recall correctly. Google uses a cluster of 10,000 linux based PC's, so you can see that Linux scales well. I read that linux will be able to support 32 processors within the next year or so. Currently I believe the maximum is 8. Once that happens, Linux will truly entrench the enterprise market. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
Oh and one more company. Microsoft runs on MS Servers. And as you well know MS is a very large Enterprise. The only problem is that it gets hacked to frequently. :( That can be dangerous to those who will be using .NET and passport. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
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Well, having read the thread I am embarassed to say I have only had 3 PC's at home in total. My current one is so old it's a joke, it has MMX in it's title. Luckily I get a decent laptop from work and I use that instead. Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
Isn't Windows programming supposed to be a profitable industry, or did MS take all your money by bundling important software into it's OS? Surely you must be able to afford more computers. The more the better. :) We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
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Actually MS does compete in the Enterprise market. I believe that DELL uses MS's Windows 2000 to run it's buisness/website. Ebay runs on MS Servers, or it may have at an earlier point if I recall correctly. Google uses a cluster of 10,000 linux based PC's, so you can see that Linux scales well. I read that linux will be able to support 32 processors within the next year or so. Currently I believe the maximum is 8. Once that happens, Linux will truly entrench the enterprise market. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
MS *does compete* in the enterprise market. The offer that Sun has made today is not going to sway many people from Microsoft platforms immediately. The iPlanet Server + Chili ASP(supports ASP and ADO, but no COM) will cost 1500 dollars per server. Why would any small company who already has these installed on an MS Windows 2000 server not just apply IIS patches instead of buying a new server platform? The larger companies will not have purely script based sites. They will be on COM/COM+. I also assume that all the manpower these IIS deployed companies have, will be Windows developers and Windows trained support staff. I takes more than CodeRed and Nimda viruses to take away Microsoft market share. I do not expect Sun to gain much out of this exercise, but they certainly seem to be on the right track. Microsoft was never a player in the enterprise market. Windows 2k made them a player. If companies like IBM and Sun do not work hard and make their solutions cost-effective for smaller companies, they will be faced with Microsoft moving in with products that take over their market share in say 3 to 5 years. They should keep in mind that - Small companies grow to big and then huge - do not leave them to Microsoft. Also, small companies form the largest group in IT consumption. Taking on Microsoft is not as easy as supporting 32 processors. Dell does not use Windows because Linux does not have 32 processor support. Linux is good enough to run a web service NOW. But, Microsoft will have a market share and WILL build its market share, unless its competitors keep up the hard work and produce integrated solutions that are easy to manage and work with. For web services, Windows 2000 also scale well. No one has claimed that Linux does not scale well. It is marketing, ease of use, availability of trained manpower and a lot of other factors that will decide the future of Linux. Microsoft has proven skills in taking on leaders in a particular market segment and succeeding. Now they are trying a .NET alternative to J2EE and a PocketPC alternetive to Palm. They have a very good chance of succeeding. If Microsoft tries to leverage its desktop presence to make its server platform market grow, why does Sun and IBM etc refrain from leveraging its server capabilities to make a more wide desktop presence. Why does Oracle and Sun have fancies about thin clients and app servers for word processing? Who wants those? The network will always be slower than the local drive. I believe that these companies should shed fancy conc
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Isn't Windows programming supposed to be a profitable industry, or did MS take all your money by bundling important software into it's OS? Surely you must be able to afford more computers. The more the better. :) We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true But, that is the most profitable and most used operating system in the world. Probably, the world is also full of monkeys. In your preprocessor remove the line #define Windows_Programmer monkey It would certainly help to *appreciate* the efforts of Microsoft. The first step towards victory is to respect the intelligence and capabilities of your opponent. If you are anti-Microsoft, consider this: A startup with virtually no investment is the largest software company now. Its products are the most widly used in the computer industry. Respect that. Anyone who does not respect that will underestimate and will certainly lose. My advice: Learn to respect your competition. Or you are *Netscape*. -Thomas
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Isn't Windows programming supposed to be a profitable industry, or did MS take all your money by bundling important software into it's OS? Surely you must be able to afford more computers. The more the better. :) We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
No, some of us have a family and a life outside of computers. With a single income and no government support (I'm too darn rich) money goes quickly. Fortunately for you Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters can't get pregnant so this won't be a problem for you. :-D OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
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No, some of us have a family and a life outside of computers. With a single income and no government support (I'm too darn rich) money goes quickly. Fortunately for you Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters can't get pregnant so this won't be a problem for you. :-D OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
"Rosy Palm and her Five Sisters" is what we called it in my neighborhood. :) -c ------------------------------ Smaller Animals Software, Inc. http://www.smalleranimals.com
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No, some of us have a family and a life outside of computers. With a single income and no government support (I'm too darn rich) money goes quickly. Fortunately for you Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters can't get pregnant so this won't be a problem for you. :-D OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
Your right. I forgot that some people are married :). Oh I guess this isn't in my bio, but I'm not married. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:
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What makes you so confident about Linux? It sure has come a long way and in many cases installs as easier as Windows (I say this from practical experience installing Linux Mandrake on Compaq and Dell machines), but where are the applications and development tools? More important, where are the developers and support staff? and finally, where are the users? -Thomas
You do not seem to understand the nature of the Linux and Open Source development. Specifically: where are the applications and development tools Well, it all comes out of the box. You can also find a lot of applications on the Internet for free for for a very low price, many can do all that MS Office package does etc. I wonder where are the development tools for Windows, ah, right, you have to buy them separately! where are the developers and support staff Developers ARE a support staff, they can be easily found in various newsgroups and mailing lists. Typically you can get help within couple of hours if not minutes from some other developer. Not to mention that you have the source code most of the time so you can help yourself if nothing else. Now, tried Microsoft Support? It takes days, sometimes weeks to actually get some useful response. We often abandon the option of searching for support for Windows related problems because we can't afford the delay and we look for workarounds instead... where are the users All around the place, and many of them are also developers. In fact the real big money is using Unix'y systems very often as they need a serious tools for the job.
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No, some of us have a family and a life outside of computers. With a single income and no government support (I'm too darn rich) money goes quickly. Fortunately for you Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters can't get pregnant so this won't be a problem for you. :-D OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
>>OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Not me Michael! :confused: Care to elaborate? Cheers, Paul (a London dweller)
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It's been quite a ride for me... 1) Atari 400 6502(?) with 8K of RAM and add-on cassette tape storage 2) Apple //e 6502, with 128K RAM, CPM/80-column card, 2 5-1/4 inch floppy drives, monochrome monitor (remember AmDek?) AppleCat/3 300bps modem 3) Sperry XT 8088, 640K RAM, 5-inch floppy, 20mb hard drive, CGA 4) Home-built 80286 with 1MB RAM, 80287 math co-processor, 3-inch and 5-inch floppies, 40mb hard drive, and EGA 5) Compaq 80386 lunchbox portable 1MB RAM, 40MB hard drive (won in a contest) 6) Home-built 80486 DX/2-50 1MB RAM, 20mb/40mb hard drives 7) Home-built Pentium 75, 2mb RAM, 250mb hard drive 8) Home-built Pentium 120, 4MB RAM, 250mb/500mb hard drives 9) Home-built Pentium2/233, 32MB RAM, 500mb/1gb/2gb hard drives 10) Home-built Pentium2/450, 64MB RAM, 6gb/9gb/4gb hard drives 11) Home-built AMD T-bird 1Ghx, 768MB RAM, 6gb/10gb/15gb/20gb/9gb/4gb hard drives Memories: A) 20MB MFM hard drives that cost over $700 B) 32MB of memory was $1000 C) Turbo Pascal 2.0 was only $39 D) Low-level formatting of MFM ard drves could only be performed in debug, using the magic command "g=c800:5". E) You could actually get useful help with MFC and windows programming in general when you called the MSDN help line. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
About 1984: Jupiter ACE (4Mhz Z80 with a whopping 3KBytes of RAM. Forth interpreter in ROM, resulting 956 Bytes for program and data. Rubber keyboard with 40 keys. 1986: first activities of self-built 6809 system running FLEX (that was an operating system look-alike). Afterwards: the typical PC crap. About 1992 a 386-40 with 16 MBytes RAM, running the first pre-beta-release of Windows NT 3.1. Tried OS/2 2.0 then, but abandoned it due to the lack of development tools. NT user since then. Current: DELL I8K with UXGA screen and a pIII-600 with 256 MBytes RAM, running W2K (the best NT version up to now). An elderly pIII-600 system with 256 MBytes sits under my desk and is feeling heavily outdated. Test with a new Athlon-1400 system showed it's floating point performance to be thrice as fast as the pIII-600. Where will we be in, say, five years from now? p6-7.5 with 8 GBytes or TriAthlon-10G with 16 GBytes? Massive SMP machines even for the home user? (Currently, I'm swarming for Tyan's Bi-Athlon mainboard) Microsoft Word EBTTLRNWICH? (even better than the last release, now with integrated cup holder) Will Microsoft's licencing policy survive? Will there still be Linux? Would Mr. Gates be the next President of the United States? (not _that_ unlikely, they already had pathetically bad actors)
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About 1984: Jupiter ACE (4Mhz Z80 with a whopping 3KBytes of RAM. Forth interpreter in ROM, resulting 956 Bytes for program and data. Rubber keyboard with 40 keys. 1986: first activities of self-built 6809 system running FLEX (that was an operating system look-alike). Afterwards: the typical PC crap. About 1992 a 386-40 with 16 MBytes RAM, running the first pre-beta-release of Windows NT 3.1. Tried OS/2 2.0 then, but abandoned it due to the lack of development tools. NT user since then. Current: DELL I8K with UXGA screen and a pIII-600 with 256 MBytes RAM, running W2K (the best NT version up to now). An elderly pIII-600 system with 256 MBytes sits under my desk and is feeling heavily outdated. Test with a new Athlon-1400 system showed it's floating point performance to be thrice as fast as the pIII-600. Where will we be in, say, five years from now? p6-7.5 with 8 GBytes or TriAthlon-10G with 16 GBytes? Massive SMP machines even for the home user? (Currently, I'm swarming for Tyan's Bi-Athlon mainboard) Microsoft Word EBTTLRNWICH? (even better than the last release, now with integrated cup holder) Will Microsoft's licencing policy survive? Will there still be Linux? Would Mr. Gates be the next President of the United States? (not _that_ unlikely, they already had pathetically bad actors)
> Where will we be in, say, five years from now? Intel is claiming that we'll be at 20Ghz by 2006 (probably 4th quarter - :) ). I want to know when we'll be at the point of using optical circuits instead of that slow-ass copper stuff. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
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>>OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Not me Michael! :confused: Care to elaborate? Cheers, Paul (a London dweller)
Not me Michael! :confused: Care to elaborate? Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters is your hand and also your sexual partner. A lovely euphemism for masturbation. An example to use on a wanker talking about his latest conquest - "So how is Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters?" :-D Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone
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It's been quite a ride for me... 1) Atari 400 6502(?) with 8K of RAM and add-on cassette tape storage 2) Apple //e 6502, with 128K RAM, CPM/80-column card, 2 5-1/4 inch floppy drives, monochrome monitor (remember AmDek?) AppleCat/3 300bps modem 3) Sperry XT 8088, 640K RAM, 5-inch floppy, 20mb hard drive, CGA 4) Home-built 80286 with 1MB RAM, 80287 math co-processor, 3-inch and 5-inch floppies, 40mb hard drive, and EGA 5) Compaq 80386 lunchbox portable 1MB RAM, 40MB hard drive (won in a contest) 6) Home-built 80486 DX/2-50 1MB RAM, 20mb/40mb hard drives 7) Home-built Pentium 75, 2mb RAM, 250mb hard drive 8) Home-built Pentium 120, 4MB RAM, 250mb/500mb hard drives 9) Home-built Pentium2/233, 32MB RAM, 500mb/1gb/2gb hard drives 10) Home-built Pentium2/450, 64MB RAM, 6gb/9gb/4gb hard drives 11) Home-built AMD T-bird 1Ghx, 768MB RAM, 6gb/10gb/15gb/20gb/9gb/4gb hard drives Memories: A) 20MB MFM hard drives that cost over $700 B) 32MB of memory was $1000 C) Turbo Pascal 2.0 was only $39 D) Low-level formatting of MFM ard drves could only be performed in debug, using the magic command "g=c800:5". E) You could actually get useful help with MFC and windows programming in general when you called the MSDN help line. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
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You do not seem to understand the nature of the Linux and Open Source development. Specifically: where are the applications and development tools Well, it all comes out of the box. You can also find a lot of applications on the Internet for free for for a very low price, many can do all that MS Office package does etc. I wonder where are the development tools for Windows, ah, right, you have to buy them separately! where are the developers and support staff Developers ARE a support staff, they can be easily found in various newsgroups and mailing lists. Typically you can get help within couple of hours if not minutes from some other developer. Not to mention that you have the source code most of the time so you can help yourself if nothing else. Now, tried Microsoft Support? It takes days, sometimes weeks to actually get some useful response. We often abandon the option of searching for support for Windows related problems because we can't afford the delay and we look for workarounds instead... where are the users All around the place, and many of them are also developers. In fact the real big money is using Unix'y systems very often as they need a serious tools for the job.
George, I am not saying that *Windows is better than Linux* or that *Linux costs more than Windows*. Where are the users/applications? Finally, the market is users, who are not developers. I accept that the GUI of Linux are very good now and I like Gnome very much. I am using a Linux Mandrake machine with Gnome and StarOffice. But, K-Office and StarOffice are nowhere near MS Office. There has to be migration procedures and tools built-in to help them and people DO NOT mind paying for their Office tools. I hope Sun comes up with a paid StarOffice, that takes itself up as a competitive business to MSOffice. It SHOULD make it a point to make migration possible. I would say the same about Corel WordPerfect (which I have not seen). Sun is talking of making StarOffice an application service. Basically, they are going back to the "Larry Ellison network computer" concept and will kill StarOffice. I think that Ximian is doing a good job addressing these issues. Where are the developers? I am talking about people moving from Windows to Linux. A large majority of business app developers are VB developers. This makes it difficult for a company with VB code base to move to Linux. Where are the support staff? If you go to a small office, you will find a few PCs and one guy who did 6 months training on Windows and getting paid 2500 dollars to 4000 dollars a month. If he is asked by his boss, the small business owner, about Linux, he will say that he knows nothing. *The installation of Linux Mandrake was easier than Windows 2000 on the same machine*. But, how many people know that? I am personally asking people to use the Linux machine that I installed. I made all the tech guys I know try to install Linux mandrake atleast once. The office users find StarOffice not as *aesthetic* as MS Word/Office. Conclusion It takes more than technical excellence to beat MS and get their market share. There has to be an effort to make students and homeusers use it. This can only be done by taking the *geek* image out of Linux and launching a good PR campaign promoting the easy to install and use factor. The technical nature of talks about Linux has to change to a user-centric one. Someone has to tell users that Linux is great and easy to install/use. No one is doing that now. Maybe, Redhat, MandrakeSoft, IBM, Sun etc.. will become more aggressive in their PR campaigns to paint a *friendlier* image for Linux. Thomas
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It's been quite a ride for me... 1) Atari 400 6502(?) with 8K of RAM and add-on cassette tape storage 2) Apple //e 6502, with 128K RAM, CPM/80-column card, 2 5-1/4 inch floppy drives, monochrome monitor (remember AmDek?) AppleCat/3 300bps modem 3) Sperry XT 8088, 640K RAM, 5-inch floppy, 20mb hard drive, CGA 4) Home-built 80286 with 1MB RAM, 80287 math co-processor, 3-inch and 5-inch floppies, 40mb hard drive, and EGA 5) Compaq 80386 lunchbox portable 1MB RAM, 40MB hard drive (won in a contest) 6) Home-built 80486 DX/2-50 1MB RAM, 20mb/40mb hard drives 7) Home-built Pentium 75, 2mb RAM, 250mb hard drive 8) Home-built Pentium 120, 4MB RAM, 250mb/500mb hard drives 9) Home-built Pentium2/233, 32MB RAM, 500mb/1gb/2gb hard drives 10) Home-built Pentium2/450, 64MB RAM, 6gb/9gb/4gb hard drives 11) Home-built AMD T-bird 1Ghx, 768MB RAM, 6gb/10gb/15gb/20gb/9gb/4gb hard drives Memories: A) 20MB MFM hard drives that cost over $700 B) 32MB of memory was $1000 C) Turbo Pascal 2.0 was only $39 D) Low-level formatting of MFM ard drves could only be performed in debug, using the magic command "g=c800:5". E) You could actually get useful help with MFC and windows programming in general when you called the MSDN help line. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
- Commadore 64C, 640K RAM, 5ΒΌ floppy drive. 2) Pentium 1 100, 32MB RAM, 2GB hard drive 3) Pentium 3 966, 512MB RAM, 40GB hard drive I don't upgrade much :)
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> Where will we be in, say, five years from now? Intel is claiming that we'll be at 20Ghz by 2006 (probably 4th quarter - :) ). I want to know when we'll be at the point of using optical circuits instead of that slow-ass copper stuff. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001
I read some universities have working optical processors but they are not ready for the commercial market.