Post #1,821
7/14/01 5:09:02 PM
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Minor correction, not all IBM's fault.
When the original 4.77 Mhz IBM PC was sold, IBM PC-DOS was not the only choice. PC-DOS was sold for $40. An alternate Digital Research CP/M-86 was available for ~ $495. I still recall the PC magazine contrasting the OSes - different but no overwhelming advantage for either one.
Now make a guess which one became dominant. Biggest mistake Digital Research ever made. They had no idea what kind of volumes would be involved. Of course neither did IBM.
Alex
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Post #1,829
7/14/01 10:15:50 PM
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Not Digital Research's only mistake.
With Concurrent DOS / Multiuser DOS they had a wonderful mass market product but couldn't see it. My MUDOS environment was the absolute envy of every programmer who saw it, and many business people would have loved it too - if they could afford $750 per computer. DR should have sold a single user version for $150 or so. They would have sold millions, and they would have delayed Windows a couple of years at least.
Unfortunately they saw themselves as a low volume provider to VARs and ISVs of a multiuser competitor to Unix. Eventually, a far less capable task switching feature was included in DR-DOS, but it wasn't marketed properly, and the market window had already nearly closed.
Apparently, to qualify as a software company executive, you need to prove you have less marketing sense than a sea slug. Off hand, I can't think of any exceptions to this rule except Microsoft.
[link|www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #1,831
7/14/01 11:24:41 PM
7/14/01 11:32:45 PM
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Full agreement.
I spent a week in Monterey, CA for DR training on Concurrent CP-DOS. Even briefly saw Gary Kildahl at the pizza party at the end of the week. The DR guys were impressive. They intimately knew every step level of Intel's 286 and were helping them debug it. They knew all the MS-DOS system calls like the back of their hand. They were developing a 680x0 version of the OS at the same time and were going back and forth between the two hardware architectures in testing and picking up design flaws. They were purists, but they were good!
Unfortunately, as you say, they didn't see the market potential of what they had or taylor it for the a single user.
For that time, their GEM GUI product didn't look bad either. I didn't play with it much.
A missed opportunity for them.
On the other hand, their C compiler was a piece of junk. They did not use it themselves for the OS work! The compiler they used was from a company that's long gone and I can't think of at the moment.
Alex
Edited by a6l6e6x
July 14, 2001, 11:32:45 PM EDT
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Post #1,832
7/14/01 11:48:36 PM
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It was the Lattice C compiler. And they live!
Live more or less that is. Their home page:
[link|http://www.lattice.com/corp.htm|Lattice]
Reading their history it looks like Microsoft C was based on Lattice as well as many others.
They are out of C compiler business now.
I feel better now that I've "recalled" Lattice with help from Google.
Alex
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Post #1,872
7/15/01 11:57:22 PM
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Weren't they the ones who did the C compiler for the Amiga?
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Post #1,891
7/16/01 8:26:15 AM
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Yes, indeed.
From their site:
"Versions of the Lattice C Compiler were released for DOS, OS/2, MVS, VMS, UNIX, AmigaDOS, and many other operating systems."
Alex
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Post #1,834
7/15/01 12:04:39 AM
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A big problem was Kildahl
He kept spouting his mouth off to Bill Gates, then got very bitter when Billy Boy kept taking his ideas and marketing them with gusto, crushing his own techie dreams in the process.
Techies despise marketeers, and so long as they do, they will continue to be blindsided. Both [link|http://www.gpf-comics.com/|GPF] and [link|http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/|User Friendly] reflect this attitude wonderfully. The truth is: an OK product well marketed will always crush a superior product that is not marketed well.
One of the most important reasons for the success of Linux is intensive and effective marketing, yet no Linux enthusiast will admit there's any marketing at all involved with Linux.
Within the Linux community Red Hat dominates purely on the strength of understanding how to market to the Linux community, yet this is invisible to the community. I've had Linux enthusiasts tell me, "I've never seen any Red Hat marketing".
"I am not affected by markething" is the mantra of the techie, and it makes them totally vulnerable. They can't even see marketing, never mind understand how it affects them. Of course, that's the state of the general public as well.
[link|www.aaxnet.com|AAx]
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Post #1,842
7/15/01 1:00:59 PM
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Good points.
Alex
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Post #1,860
7/15/01 10:48:13 PM
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excellent viewpoint
I like redhat because when i was in the RTP anfd they were pre IPO I used to mooch around at Stay On Line at the end of the street I lived on where RH techies would hang out and bs with the passerbys. Already tried one RH distro in Alaska and liked calling my "buds" for advice while at Eli Lilly. That is prolly why Eli Lilly is now mostly RH when it comes to Linux. The freebees were always good.
thanx,
bill
can I have my ones and zeros back?
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Post #3,306
7/31/01 6:19:43 PM
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The Amiga and Linux
It seems like Linux is mostly marketed by word of mouth by Linux users, much like AmigaDOS and the Amiga was. When I tell some average person that I use Linux, they claim they have never heard of it before. I guess the marketing of Linux is being done towards computer professionals who already know what it is? That is if there is any at all. Sort of reminds me of the Amiga marketing, which was almost non-existant in the US. The most I saw of Amiga marketing was the magazine ad that appeared in Amiga magazines. They might have done better if they put magazine ads in non-Amiga magazines and got the word out to new customers that never heard of it before. No TV commercials that I saw, except for one that I think was the CD32 or something, their Game Console version of the Amiga done around the time Commodore was becoming a corpse and didn't know it yet.
Rather than suffer the fate of the Amiga (I like Amigas, I own an Amiga 500 at home) and fall into a small market, I'd rather see more Linux marketing to get the word out to those who never heard of it before. About what it can do, what it costs next to other operating systems, and how it performs. Get out the old feature-chart and place it in magazines and newspapers. See if the Wall-Street Journal will run an advertisement with Linux stacked up against Windows 2000, Novell Netware, SCO Unix, Solaris and other network operating systems. Then add in MySQL, SAMBA, Apache/PHP, QMAIL, OpenOffice/StarOffice, Mozilla, Java, and other things.
Lattice C compiler, I remember that one from college. I remember they were just about the only decent C compiler for the Amiga, some of my C language classmates used it for C projects for our class. Too bad Lattice quit the C Language market, but I guess they felt that it was hard to compete with Borland, Microsoft, and many others.
"I can see if I want anything done right around here, I'll have to do it myself!" Moe Howard
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