Comment by einr
9 days ago
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example.
So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.
But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.
If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.
Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?
IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows.
That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.
Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.
Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.
Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.
The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.
For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
> Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone
At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals.
IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.
I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
That's just the way things were.
> Mac OS didn't have memory protection
That's true, but that's not the only issue in system design. None were modern OSes.
Most of the rest I think is BS.
> IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.
Never heard that. What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser but Microsoft used their Windows monopoly, again, to spread IE - which the US government also convicted them for.
> I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection?
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> Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
My feeling of IE3 to IE6 (at its release time) is that (anti-competitive strategies aside), many (most?) average consumers would very likely choose IE over Netscape if they gave both a bit of a test drive.
In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was 14/15 at the time and remember coming to the conclusion that IE3 ran much faster on Windows 95 compared to Netscape.
It being (anticompetitively) free helped, but on the 100Mhz Pentiums with 8MB of RAM in our computer lab, you’d be a masochist to choose Netscape over it for random web browsing.
IE4 was quite resource intensive, but because MS anticompetitively pre-loaded it on OS startup, it still started faster than Netscape.
IE6 I found pleasant to use and it wasn’t until Firefox came out with tabs (Opera had them earlier, but you would often encounter websites it wouldn’t render properly, probably due to IE targeted design), that IE lost its sheen for me.
Firefox was popular enough that developers started caring about standards compliant websites at which point IE started entering the “despised” category, but it may not have actually been displaced from its top spot were it not for Chrome.
> IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
I've never heard that and IIRC, DR-DOS's owners sued successfully (or DoJ sued successfully). People certainly saw the errors.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
I don't take Wikipedia as gospel, but that doesn't say what happened with earlier versions of Windows. And regardless, how did DR-DOS sue them if they weren't affected?
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