From: kevin lyda (kevin at domain suberic.net)
Date: Thu 28 Jun 2001 - 13:50:36 IST
On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 01:36:30PM +0100, bscanlan at domain irish-times.com wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 28, 2001 at 01:12:06PM +0100, Thomas Bridge wrote:
> > Of course - had Apple set up its OS in such a way that you could have
> > "Apple Compatible" machines, it would probably be the dominant desktop OS
> > vendor right now.
> I was under the impression that IBM were responsible for the opening of
> their PC standard.
no, ibm made the pc cheap (and then picked ms, so the trend to chep
computers started prior to ms) by using off the shelf components.
the proprietary bit - and you can be sure ibm made sure there was some -
was the bios. until phoenix did their clean room reverse engineering hack
on that, there were no clones. ibm didn't open the pc standard by choice.
and saying sun would have kept big and expensive h/w is incorrect.
they made cheap computers compared to their competition - dec and ibm.
are suns cheap compared to pc's? no, of course not, but they *were*
much cheaper then their peers at the time.
context is rather important.
kevin
-- kevin at domain suberic.net "linux is a cancer" --steve ballmer fork()'ed on 37058400 "released 25 august 1991, linux is a virgo" --me meatspace place: home linux, not just a star-sign: http://suberic.net/~kevin http://www.linux.com/
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