From: Paul Jakma (paulj at domain alphyra.ie)
Date: Thu 28 Jun 2001 - 13:59:29 IST
On Thu, 28 Jun 2001, John P. Looney wrote:
> Whatever else they did, they brought computing to the masses. We would be
> using 486's today, if 600 million people weren't willing to pay £2000 for
> something that could run word & excel.
i think this is a fallacy.
there were plenty of software houses around that would have filled in
had say, eg, gates been knocked down by a bus in 1980. and instead of
1 utterly dominant software house, we might instead have had 2, 3 big
software houses vying with each other.
i think that what can be said is that cheap, standardised (windows is
a standard, albeit a bad one) computing came about /despite/ the big
Unix players. Had popular computing been left to them ordinary
households could never have afforded computers.
> Kate
--paulj
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