OS recollections

One advantage about walking to work is your mind can wander about the wonders around. This AM my grey matter landed on the lauded Windows Vista release.

Microsoft (MS) rules the PC world. As such they charge a premium for thier product and they know it will be widely purchased and implimented. When your selling a bunch of ones and zeros you have to bring new things to market to sustain payroll and investments.

This lesson took awhile and many Operating systems (OS's) fell to the side of the road. Todays blog is about those pioneers.

CP\M (Control Program for Microcomputers). This OS was poised for greatness and in hindsite would have halted Microsoft from being the jaggernaut it is today. But, they freaked out about being linked to IBM and opened the door for MS-DOS.

Timex OS, Atari OS, Texas Instrament OS. <-> these probably ran CP/M or something. I just know that they were early computer systems (among many, many) that also fell to the wayside.

Commador and Amiga OS. These were innovative and lasted much longer then the others. Amiga really did some amazing things for the time and place.

IBM and MS worked together on OS/2 MS bailed later and IBM lost it touch when it went for the Microchannel and the industry went with EIDE (its hardware on the motherboards) The industry went on to not support either and went with PCI instead.

OS/2 became IBMs OS/2 warp.

CP/M became DR-DOS and was later bought by Novell in an attempt to be an alternative to MicroSoft. They may have succeeded if they had been more cut-throat and gotten pre-loaded contracts.

now we have Windows Vista which is really snazzy looking with lots of really cool funtions. Stable? lets hope, secure? lets hope.

You may note that I left Mac OS out. It and arguably Linux are the only other OS's out there offering an alternative. Even Mac has bowed to Windows, seeing as how thier current advertisements are showing you can buy a Mac and use windows on it...

Personally, I would like to see more alternatives out there. OS/2 Warp open source. If I was setting up a new office environment I would strongly look at getting Linux and Open Office over Microsoft. You could use a lower cost machine compared to Vista.

Its an interesting thought. Larry Ellison is making some rumblings in that direction as well.