After Don Estridge died there was no “winner” to take over the micro products and the big iron people resumed control of everything. Mother Gates had pull with the big iron guys, and there was no major champion left.

The PC guys ticked off a lot of the big iron people by being successful, and there were definite losses to PCs by the System/3x group. It isn’t all that surprising that corporate dumped the suit. You can put it down to intra-corp squabbles.

PCs were gelded to some extent to be sure they wouldn’t compete with other product lines.

I hate to admit it… But I did like Multiplan. Even idiots like M$ get lucky occasionally (Though, the truth is probably that they stole it from someone and didn’t get around to destroying it, so they just dumped it befor someone woke up to it and sued them.) I used to use dBase II & III before M$ tokk them over and killed them, and FoxBase… M$ have a long and terrible history of destroying good software.

You are right about DRI, but also remember that Gates would still be a complete nobody if not for his mother and her control within IBM. I wonder why few if anyone have asked why one of the most litigious companies in existence (IBM) quickly dropped their suit(s) against M$, even though all the pundits were worried about IBM killing M$ because they never lost a suit and this one stood a good chance of success. Was only one reason, and it had nothing to do with IBM fearing M$ or loosing.

The real problem with between DRI and IBM was that Gary’s wife was an attorney and she wasn’t willing to give control of his work to IBM. Paul and Bill didn’t write MS-DOS, they bought it, so they didn’t care that their market would initially be limited to IBM labeled machines. CP/M was already established on a lot of different boxes, and DRI didn’t want to cut off other manufacturers.

MP/M, the multi-user version, was a pretty stable OS, and I worked with it at a couple of my clients. GEM was a nice little, unobtrusive GUI that never took off.

People forget that Windows didn’t stabilize until 3.1. The earlier versions just wouldn’t stay up long enough to be used for anything.

People don’t know/remember that the original MS Access was a communications program that didn’t work, and they used the name for their data base program to eliminate that memory.

Yeah, hearing Bill complain about piracy is hypocrisy of the first order. A lot of great little companies were destroyed because they didn’t have the money to fight the theft.

MS-DOS paternity suit settled

The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall’s Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists – only with far superior technology. DRI’s roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft’s Windows finally emerged as a standard.

But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man.

Sadly, that is all too true! But then, Gates typifies *excellence* in the USA. That’s not a compliment.

Gates is an insecure, unimaginative, cowardly little control freak. He doesn’t believe he (or M$) have to pay for anything, he can take whatever he likes. Yet, he believes everyone owes him and must pay. He has the loudest voice screaming about the evil software Pirates in the World stealing all his precious money. The last I saw, I didn’t notice that he was hurting financially in any way, but many who use his products or are forced to deal with him in any way, are hurting. “He doth protest to much. Methinks!” 😉

*sigh*

I always said that Gates was a crook and a thief. If Gates ever had an original idea, his head would explode. It hasn’t, therefore… I rest my case. LOL

Heres the info on that suit if anyone is interested. 😉
Text of Stac Electronics’ patent infringement complaint against Microsoft

I have a folder full if patent infringement suits against M$, which M$ usually lost. Gates is the biggest pirate out there! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

…and don’t ask! 😉

Ehhh… I had a comment in angled brackets after “idea how to”. I forgot that I shouldn’t use them in a comment. 😉 Oh well… you get the idea! 🙂

Their entire disk architecture was a primitive kludge [as we said in SoCal back in the day].

You weren’t the only coder who left snide comments about Bill & Co. in their code.

I’ve heard time and again different people making the pitch “unlike Microsoft, my software works and I guarantee it.”

As I said, whatever works for the individual is all good. 🙂

I did say *some* fun Bryan! LOL Yeah… I was doing a lot of coding in those days. I learned the hard way about using good comments in my code. Usually, when I started on a day, my comments would be concise and to the point. By 1 or 2AM and many caffeine hits later, they became more like rants along the lines of: “This routine is here because the coders at M$ are a bunch of retarded monkeys that have no $#&@$%$ idea how to !” The number of times I had to create code to fix or replace something DOS did (or didn’t do) was amazing! There is a lot of code floating around with some very colorful comments aimed at M$! LOL

I still really cannot comprehend how Gates & M$ have managed to pull off the scam of the millennium! I am sure he could sell the Golden Gate Bridge to several suckers if he wanted too. Of course, the fact that his Mom was a senior exec at IBM helped a great deal. He had access to a lot of resources that many didn’t. If anyone ever wanted proof that the World is completely unfair, that would be it. 😉