Item — HN Reader

I think many of the points tomstechblog is making are wrong. In particular, insofar as I can remember, ms-dos was really the only choice that business was making. Yes, there was cp/m, qnx, Coherent, but ms-dos was where it was at.

If his point about ms-dos is in error, then much of the rest of the article is pretty much off the rails, no?

1 comments

I woz there and the article is right. Desqview was GREAT, but wasn't much of a shell, it was a shell for the shells. OS/2 was on everyone's lips, and many people thought it was the next big thing. Windows 3.1 was just okay. Windows 3.11 turned the page with the workgroups stuff and that captured a lot of imagination, even if others were going the same way, it was just easier to grasp.

And people were ready to stop doing "Reveal Codes" in WordPerfect 5.1, so Word started driving a lot of Windows adoption.

And like the article alludes to, OS/2 ran like a slug, even after I upgraded to an astounding 4MB of RAM. In my case I was a bit of a diehard though and usually ran Windows 3.11 inside Desqview, with a double tap on the Alt key I could jump between running copies of Windows, as well as DOS and whatever else I can't remember, maybe OS/2 Warp as well.

Microsoft was most certainly NOT a monopoly. They beat OS/2 fair and square.

From: http://www.investorwords.com/3112/monopoly.html

Monopoly: A situation in which a single company owns all or nearly all of the market for a given type of product or service.

There is nothing implicit in the phrase "Monopoly" that suggests you didn't beat other people based on price, performance, features, customer service, etc...

Microsoft has had a monopoly on the OS and Office Productivity suites for quite a while, with the OS leading the Office Applications by a few years.

Of course, the pretty much ubiquitous presence of MacBooks around me, at coffee shops, and in the offices suggests that they may finally be starting to see some competition in the OS marketplace. And, if the kids these days are any indication, this trend has a pattern:

http://itc.virginia.edu/students/inventory/compare/

I think Blodgett's article was reasonable, and certainly wouldn't refer to him as a Dope.

At the time that this article was written, what you're saying was not true. I struggle to see how your response makes any sense in the context of my comment or the article. Word was not dominant, WordPerfect was, Windows was not dominant, which was the point of the article. MS-DOS was dominant, but there were lots of DOS alternatives.

And when you say "Finally see some competition" you're just demonstrating exactly what the article is talking about, discussion that sounds knowledgeable of the history, but isn't.

I think you are correct about the deskview stuff, and yes os/2 was a pretty big deal. But prior to that my vague recollection was that ms-dos was the thing.

I worked at a company that produced an editor for os/2 for the publishing industry, and it was pretty slow as you say.

However, I know at least one exception to the reveal codes urgency. My Mother, who is 79, would still be using reveal codes if there was a way to do it on her current xp laptop. She never cared for the windows version at all.

There were lots of DOS competitors at the time. 4DOS was a biggie.

I just remembered, I was also running GEM with Ventura Publisher, and I'd use Desqview to flip back and forth between GEM and Windows. Was major pain relief because I had to use Ventura like that for awhile.