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DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

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Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#41

Post by crgt »

WorldWideWayne wrote: post #33

Looking at the submitter's background I don't see any professional experience with Microsoft tech. Maybe someone can explain it to me - I don't understand why a guy has avoided Microsoft for his entire career feels the need to dredge up a 10 year old article that talks about events from over 30 years ago. Too much pro-Microsoft news for you? Honestly - what's your interest here?

This quote was mentioned in the recent discussion of Twitter's outreach to developers. I believe the intent of this submission was to share a slice of relevant history with those in the community too young to have lived through it.

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#42

Post by mindcrime »

crgt wrote: post #41
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #33

Looking at the submitter's background I don't see any professional experience with Microsoft tech. Maybe someone can explain it to me - I don't understand why a guy has avoided Microsoft for his entire career feels the need to dredge up a 10 year old article that talks about events from over 30 years ago. Too much pro-Microsoft news for you? Honestly - what's your interest here?

This quote was mentioned in the recent discussion of Twitter's outreach to developers. I believe the intent of this submission was to share a slice of relevant history with those in the community too young to have lived through it.

I believe the intent of this submission was to share a slice of relevant history with those in the community too young to have lived through it.

Exactly.

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#43

Post by eropple »

krylon wrote: post #36
eropple wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD used to (maybe still does?) clobber the boot loader too. Do they also have mustachios that they evilly twirl?

On the other hand, Windows runs on 85 - 90 percent of desktop machines, whereas FreeBSD's market share on the desktop is probably below 1%. (This is not a judgement on FreeBSD's quality as a desktop system, I have used it myself for about two years and was very happy with it. But compared to Windows, its market share on the desktop is tiny.) For better or worse, there is a difference between a system used by a tiny m…

That other hand and its callbacks to anti-competitive behavior and whispers of monopolies don't have much bearing on anything unless you are prepared to substantiate exactly how this behavior impacts the market share of other competitors. (I wish you luck on that very, very long row to hoe.)

Meanwhile, even that "good behaving" Linux distro will happily remove Windows's boot record in favor of GRUB's, rendering the system reliant on a component that breaks if you want to remove Linux (and most people are way more likely to want to remove Linux than to remove Windows!). Hardly neighborly behavior in and of itself. And yet, I'm still not seeing a reason to cast aspersions on GRUB or Linux distros, nor am I seeing those twirly mustachios on their faces.

No OS gives much of a damn about anything else running on the computer. Claims to the contrary are literally farcical and the pseudo-damages it could theoretically cause to the easily bruised are silly.

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#44

Post by pohl »

rilindo wrote: post #24

I been around IT long enough to know that this statement: "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run" Was never a common saying. It is actually: "DOS ain't done till Lotus runs" I am not sure how it devolved to the current usage. I suspect it is probably started after the Microsoft-DOJ trials.

I've been in computing since the TRS-80 Model I, and I have only ever heard the "won't run" variant.

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#45

Post by mmahemoff »

The obligatory Joel post ...

"Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#46

Post by mgkimsal »

mindcrime wrote: post #40
WorldWideWayne wrote: post #33

Looking at the submitter's background I don't see any professional experience with Microsoft tech. Maybe someone can explain it to me - I don't understand why a guy has avoided Microsoft for his entire career feels the need to dredge up a 10 year old article that talks about events from over 30 years ago. Too much pro-Microsoft news for you? Honestly - what's your interest here?

I don't understand why a guy has avoided Microsoft for his entire career feels the need to dredge up a 10 year old article that talks about events from over 30 years ago. Too much pro-Microsoft news for you? Honestly - what's your interest here? A comment[1] somebody made yesterday on the "Twitter apologizes" story reminded me of this. I think it's an important story regardless of your opinion on Microsoft specifical…

you should highlight some grails. :)

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#47

Post by krylon »

eropple wrote: post #43
krylon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, Windows runs on 85 - 90 percent of desktop machines, whereas FreeBSD's market share on the desktop is probably below 1%. (This is not a judgement on FreeBSD's quality as a desktop system, I have used it myself for about two years and was very happy with it. But compared to Windows, its market share on the desktop is tiny.) For better or worse, there is a difference between a system used by a tiny m…

That other hand and its callbacks to anti-competitive behavior and whispers of monopolies don't have much bearing on anything unless you are prepared to substantiate exactly how this behavior impacts the market share of other competitors. (I wish you luck on that very, very long row to hoe.) Meanwhile, even that "good behaving" Linux distro will happily remove Windows's boot record in favor of GRUB's, rendering the s…

> No OS gives much of a damn about anything else running on the computer.

Most Linux distros (the ones I have used, at least) will detect an existing Windows installation and put a corresponding entry into GRUB's menu. Linux has been able to access data on Windows partitions for many, many years.

I agree that the boot loader issue probably has at most negligible impact on the adoption of Linux (or any other OS for that matter). I am just saying that in light of Microsoft's history one may feel inclined to judge them differently.

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#49

Post by rbanffy »

mmahemoff wrote: post #45

The obligatory Joel post ... "Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to…

Changing Windows to work with legacy software is easy to do when you are the unchallenged market leader. That wasn't the case when Lotus running on DOS was something Microsoft (and Lotus) would care about. In that era, Microsoft faced competition from multiple directions. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a decision to sabotage Lotus 123 on some version of DOS, specially if that sabotage could drive the move to Windows and Excel.

In all fairness, that Microsoft (they seem to have somewhat improved, as their power diminished) was known for not playing fair (something later demonstrated in court):

http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_in...

So, forgive me if I take this piece of history with a grain of salt. I started in this business at a time Microsoft made a BASIC interpreter and little more and I have observed a lot myself.

Re: DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)

#50

Post by digi_owl »

mjg59 wrote: post #18
delonia wrote: post #3

The author of that article says "I know from personal experience that today [2005] Microsoft takes application compatibility very seriously". And if you want to install Windows on a computer that already has a Linux distribution installed (dual-boot), then Windows will replace the existing boot manager, making it really difficult to boot Linux. That thing used to happen then, and it still happens now (2015).

This is limited to BIOS-based booting, and there isn't really a whole lot of choice there. There's no standardised mechanism for bootloader configuration in the BIOS world, so you have the choice of either: (a) overwriting the existing MBR, or (b) knowing how to configure every single third party bootloader, or (c) not booting In the UEFI world, the Windows installer won't overwrite any files it didn't install.

UEFI brings with it all kinds of other lovelies though.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTIyOTg

Kinda reminds me of the issues Linux has run into with ACPI, and here are some lovely emails from Torvalds regarding that:

http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/acpi.html

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