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Quotes from 1992

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Re: Quotes from 1992

#71

Post by omegabravo »

pjc50 wrote: post #64
jhbadger wrote: post #50

From Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time (long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports game.

Not to mention some of the most popular games of all time - Minesweeper, Solitaire, and the earlier Reversi. And a pinball game in Windows 95.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...

Pinball game was licensed, not developed by Microsoft AFAIK

Re: Quotes from 1992

#72

Post by jhbadger »

pjc50 wrote: post #63
simonh wrote: post #2

>On big things failing to scale down: It occurs to me that the same applied in the transition to mobile. Microsoft was obsessed with making hand-helds and phones into little PCs, keyboard and all. It actually required a radically new interaction model and interface technology to unlock the potential of the form factor.

One key aspect of this was that on the "big iron", software was under the control of the administrator and generally trusted, while the users need to be protected from one another. On "small iron", there is one user, but the applications come from a variety of sources which may not be trustworthy, so the user needs sandboxing between the apps. On interaction design: the iPhone may not have been quite the first consum…

Two things that styli do better than fingers are writing and drawing. That was the point of Samsung's use of it, and even Apple now has their Pencil. Yes, using them for everything, like in the Palm Pilot era, was annoying.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#73

Post by bdickason »

Stratoscope wrote: post #40
amelius wrote: post #22

> Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts created by radically different groups of people. It's logical, I know, to assume that the personal computer came from shrinking a mainframe, but that's not the way it happened. This seems off. Those little computers in your phones run a flavor of Unix, just like the mainframes did (besides VMS, etc). Also, those little computers connect to the cloud…

The idea that big computers and little computers were fundamentally different goes back at least as far as 1976, when I ran into Steve Jobs at Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto. Both of us being hippies, we got to talking and Steve told me he'd just started a company with a friend and explained the name: "Take a byte out of the apple, get it?" He mentioned that they needed a 6502 disassembler, and I said that wa…

Great story - thanks for sharing :) In hindsight, do you think it was any different? (Microcomputer vs mainframe for the disassembled you were talking about building)

Re: Quotes from 1992

#74

Post by amelius »

Stratoscope wrote: post #40
amelius wrote: post #22

> Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts created by radically different groups of people. It's logical, I know, to assume that the personal computer came from shrinking a mainframe, but that's not the way it happened. This seems off. Those little computers in your phones run a flavor of Unix, just like the mainframes did (besides VMS, etc). Also, those little computers connect to the cloud…

The idea that big computers and little computers were fundamentally different goes back at least as far as 1976, when I ran into Steve Jobs at Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto. Both of us being hippies, we got to talking and Steve told me he'd just started a company with a friend and explained the name: "Take a byte out of the apple, get it?" He mentioned that they needed a 6502 disassembler, and I said that wa…

So what you are saying is that big computers and little computers were fundamentally the same?

Re: Quotes from 1992

#75

Post by jimmaswell »

Stratoscope wrote: post #40
amelius wrote: post #22

> Big computers and little computers are completely different beasts created by radically different groups of people. It's logical, I know, to assume that the personal computer came from shrinking a mainframe, but that's not the way it happened. This seems off. Those little computers in your phones run a flavor of Unix, just like the mainframes did (besides VMS, etc). Also, those little computers connect to the cloud…

The idea that big computers and little computers were fundamentally different goes back at least as far as 1976, when I ran into Steve Jobs at Country Sun Natural Foods in Palo Alto. Both of us being hippies, we got to talking and Steve told me he'd just started a company with a friend and explained the name: "Take a byte out of the apple, get it?" He mentioned that they needed a 6502 disassembler, and I said that wa…

Amazing how he was so astoundingly wrong about so many things and still managed to luck and cheat his way to the top.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#76

Post by NeedMoreTea »

jhbadger wrote: post #50

From Accidental Empires, which the article quotes: "Then there was Flight Simulator, the only computer game published by Microsoft". Even at the time (long before XBox), this wasn't true. Microsoft had published several games before Flight Simulator -- a version of the classic Colossal Cave adventure called "Microsoft Adventure", and "Microsoft Decathlon", an Olympic sports game.

Not forgetting they licensed flight simulator from SubLogic.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#77

Post by mprovost »

simonh wrote: post #33
avian wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny how these days it's the inverse, isn't it? Everyone, including Microsoft with Windows 10, seems to be obsessed with making PCs into large hand-helds and phones as far as user interfaces are concerned.

I think there are useful lessons that can be learned from mobile, that might be applicable to desktop, but you're right Microsoft made exactly the same mistake again in the opposite direction. I'd say they did that most egregiously with Windows 8 though. Microsoft keep looking at a few data points they have now, extrapolate those into the future and then try to jump directly to that future. Currently it's an attempt…

A quote from the post calls this pattern "Microsoft takes three tries to get anything right": Microsoft's entry into most new technologies follows this same plan, with the first effort being a preemptive strike, the second effort being market research to see what customers really want in a product, and the third try is the real product.

Re: Quotes from 1992

#78

Post by NeedMoreTea »

simonh wrote: post #17
ilamont wrote: post #8

On the value of limiting yourself to standards: ...which was why the idea of 100 percent IBM compatibility took so long to be accepted. "Why be compatible when you could be better?" the smart guys asked on their way to bankruptcy court. It sounds a bit like a jab at Apple (or maybe even NeXT, which I believe was struggling in 1992 with its hardware releases). AFAIK neither company ever went bankrupt. Or was it referr…

There were tons of almost-PC-compatible manufacturers back then, selling their proprietary very slightly better, but incompatible systems. They'd have a slightly faster but incompatible bus system, slightly higher capacity floppy disks with a custom format, a proprietary interface that was quicker but only worked with their own printers, a higher resolution display or with more colours but which required special soft…

Many included "better" features that depended on a somehow non-compatible BIOS. Quite a few of those had dual modes so you could get PC compatible but slower or worse, or incompatible but better. They eventually died out.

One company I remember that was pretty successful for a while were Apricot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC

Re: Quotes from 1992

#79

Post by skmurphy »

I found this quote the most interesting:

"Microsoft's entry into most new technologies follows this same plan, with the first effort being a preemptive strike, the second effort being market research to see what customers really want in a product, and the third try is the real product." Robert Cringely in "Accidental Empires"

Re: Quotes from 1992

#80

Post by peteri »

einr wrote: post #24
ilamont wrote: post #8

On the value of limiting yourself to standards: ...which was why the idea of 100 percent IBM compatibility took so long to be accepted. "Why be compatible when you could be better?" the smart guys asked on their way to bankruptcy court. It sounds a bit like a jab at Apple (or maybe even NeXT, which I believe was struggling in 1992 with its hardware releases). AFAIK neither company ever went bankrupt. Or was it referr…

It's referring to 8088/8086 machines that ran MS-DOS but were not 100% IBM PC compatible. Stuff like the Amstrad PC 1512 (an 8086 machine with proprietary graphics) and the DEC Rainbow 100 (a very expensive and versatile dual-CPU machine that could run both MS-DOS and CP/M)

The PC1512 was very IBM compatible except for stuff that reprogrammed the 6845 into odd modes (IIRC) it had an odd 16 colour CGA mode that was available.

The only other issues I can remember I think is the PSU was in the monitor so video connectors were odd and the keyboard/mouse were Amstrad custom designs so you couldn't swap with a regular PC or clone.

I worked at Borland in the UK at the time and I don't remember any real issues.

The other major vendor in the UK was Apricot which started out rebadging Victor machines and had a similar level of compatibility to the DEC rainbow (I think it used an 80186 as the CPU)

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