The "Tank" Project
Upgrade of an old 486
WHY NOT MICROSOFT?
The earliest MS product that I owned was on my Tandy 1000 TL. Out of the
box, the Tandy had MSDOS 3.2 pre-loaded on a ROM chip! Pretty
fascinating to me. Tandy also included (on floppies) the newest
version at that time, MSDOS 3.3, which was a pretty decent, stable
release. Then later came release 4.01. Talk about bug city!
But I was now a thoroughly entrenched MS fan, so I accepted it, bugs
and all, pooh-poohed all the other OSs out there, and cheered the "end of"
IBM's effort - PCDOS (which we all now know was the seed for a particular OS
we've become accustomed to). Although somewhat frustrated with 4.01,
version 5.0 came rather quickly, and this is what came with my '486.
In my personal opinion, DOS 5.0 was the last stable version of
MSDOS (or any other OS by MS) that was released.
As time marched on, I
suffered through the buggy 6.0, the "truncated" 6.21 (missing features like
the DOS menu), and finally 6.22, which proved a little more stable, but
not rock solid like 5.0.
During the time between the 3.x and 5.x MSDOS
releases, I bought MS Windows 286, with its "MSDOS Executive", which I thought
was kind of cool. When MS Windows 3.0 came out, I jumped right on it,
and although I hadn't bought the '486 yet, it ran pretty decently (albeit in
black and white) on my Tandy. Then came Windows 3.1, 3.11, and finally,
the product that made me step back and have second thoughts - Windows
95.
Perhaps what really turned me off was the hype. It's a given
that if one wants to sell a product, especially in the U.S., one needs to have
superior marketing skills. But the resulting media blitz and
journalistic feeding frenzy that preceded the release was, in my opinion,
overkill. Couple that with the instability and the now three
different versions of it, and I'm sorry to say that MS has now lost a
customer.
While all of this was going on in the "consumer" arena, I
was debating the OS/2 vs Windows NT issue for a work OS. But once again,
because of the marketing overkill, I opted for OS/2 (as did many others -
although we had a copy of NT 3.51 to play with) and preferred it's stability
and security. I had recalled that many years ago, long before Windows 95
was a twinkle in someone's mind, IBM's first shot at windowing software, OS/1,
was released. I remember seeing it at a trade show running on a
workstation that had a monitor set for its ultra high quality, "8451"
resolution - amazing at that time, for something other than an Amiga or
Macintosh workstation. Unfortunately, the marketing wasn't there and OS/1
died.
When it was time for another try, IBM did make an effort at
marketing, but the effort was (in my humble opinion) too cosmopolitan for the
"average joe", and so "joe" opted for "flying through windows" into a
cloud-filled future and was left to ponder "where he wanted to go today",
rather than have to deal with trying to read the English subtitles for someone
speaking something other than American English, and telling him something
"about computers or something".
Having had to use Windows 95(a, b,
c)/98 (1,2)/NT (3.51, 4.0 SP 1-?), and having watched the "average joe" at
work and at home struggling when he gets an "Illegal Operation" or some other
such error and having to reinstall, reinstall, reinstall, reboot, reboot,
reboot, ad nauseum - that's not my idea of a stable operating system.
Stable is DOS 5.0, which I've had on my 486 for almost 8 years and never
had to reinstall it.
And although the reality is that Microsoft
has dominated the world, with over 80% of the market share, sometimes one has
to step back and say enough is enough. If you have ever walked into a
store and they only have purple pants left on the rack (and you're looking for
gray) and you ask the clerk whether there are any other colors or whether they
plan on ordering any more, and you're told "No. That's all we have.
That's what our customers buy, and that's what the customer wants.", then you
see where I'm coming from. For those in a hurry walking into that same
store, they sigh and buy it anyway... and so that act of buying
on impulse or because you have not the time nor the inclination to research
and choose... is interpreted as acceptance, whereas it's
merely convenience until something better "comes along", and not
necessarily what the customer wanted, but it will have to do.
Couple all of this - instability and the lack of choice, with this: I
along with many others, are often frustrated with 95's/98's insistence
that it knows what it's doing, regardless of whether it is correct or
not. And trying to get around that insistence is what makes me cry out
for something else... I have found myself losing precious work time
trying to configure (or reconfigure) something that 95 refuses to do
correctly.
If someone offers me the simple, common sense observation
that if you uncouple an operating system's kernel from the applications that
run on it, you inherently increase the stability and help bullet-proof that OS
if the app suddenly crashes, then that's the type of OS that I should
seek out. If on the other hand, you tell me that more and more "features"
(documented or not)and whole applications will be "built-into" the core OS,
then that should make me take pause. And knowing that this sort of
configuration is inherently risky, the promoters then tell me that they plan
to erect more and more bloat around the whole of it to protect it, rather than
devise a way to easily extract the offending portion, then this tells me it's
time to move on to something else. So I will.
Caveat Emptor. Let the buyer beware. Long live Linux.
NOTICE: "Linux" is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.
"Microsoft","Windows 3.x/9x/NT", "Tandy", "IBM", "Amiga", "Macintosh", and any
other product/company mentioned on this page or at this site, are trademarks
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