1. Create a better UNIX than UNIX. UNIX microcomputer market forms as a side-effect due to marketing.

2. Move UNIX features into CP/M in MS-DOS.

3. Clone OpenVMS architecture with enhancements and emulators for older OS's.

4. Develop on OS/2 for better reliability, pace, and inspiration. I'm sure OS/2 stuff ended up in NT past the emulator. I'd be interested in a link that went into that in detail.

5. Run mail and gateways on Xenix as UNIX was great at that sort of thing.

6. Run whole business on a single AS/400 that just gets shit done mainframe-style.

7. Replace all of the above with one product that has key attributes of all of them in usable package on cheaper hardware.

They don't look as dumb now as I thought when I was younger comparing MS-DOS to BSD's or Linux. ;)

re Linux

The author asserts multiple times that Linux comes from Xenix somehow but didn't seem to prove it. Says the architecture, standard, and microcomputer UNIX was first done by Xenix. Then Linux did one. Past that, nothing. Is there some resource with specific evidence that Linus got Linux design aspects from Xenix as opposed to another UNIX? And my original sources said he started with Minix changing stuff in his design that didn't suit his hardware or needs. So that needs to be factored in.

Windows 3.x was way more successful than Microsoft anticipated. They wanted to pivot the Win32 layer in NT to be the primary API and make the user interface more Windows-like. IBM didn't want that so they parted ways.

David Cutler (designer of VMS) was the architect for NT. Many people don't know it has a single root filesystem that takes the unix philosophy even further... objects like mutexes exist in the root, not just files. Everything has full ACL support. The IO completion ports and async support were way ahead of their time. It originally even ran things like the video driver in user space.

Windows 3.x being so successful almost killed everything that was great about NT. It also caused Microsoft to completely miss the mobile revolution.

Success hides problems indeed.

Hybrid tablets have killed the netbooks and the majority of people are going for 2GB/4GB + 32/64 eMMC hybrids with Windows 10, and not to those Android ones that kind of look like a desktop. For most pockets across the world, an iPad Pro isn't an option.

The whole thing with .NET, Longhorn, Windows 7 and 10, was also a causality of the typical Windows Dev vs DevTools "wars" and most of us that follow MSFT blogs and news, know to which side Sinofsky was sponsoring.

Somehow UWP seems to be what .NET and eventually Longhorn should have been all along, lets see how it goes.

http://windowsitpro.com/windows-client/windows-nt-and-vms-re...

Be interesting at some point to collect all the attributes of NT to see what came from VMS, OS/2, UNIX, DOS, Win 3.x, etc. Then one might also see how it could be done even better esp without baggage. :)

For those of us that enjoy delving into OS details, Windows is full of interesting goodies.

Even the way .NET is integrated with the OS, is somehow similar to how bytecode and JITs used to work in mainframes.

Got bitten by that once when i thought i could just copy the user dir between Windows installs and discovered that the registry had its own ACL on top of the FS ACL...

All that trouble to move files on a LiveCD that has full access to the disk anyway. Wth lol...

It took a lot of work to build Microsoft and the PC industry with it. Hopefully in later years he will be redeemed.

Given the first instinct is always to be closed and profit the openness of the PC ecosystem must have taken gargantuan effort to build. Gates clearly believed in more accessibility, affordability and wider outreach for computing than closed systems in some deeper way, whatever his motives and the outcome on hindsight completely blew open the floodgates.

Thanks to that we have open systems on PCs instead of closed blackboxes and a massively rich ecosystem. This in itself is an impressive achievement.

The openness of the PC ecosystem was built almost entirely on IBM's failure to legally secure it (which was neither intentional nor something for which Gates was responsible), and the willingness of third-party hardware vendors to take risks in testing the degree to which IBM had failed to legally secure it (which, again, was not something Gates was responsible for.)

Also, back in the day, at least in Portugal, many of us dreamed to work at Microsoft and usually applied to work there at the end of the CS degree.

I can also switch between ROMs to boot from - I have BBC Basic, Word*, Publisher, Forth.

It was a great idea when you only have 32K RAM. The ROMs are page mapped in.

OS choices and OS upgrades happened regularly. You could run all sorts of things on a PDP/11, VAX, DG Nova, etc.

As for the mainframes and minis, I never worked with them, besides the AS/400.

But from my collection of old papers and manuals, many of them had "bytecodes" with microcoded execution (more higher level than plain CISC Assembly) burned on their processors.

See for example this paper, where they took a VAX and rewrote its microcode so that it executed instructions for the Warren Abstract Machine, the output format of their Prolog compiler.

It's like you would reprogram your Core i7 to directly consume JVM bytecode.

http://hps.ece.utexas.edu/pub/gee_micro19.pdf

I was a big Prolog fan during my degree.

And frankly, its design is not that far from the other micros (ISA cards can extend the BIOS by responding to specific memory address ranges, much like a ROM cart on a C64). Its just so damn well wallpapered over these days.

Before MS-DOS there was CP/M and UNIX. After selling IBM PC-DOS, Gates had MS-DOS 2.0 made for PC clones after Compaq and a few others wrote a clone BIOS. They had to reverse engineer the BIOS in one room, and build their own BIOS in another. It was the cheaper PC clones that put an end to TRS-80, CP/M, Apple //, etc.

Windows was a cheap knock off of the Macintosh GUI, I used to have a blog that had an article that Bill Gates stole from Steve Jobs to make Windows because Steve Jobs would not give him permission to license the Mac OS. Sure Apple and Microsoft settled it out of court by Microsoft investing money in Apple to save it. But a lot of Apple fans don't like how Gates had cheated Jobs originally.

Even if Microsoft was not the first company to invent these things, they filed for patents anyway.

But I will say something positive about Gates, his monopoly created a Windows standard by forcing OEMs to pay the Windows tax per PC even if they didn't use Windows. So that killed the Amiga, Atari ST and other third parties as PC clones became so cheap in the early 1990s that the market was flooded by them.

Jack Tramiel founded Commodore and got into war with other companies in the same way Steve Jobs went to war with IBM. Without Jack Tramiel and the home computer wars that lead to $200 Commodore 64 ect systems, a lot of families would not be able to afford a computer to learn on. Commodore got a primitive version of Microsoft BASIC so they got a cheap license per computer.

The open system PC was IBM using off the shelf parts from Intel and other companies. Using the ISA bus for example for expansion cards.

What IP holders? Those of other FORTRAN implementations?

So if I'm writing a C compiler I'm "taking money away" from the developers of existing compilers? Like, I'm doing something despicable, as apparently, that money belongs to them?

Back then if you wanted to use C or UNIX you had to license it from Bell Labs. If you wanted BASIC you had to license it from Dartmouth, if you wanted COBOL you had to license it from The navy and Grace Hopper, etc.

Over times things have changed and free and open source versions of those languages got written. But try to make a free and open source version of the Intel Mac BIOS, try to make a clone of MacOSX, try to make a version of XCode that runs in Linux and submits apps to the Apple App Store, etc. You need an Intel Mac for that and Apple's MacOSX and XCode. So not everything is free and open source or has an alternative to it.

For example Microsoft made Windows that basically stole the Mac GUI IP without permission. Windows sold so well that Apple started to have financial problems. In that case it was taking money away from Apple.

Also, while you had to get a UNIX license from AT&T, they didn't make any money from it (well, they weren't allowed to) and at the time, it came with full sources. Yes, the term FOSS didn't exist yet but people shared source code anyway, at least in the academic/research environments where UNIX was popular.

You're right in that things were much worse in the commercial office and home computer market.

For instance, perhaps you feel having the appropriate moral tone to a vision is the requirement to deserve credit for achievement?

edit: Looking back on my original comment, I can see where I should've phrased things better. When I said I couldn't see giving Gates any credit for the open PC ecosystem, I should've said "the creation of" the open PC ecosystem. We may still disagree, but at least now we'll be on the same page about where the points of disagreement are. =)

The only thing he really did was not get in the way of making billions.

If not for MS, other companies would have filled its place (DR-DOS?)

If not for IBM creating and then opening up the PC market?

HTTPS://feld.me/pub