[jpsb]

Like I said, they were lot's of inexpensive PCs before MicroSoft and big blue. Kapros, Osbornes, Comadores and some others, but they were runing CPM as an Operating system (Commadore needed a CPM card, but that was cheap). DOS by the way is a CPM rip off. IBM just used it's muscle with the US gov to get the US gov to declar IBM the standard Deskto PC and that was that, everyone but Apple went out of business. Not cause they had a bad product, but because the US gov picked IBM (surprise) as the standard. Now if the US gov picked you to supply all the software for all the government desktop computers do you think you could make money too? Think maybe you could put all your competition out of business? Of course you could, and that is exactly what happened. Since you had to use an IBM/DOS at work, everyone stopped buying the CPM boxes for home use and bought the DOS boxes so they would be compatable with the office computer. Commadore managed to hang on for a few years since they had a great computer, dido apple. But in the end there is no fighting the US gov and then the US gov declares everyone will us an IBM/DOS it is just a matter of time until all that is effectively left is IBM/DOS.

Sorry for the rant, it just bugges the hell out of me when people talk about free market and Microsoft in the same breath. Microsoft never competed in a free market, Microsoft owns it's success to the IBM and the feds.

[ctdonath2]

Microsoft never competed in a free market, Microsoft owns it's success to the IBM and the feds.

They DID compete in a free market.

There were lots of operating systems, but incompatibilities made it very hard to communicate between them. CPM, Apple II, PET, Commodore, and a host of others - not to mention mini- and mainframe-computers - amounted to a Tower of Babel where nobody could seriously communicate. All competed in a free market, all jockeyed for acceptance. One - DOS - made it through the psychological layer of acceptance by first being picked by IBM, and then being picked by the Feds as their standard.

It's not that the gov't bypassed the free market to force one option down our throats. It's that a thriving free market provided options, and the biggest names made an infrastructure choice, which resulted in standardization.

The issue was developing a viable infrastructure, like choosing a language (we almost ended up speaking German starting in the 1700s, ya know).

The free market in operating systems still thrives. Just because you don't like what the market largely chose or who benefits, it's still a free market. You still have viable options of OS X, Linux (various flavors), QNIX, Solaris, Taligent/CommonPoint, JavaOS, PalmOS, EROS, AtheOS, and a host of others.

The issue isn't that the feds shoved Gates' POS down our throats.
The issue is that people had a choice and made a choice - and still do.
You could just as easily whine about having to speak in English - you have the same choice to use French, Urdu, Latin, Spanglish, Klingon, Elvin, or others ... but then you'd have to suffer the consequences of not using the same language as those you seek to communicate with on FR.

Remember: the feds also "forced" on us the Golden Dollar (aka Squabuck, or however it's spelled), Susan B. Anthony dollar, $2 bill, $0.50 piece, etc. , but most simply choose not to use them. You don't have to use DOS/Windows either, regardless of whether the Feds do.