🚀 go-pugleaf

c592073@showme.missouri.edu (Robert L. Stinnett) writes:

>Peter da Silva (peter@Starbase.NeoSoft.COM) wrote:
>: Apple and Commodore managed to do GUIs that didn't require 120 MHz Pentiums
>: to get decent performance. AmigaOS did useful real-time multitasking on a
>: 7 MHz 68000 with 512K RAM. MacOS ran in 128K.

>In the 1980's Tandy Corporation developed a graphical interface entitled 
>'DeskMate'.  A quasi-GUI that could task switch, use a common interface, 
>and run on 8088 machines quite decently.  In fact, on a 80286 it screamed.

>They spent years developing it, had major software companies writing for 
>it (Lotus, Broderbund, PFS, Norton) and was selling it like hotcakes with 
>its Tandy line of Personal Computers in the late 1980's and very early 
>1990's.

Correction: Tandy was GIVING IT AWAY like hotcakes - a copy was bundled with 
every Tandy MS-DOS-based PC sold. I somehow doubt that the number of
copies actually SOLD OUTRIGHT was very high. Note the similarities to
the Windows situation today.

>Then Windows came out in the early 90's and DeskMate was dead.  They had 
>everyone convinced they needed this bloated shell and that developers 
>should write EXCLUSIVELY for Windows.

>Tandy lost many developers, and eventually gave up on DeskMate in 1992.  

[...]

>It's a shame what Microsoft has done to computer users.

Shed no tears for either Tandy or DeskMate.

Given half a chance, Tandy would have dominated the computer
market the way Microsoft does now. From the beginning, Tandy has tried
to lock its customers into its own proprietary computing products.
During the age when CP/M was the dominant computer operating system,
TRS-80s came not with CP/M but with the proprietary TRS-DOS. When the
success of the IBM PC became apparent and the sales of TRS-80s began to
suffer, Tandy came out with an "MS-DOS compatible" machine, the Tandy
2000, which rerquired a custom version of MS-DOS (sold only by Tandy),
custom versions of MS-DOS apps (sold only by Tandy), custom expansion
hardware (sold only by Tandy)... Next came the Tandy 1000, which could
run regular MS-DOS apps, but was still designed to lock customers into
proprietary Tandy expansion cards (e.g. a standard hard drive controller,
even if you could find one short enough to fit into the 1000's shorter
card slots, would not function without hardware modifications to the
T1000 motherboard).

Only when the market soundly rejected all of these attempts by Tandy to
lock customers into their proprietary products did John Roach and Company 
give up and start selling truly compatible machines.

Shed no tears for Tandy - they are no more benevolent than MicroShaft. 

-- 
Scott Coleman, President ASRE (American Society of Reverse Engineers)
asre@uiuc.edu
Life is temporally limited - pilot your vehicle velocitously!!
Proud Member #005 of the John De Armond Fan Club