🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <genghis.803492083@ilces>,
Scott Coleman <genghis@ilces.ag.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>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.

don't forget GEOS which ran on the C64 with 32K


>
>>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).
>
[..munch..]
good, here's someone who doesn't remember his history well. not being a 
big tandy fan, i think this guys memory is somewhat off.
  (1) a cp/m licence sold for $400 PER MACHINE. tandy was putting out
      personal computers and needed a cheap/small DOS. TRSDOS used 5K.
      had cp/m been more reasonably priced, MSDOS probably would not have
      been born.
  (2) cp/m required 64K. the base TRSDOS machine was 32K of which 16K was ROM.
  (3) yes, the early tandy was proprietary. not that unusual at the time.
      it also came standard with 1 parallel/2 serial ports when no one else
      did. custom versions of msdos were also common under compaq and at&t
  (4) no, you didn't need custom apps or custom hardware, though the case
      was smaller so you did have to be careful when you bought expansion
      cards. most software worked off-the-shelf, the exception being some
      games. this, again, wasn't at all uncommon.

--kyle