1 - Who can afford to miss a customer just because of economic snobbery?
Just because the rich USA city boys can afford to get a new PC every year
doesn't mean every potential Mchip customer can.  Small shoestring
startups can grow into major accounts.

2 - Dos versions? You'd be hard pressed to find anything running less than
3.1 and simple Dos programs would have no trouble with the later versions.
CGA text mode screen handling is stable and well known with several public
domain source code modules available in either asm, C or Turbo Pascal.
Mchip appears to have used Borland's TurboVision library in the Picstart
16B and 16C MPSTART programs, so they have the tools and the source code.
Developing another DOS MPSTART program for the Plus would have been a
modest patch. The serial com problems have been around a long time and the
fixes/work arounds published.  Most of the problem today is in the
variations in hardware.  Best to avoid serial and use the printer port.

3 - I've been complaining about MPLAB's problems with Windows 95. Problems
are just as (and maybe more) likely with W95/W3.1/WNT/WWG as DOS.
Microsoft doesn't seem to tell application programmers all they need to
know about their OSs to avoid problems. Eventually the bugs and pitfalls
will be identified/published and then MS will come out with a new OS that
starts the thing all over again.  They've been doing that since day one (I
remember MSDOS 1.0!).

_______________________________________________________________________
 Lynn Richardson          | lrich@qni.com    |Progress Instrument, Inc.|
 Design Engineer          | wa0znl.ampr.org  |807 NW Commerce Drive    |
 Circuit Design DC to 1GHz|  [44.46.176.3]   |Lee's Summit, MO 64086   |
 Asm 6805, Z8, 8051, PIC  |                  |Phone: (816) 524-4442    |
 C                        |                  |Fax: (816) 246-4556      |

On Mon, 23 Dec 1996, William Chops Westfield wrote:

> Maybe.  Who wants customers who can't afford $1000 for a new PC every 5
> years? (and that's for "current generation" technology.  You can upgrade to
> a reasonable 486 system for considerably less (~$90 for motherboard and
> cpu), and I bought a used 386sx w VGA and 40Mb hard drive for under $40.))
> I don't believe that this would actually minimize support costs, given that:
>
>         1) there are more versions of DOS than of windows.
>         2) part of what windows does is insulate you from a
>            wider variety of hardware than DOS does.  Writing any
>            sort of screen-oriented software for DOS is a pain.
>            Serial support sucks too.
>         3) people will complain that it doesn't work in their linux
>            DOS window, or their Mac SOFTPC window, etc, etc...
>