William ChopsWestfield wrote:

> Dave Tweed wrote:
>> I'd say that Microsoft has set the PC industry back a good 20 years
>> from where it would otherwise be ...

The "would be" argument is a very virtual one. If it had been easy to do, I
wonder why no one did it. If no one did it, why did they set the PC
industry back? Maybe they made a slower progress than somebody else could
have done, but then, this somebody else didn't do it either.

In large (and smaller) companies, they had running DOS programs until quite
recently. The ability to do so from the very beginning was probably one of
the major ingredients of the success of the Wintel platform.

>> ... -- look how long it took them to decide that virtual memory and
>> preemptive multitasking were Good Things. These were known in the 1970s
>> (on mainframes and minicomputers),
> 
> It wasn't just microsoft, of course.  The microcomputer industry
> in general completely ignored a lot of stuff that had been learned
> on mainframes much earlier.  

As I was told (I had very little exposure), pre-OS X Apples didn't even do
such simple multitasking as compiling or rendering something in the
background while editing another file in the foreground.

Gerhard
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