----- Original Message ----- From: "Gerhard Fiedler" To: "Microcontroller discussion list - Public." Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 7:35 AM Subject: Re: [OT]: that filesystem royalty problem again > 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. I large suite of DOS applications that I developed starting in 1984 is still being used today by one of my customers. It is a very critical part of their business. I have several times provided them with the potential of upgrading them to a Win environment, but they are happy with them and see no reason to spend the $$. However, they have had a in-house development project going on since 1999 to build a replacement for my system, but delivery of that system is now 4+ years late! Bob Ammerman RAm Systems -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist