My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example.
So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.
But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.
If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.
Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.
Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?
IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
It was strong-armed because Gates used family connections to negotiate a preferential deal for DOS with IBM, and then forced PC manufacturers to bundle DOS and/or Windows.
That was then leveraged into attempts to force Internet Explorer onto Internet users. Which was when the antitrust suit happened.
Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone - far behind even the most basic standards of professional reliability. 3.x was sort of usable but extremely simple, 9x was just horrific, and it wasn't until XP that it became almost reliable.
Both IE and Windows were also a security disaster.
Between the bugs and the security flaws Microsoft wasted countless person-centuries for its users.
The one thing that MS did right was create a standard for PC software. That was the real value of Windows - not the awfulness of the product but the ecosystem around it, which created Visual Basic for beginner devs and Windows C++ classes for more experienced devs, and kick-started a good number of bedroom/small-scale startup businesses.
For context, PCs at this time were also extremely expensive. The price of a Mac Classic got you a brain damaged 80286 and not much RAM. You had to spend $3k or more to get the newer 80386, and the 486/66 was just starting to become available.
> Windows was always horrifically buggy and crash prone
At the time Mac OS didn't have memory protection -- Netscape would make your whole computer go BOOM at regular intervals.
IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.
I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
That's just the way things were.
> Mac OS didn't have memory protection
That's true, but that's not the only issue in system design. None were modern OSes.
Most of the rest I think is BS.
> IE was even a hell of a lot more stable (and faster) than Netscape.
Never heard that. What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser but Microsoft used their Windows monopoly, again, to spread IE - which the US government also convicted them for.
> I put a fresh copy of Redhat on the Internet in 90s and it was p0wned in 5 minutes.
By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection?
> What I always heard was that Netscape was the better browser
Netscape was SO bad that they literally threw away all the code to make Firefox. Before IE3, Internet Explorer was not really competitive but with IE3 you could fully use it place of Netscape and it was smaller, faster, and more stable (it was also mostly Spyglass Mosaic). IE4 began the integration with Windows, all of which sucked and nobody used but the browser itself remained solid.
As a developer, IE was also way easier to develop for than Netscape and many things we now take for granted on the web were pioneered by Microsoft in IE. When the browser wars were on, IE was a really good browser and Netscape was stuck with a difficult code base. However, once Netscape was gone Microsoft simply stopped significantly updating IE. It remained almost completely stagnant until Chrome came along and it's from that period onwards that IE gets its bad reputation. I switched to Firefox at version 1.0 and still use it today.
The thing is that Microsoft did, in fact, bundle IE with Windows to try and kill Netscape but that doesn't imply IE was bad at the time. That's the flaw in the logic and where a lot of negative revisionist history comes from. Ironically, today, it would be considered crazy to sell an OS or device without a browser being bundled. And Netscape may have collapsed under it's own weight eventually anyway.
> By who? Over your 56K dial-up connection?
By some automated script over cable internet.
> Netscape was SO bad that they literally threw away all the code to make Firefox.
Nope. Netscape 4 did very well; that's one reason Microsoft used illegal means to compete. But Netscape, in what may be the textbook lesson about starting software projects over, tried to write Netscape 6 from a clean slate. It took much too long (of course) and wasn't released until Netscape was effectively dead.
AOL open-sourced Netscape's source code and from that was born Mozilla. Mozilla's first releases, based on Netscape 6, were Mozilla Suite or later Seamonkey. From what I know, they had generally superior browsers to IE - for example, they had tabbed browsing, popup blocking, and weren't the world's leading vector for attacks (it was before the Gates' Trustworthy Computing memo, which finally focused Microsoft on security).
Mozilla Suite included the browser, email, an HTML/webpage editor, and I think an IRC chat client. It also had seemingly every configuration option any contributor could think of. It was complex and impossible to develop and manage, and far exceeded user needs - most just wanted a web browser. So Mozilla made Firefox, just a web browser, along with the separate Thunderbird, just an email client.
> Nope. Netscape 4 did very well.
I didn't say it didn't do well, I said it was a buggy bloated piece of crap. And it was. It was also the de facto way that many small businesses did both web browsing and email but the writing was on the wall. The price of browsers had fallen to zero.
It's weird arguing about history with someone who wasn't there. I was there. All this software you vague impressions of, I actually used. All of it. All versions of Netscape. All versions of IE (except 1). I still use Thunderbird for email.
The timeline you have in your head is sort of all over the place. By the time Firefox 1.0 was release IE was already on version 8 and had been around for a decade.
Firefox was a superior browser but realistically, at that time, browser security wasn't a huge problem. This was still the time of Flash plugins -- which all browsers supported -- but you still weren't p0wned the minute you browsed anywhere.
> Meanwhile IE and Windows were notorious for being terrible pieces of software.
My feeling of IE3 to IE6 (at its release time) is that (anti-competitive strategies aside), many (most?) average consumers would very likely choose IE over Netscape if they gave both a bit of a test drive.
In 1996 (maybe 1997) I was 14/15 at the time and remember coming to the conclusion that IE3 ran much faster on Windows 95 compared to Netscape.
It being (anticompetitively) free helped, but on the 100Mhz Pentiums with 8MB of RAM in our computer lab, you’d be a masochist to choose Netscape over it for random web browsing.
IE4 was quite resource intensive, but because MS anticompetitively pre-loaded it on OS startup, it still started faster than Netscape.
IE6 I found pleasant to use and it wasn’t until Firefox came out with tabs (Opera had them earlier, but you would often encounter websites it wouldn’t render properly, probably due to IE targeted design), that IE lost its sheen for me.
Firefox was popular enough that developers started caring about standards compliant websites at which point IE started entering the “despised” category, but it may not have actually been displaced from its top spot were it not for Chrome.
> IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
I've never heard that and IIRC, DR-DOS's owners sued successfully (or DoJ sued successfully). People certainly saw the errors.
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
Microsoft disabled the AARD code for the final release of Windows 3.1, but did not remove it so it could be later reactivated by the change of a single byte.
DR DOS publisher Digital Research released a patch named "business update" in 1992 to bypass the AARD code.I don't take Wikipedia as gospel, but that doesn't say what happened with earlier versions of Windows. And regardless, how did DR-DOS sue them if they weren't affected?
the check for dr-dos didn't exist except in that beta version of Windows. there were no media reports of dr-dos problems with windows before then. according to the wikipedia entry, the code was disabled but still shipped in windows.
I think that repeats your GP comment? I have the same response - what are your subsequent thoughts?