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Comment by zerostar07 | Hacker News Reader

I 'm not sure how any rational account of Gates' legacy can be negative. He helped make computers affordable internationally, paving the way for their explosive mass adoption. Even with internet explorer, it introduced the internet to thousands of people. Computers (windows computers) have increased productivity dramatically since the 80s, so much that the cost of having to modify HTML for IE6 is relatively negligible.

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Did he help make computers affordable internationally?

I have a hard time seeing an argument for this. There was a large selection of alternative OS's in the 80's, and one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition.

Gates legacy is becoming more positive, but brushing the negative sides under a chair is revisionism.

EDIT: Charming, being downvoted instead of getting a counter-argument. I thought I was on Hacker News, not on Reddit.

The turning point was when Microsoft licensed DOS to Compaq. This suddenly send hardware prices tumbling and made computers cheap enough to penetrate the corners of the world. This even made Linux possible in the early 90s by leverage cheap hardware. All(or most) of the other solutions were software/hardware tie-ups like Apple and Commodore. Even Apple started taking advantage of this by switching to x86 processors. Also, to MS' credit, they never got tempted to get into the PC hardware market(unlike Google with Android/Motorola) that would've skewed things.

If you think Apple's prices are high now, think what would happen if there no other PC OEMs.

There were several DOS alternatives available. Hadn't Microsoft been there, someone else would have filled that niche quickly. It is simply highly unlikely that removing Microsoft from that equation would have made all that much difference given just how competitive that part of the OS market was.

That's great and all...but they did, not somebody else.

Surely somebody else would have eventually written an open source Unix clone. (Probably not GNU, but somebody.) But Linus gets praised for it, and rightly so.

The did because they got in there first, not because nobody else where willing to license theirs, so this is bogus argument. The whole point is that original claim I addressed about Microsoft making computers affordable is based on the assumption that Microsoft somehow provided something unique at the time. They did not.

There's little basis for thinking that if you were to travel back in time and take Microsoft out of the equation, IBM would not have been able to quickly sign a deal with someone else, and that someone else - or a third party would not have been able to help kickstart the clone industry the same way Microsoft did by being willing to provide a license.

Nonsense. Whether someone else could have exerted a similar downward pressure on the cost of computers does not change that Microsoft did. "Could have" is worth very little.

As mentioned above, there were other OSs and DOS implementations. Nothing unique about MS except their agressiveness.

...and that they succeeded.

>that someone else - or a third party would not have been able to help kickstart the clone industry the same way Microsoft did by being willing to provide a license.

That someone else would have to resist the temptation of making mega billions by tying their software to hardware that they sell at a premium.

I think this is a lot of what people are missing. Microsoft did things differently, and because of that, were successful. Whether or not you agree with their business tactics, their contribution was undeniable.

I don't think anyone here is questioning Microsoft's success. The question is more whether the tactics used by Microsoft to achieve that success (and the consequences of that success for people who weren't Microsoft employees) were admirable or despicable.

I don't think it's binary. They had more than one tactic. Their initial tactics were admirable. Long term, their tactics tended towards despicable. But then again, most large corporations fall down that hole.

Wasn't the turning point when the IBM PC spec was reverse engineered which allowed for clones?

The IBM PC spec was included with the IBM PC (or sold for $100 or so). Schematics, BIOS source code, everything. IBM was meticulously documenting everything, and that was actually common and expected at the time (e.g. I had the same info about my ZX Spectrum; I remember the same info was available for the Apple][ and C-64 at the time).

A defining moment was when the "clean room" approach to implementing a BIOS was certified non infringing by courts. Clones were available (as in, 5 years or so) before that moment, but the BIOSes had a cloud of copyright uncertainty.

How about when Microsoft made it so Windows wouldn't run on DR-DOS?

Though it may not have made too much difference in the long run, given the need to get away from the DOS based architecture.

Digital Research licensed CP/M to everyone; CP/M machines were more varied in hardware than PCs of the time, but CP/M software _was_ portable.

This was already in progress, and Digital Research was already working on CPM86, just too slow and not business savvy. Had microsoft not snatched the IBM deal, PC prices would have probably looked the same, perhaps one or two years delayed.

I have personally witnessed Microsoft bullying in 1990 in a project I was involved with. BeOS (and other alternative PC operating systems) died mostly because of Microsoft bullying. That's a big part of Gates' legacy, and probably will be for a long time to come.

BeOS died because Jobs torpedoed their negotiations with Apple with his return from NeXT. Prior to that, the odds were good that BeOS would become the next OS for Macs.

Apple was the last-chance for BeOS. They were actually gaining ground with PC channels, until Microsoft declared that anyone selling a non-pure-windows system (including dual boots that default to windows) will lose their discount on the Windows OEM license.

Guess how many PCs were sold with BeOS after that happened? At that point, it was Apple or bust. And then it was bust.

I didn't downvote you, but I'llgive a counter argument.

If you go back to the 80s it was a very different world. Gates foresaw that by licensing the OS and allowing it to run on any IBM PC compatible computer it would commodify HW. Prices on PC HW just started dropping -- margins all but disappeared.

The model virtually everyone else did -- and note the Apple model was the dominant model in this day -- was you did the full stack. Apple, Atari, Commodore, Sun, SGI, DEC, etc all built the HW and the OS -- with healthy margins built it. But they couldn't compete pricewise with MS + commodity HW.

The other thing Gates did was to realize that disruption works from the bottom up. Microsoft became the master w/ disruptive SW. They would come into an existing market with a powerful, but expensive marketleader and offer a weaker, but far less expensive competitor. I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price.

What Gates didn't have a plan against was the natural disrpution to MS's disruption -- free software.

People now say, "Microsoft SW is so expensive!", but few recall that early versions of WordPerfect could cost $5,000 per seat.

Microsoft brought prices down for much of software into the $49-$299 range from the $5,000-$10,000 range. Without the licensed OS model that runs on commodity HW, I'm not sure we would have seen such drastic downward pressure on SW pricing.

The point is there were other players with OS's similar to DOS ready to license it. E.g. remember the controversy over how Digital Research supposedly lost out on the contract with IBM? The market for CP/M like OS's (of which DOS is/was one) was not confined to Microsoft. To believe that in that environment if you were to take Microsoft out of the equation nobody else would step in (quickly) seems ludicrous to me.

You want to talk about revisionism and all you do is speculate about what would have happened without microsoft doing this or that.

> Gates foresaw that by licensing the OS and allowing it to run on any IBM PC compatible computer it would commodify HW.

That was happening before gates -- MS-DOS 1.0, renamed from QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) was a clone of CP/M, an O/S that had already been available for essentially every hardware capable 8080 or Z80 based system at the time. MS-DOS was just a clone for 8088/8086 based systems.

The fact that 8088/8086 became the dominant PC architecture (rather than e.g. 68K) has a lot to do with IBM's lack of innovation (they just needed to counter apple's rise, so they built something which was very close to an intel reference design -- making clones easy and mostly legal).

To a lesser extent, this was also happening with Unix.

DOS was a clone of CP/M in the same way as Linux is a clone of Unix ... it preserved some compatibility, but the internals were rewritten from scratch. And that's not a clone in my view.

I also played with a Z80 computer - those things were useless. What made the PC shine was the constant innovation coming from Intel - they didn't stop at 8086.

> I also played with a Z80 computer - those things were useless.

Context is everything. CP/M was already useful in 1973. MSDOS made an appearance in 1981. Which word processor could you run on the PC in 1979? (Yes, that's a trick question ...)

> What made the PC shine was the constant innovation coming from Intel - they didn't stop at 8086.

No. The only thing that made the PC shine is the cheap IBM clones of the time. Motorola's 68K (in 1978) was years ahead of the 8086 (introduced in 1978) -- and it also cost 20 times as much. The same vintage 1978 68K was still years ahead of Intel's 80286. And then Intel almost killed themselves with the 432, which was not backwards compatible and had miserable performance.

Intel returned to usefulness with the 386, that was comparable to the 68030 (same time, and price comparable as well) The 486 was to the 68040. But at that point, the world was unfortunately owned by the PC and x86 architecture.

If you ever programmed for the 68K, and then looked at the mess that is the x86 32-bit architecture, the only possible response is WTF!?!?

"I think kids nowadays never knew the old days of computing where the fear was that Microsoft would do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."

We now have Google entering your market and offering a better product for free.

And discontinuing it a year later.

Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS. The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads. Not to mention much of the world still runs offline whereas Google assumes de facto connectivity in most things they do.

Of course where search, mail,browser and android are concerned, Google has done an excellent job, but for productivity software MS is still the king.

I was referring to the fear, not the actual products. If Google entering your market doesn't scare you, you are either a fool or lucky to be in a defensible position.

The free price comes at the expense of your privacy which in invaded by personalized ads.

And in exchange get a system where when your non-tech-savvy friend breaks their computer their data is still safe waiting for them?

Or when they want to send you a document they just press the share button?

Google Docs and MS Office are very different products, but saying Docs is inherently worse ignores the benefits provided by a web based system that Office just can't provide.

> Oh no we don't. Claims that Google Docs are better than MS Office are total BS.

For many it is, for others it's insufficient. But: "do a product similar to yours, not quite as good, but sell it at 1/5 the price."

The only reason we have MS Office at work is Exchange and Outlook, and that's because we dogfood a component of the service we're providing to our customers. Everything else is taken care by OOo/LO and we have a Google Apps around (used mostly for XMPP) but that one would be put to full use the moment we drop Exchange.

Agreed with offline though.

haha

> one of them would've gotten a dominant position without DOS/Windows, possibly, though not necessarily, giving us a dominant player that would've been far less aggressive about using illegal methods to undermine their competition.

It's worth noting that Apple wanted to control both the hardware and the operating system, just as they do now. I'm glad we don't live in a world with a dominant player controlling both of those.

I think by supporting an enourmous range of hardware they did a titanian task. Apple never had to tackle that problem.

The Unix model of innovation didn't work. We wound up with a zillion fragmented versions, and writing applications that had to run on multiple platforms was a terrible, expensive task. There are few companies left from this era; one exception of note is Oracle.

It seems that to survive in a "fair" proprietary ecosystem -- please recall that Unix /was/ proprietary in the 80s and 90s -- that you need to be rapacious. Microsoft used E/E/E, predatory dealing with manufacturers and gave out candy to developers, while Oracle followed IBM's old pattern of FUD backed by armies of consultants.

Apple barely made it; they were circling the drain when The Chief Jerk returned and started kicking the antheap and killing his predecessors projects. It was a near thing.

[Jack Tramiel failed in his attempt to bring Atari back to life in the mid 80s because he mistook 'being aggressively cheap' with being ruthless.]

I like the Chief Jerk theory. I've seen a lot of orgs get complacent and consensus-driven and /go under/ because they lose their edge. You need to stay hungry and driven, and one way to get this is to have someone who is not very likeable -- but that you still respect -- at the helm.

"We wound up with a zillion fragmented versions, and writing applications that had to run on multiple platforms was a terrible, expensive task."

Sounds like Windows to me.

No. Not even close.

I can still run Windows apps from 1995. Not all of the ones I have, but I'm impressed at what /does/ run. I could probably even make my Windows 3.1 stuff run.

The Unix vendors didn't seem to care about this. Oh, there were standards, but they were awfully weak. And when it gets down to doing interesting, useful things, you were sunk when you needed to do cross-platform.

There's a lot to be said for having /some/ kind of winner. Though the stuff that goes along with that -- monocultures as a target for malware, corruption in the face of absolute power, etc. -- have to be dealt with somehow. Sheer fragmentation is bad for everybody.

Reminded me of the video where a guy did a fresh install of Windows 1.0 and upgraded all the way to Windows 7. An amazing amount of programs still ran by the time he got to 7.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPnehDhGa14

For values of Unix approximating Linux or BSD, your programs come with sources, and/or have been incrementally updated along with the OS. There are very few specific applications from 15 years ago that I have any interest in running, though there are capabilities I had and/or syntaxes I might want to use/rely on.

I started using UNIX in 1987. Among the tools I used at the time were sh/csh, vi, cc, telnet, talk, sed, awk, find, and grep. All are either still present in their original or evolved forms (grep, sed, gawk, GNU find, gcc, vim, talk/irssi), or have been replaced by more appropriate and/or secure tools (bash, ssh for telnet), I prepared more than one paper using nroff macros (groff today).

While these are for the most part text/console tools, the point is that over nearly a quarter century I've been able to build on rather than periodically toss out wholesale, a set of technical skills. Underlying concepts such as TCP/IP, filesystem hierarchies, daemon startup, process monitoring, etc., have similarly remained fairly constant.

In the personal computing world I watched CPM, Amiga, BeOS, nine or ten iterations of Windows/DOS (each with many gratuitous changes), and several major iterations of the Mac platform come and go, among others.

While the proprietary Unix market did fragment, and has ultimately fallen under the licensing correction of Free Software (thank you, RMS), that was ultimately a false start.

Microsoft managed to create platform uniformity through compulsory licensing arrangements with bulk OEMs (Compaq, IBM, Dell, HP, and others), quashing the competition (particular QDOS/DRDOS and others). The binary backwards compatibility is somewhat impressive, but comes at a high cost, and one which today with emulation readily available is rather much a throwback.

I meant: Windows is designed to support a gazillion hardware platforms, and Microsoft goes to great lengths to make that happen. I guess I wasn't very clear.

Are you kidding me?

He made computers affordable? Is that what you call a convicted monopolist, using anti-competitive tactics to drown out competition? Making things affordable?

He exploited market power and made, by and large, shitty products that at best people have tolerated because they felt they had no alternative. Having done that for two decades, he grew a conscious and started handing out all his ill-gotten gains.

As with so many bits of Microsoft history - don't look at what is replacing Microsoft, look at what Microsoft replaced.

Think about IBM with a full-on monopoly on both the hardware and software, and what that would have been like instead.

Yes. Bill Gates helped make computers affordable.

I think everyone understands your point, but for future reference he grew a conscience cf. conscious.

Guess how I learned about and downloaded Netscape on Windows back in the mid 90s?

but the central issue in US vs. Microsoft at the time was the bundling of their own browser with their operating system. i'm not saying that there weren't other anticompetitive practices going on at the time. but apple essentially does the same thing with safari, and there are some instances with OSX where one can't override the default browser with another.

it's curious that the US gov't isn't going after apple for predatory practices in this case. i guess it's due to the fact that OSX still has a very small market share, overall.

but consider another case where it doesn't ... iOS. apple is essentially guilty [to a larger extent] of the same thing microsoft was convicted for. last time i checked, there were no alternate browsers available in iOS because apple's licensing terms strictly prohibit it. the closest anyone has come is opera.

am i mistaken?

I never understood what was wrong with bundling the browser with the OS. Every OS comes with a bundled browser, including Ubuntu, FreeBSD, OS X, the iPod, the Kindle, darn near everything. I'm annoyed that there's no bundled browser in my Roku box.

They were not convicted for giving a browser free with their OS. They forced their OEMs to supply with only IE, and not with Netscape. If the OEMs supplied with Netscape they would lose volume discounts & mktg money.

Since no OEM could sell without MS, and losing the discounts would be death in a super price competitive market, this essentially meant Netscape couldn't use the same OEM channel to market.

That's misusing a monopoly to enter a different market. And that's what they were convicted of.

"Predatory practices" or whatever you want to call bundling stuff with the operating system - is not against the law.

UNLESS you are using a monopoly you have in one field, to further a monopoly in another. Which is what Microsoft were doing (as decided by courts). Lookup "antitrust" and "sherman act" for the US legislature, but similar laws exist in all western countries.

Apple never had such a monopoly position. Some "smart" people claim that apple has 100% monopoly on selling Apple products, and should thus be subject to similar antitrust provisions. Apple now has ~10% market share of personal computers. Microsoft at the time had >90% market share. That's why they they were regulated. Not just because they were anticompetitive.

> Is that what you call a convicted monopolist

That's subtly and importantly wrong:

There is nothing illegal or immoral about having a monopoly. It is the natural state of affairs for many markets. Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly. And abuse of a monopoly is somewhat tricky to process from an ethical perspective: a company using their base in one market to provide an advantage against competitors in a new, related market is totally normal, accepted business practice. It only becomes "wrong" when it succeeds too often. So how does a company decide where to draw the line without help of the courts? At which point do you stop doing an activity that you've been hitherto commended for?

From a market perspective it probably makes sense to have regulations restricting some cases of anti-competitive practices. But it's malarkey to go from "we have regulation for this" to branding someone unconscionable because they run afoul of it.

"There is nothing illegal or immoral about having a monopoly. It is the natural state of affairs for many markets."

If you are saying that what's natural is necessarily moral, you are committing the "naturalistic fallacy" (aka the "is-ought" fallacy)[1] In brief, it means you are confusing what is (the supposedly "natural state of affairs") with what ought to be (ie. what is moral).

It is quite possible to argue that the "natural state of affairs" is, in fact, immoral, and what ought to be (ie. what is moral) should be different from this "natural state of affairs".

"Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly. And abuse of a monopoly is somewhat tricky to process from an ethical perspective: a company using their base in one market to provide an advantage against competitors in a new, related market is totally normal, accepted business practice."

"Normal, accepted business practice" could very well be immoral.

[1] - https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Naturalistic_...

     made, by and large, shitty products that
     at best people have tolerated because they
     felt they had no alternative

Microsoft Office was quite good from the get go. WordPerfect may have been better, but Office was more affordable. It won on merits, and although later they preserved this newly acquired monopoly through proprietary formats, Office is a pretty good product.

Internet Explorer kicked Netscape's ass. It only stagnated after version 5, when there was no competition remaining, but IExplorer was then the equivalent of today's Chrome ... fast and innovative.

Also people only remember Windows 9x and cry about the failure of OS/2, but NT 4.0 was released in Jul 96 and it was a pretty good operating system. It evolved later in Windows 2000 and XP. And it wasn't sold to consumers because consumers didn't want it. Instead consumers wanted 100% backwards compatibility - this was a hard constraint to workaround as hardware was not powerful enough for emulation modes.

People also cry about how Microsoft killed Netscape and yet how many people are willing to pay for their browser? Some people do, but not that many. And the Internet is useless without a browser. The irony of the situation is that many of the people blaming Microsoft for Netscape also love free stuff. And you really should do some reading on what Netscape did, because the truth is they killed themselves with whatever remained going on to live as the Mozilla Foundation, which is doing fine.

The thing is operating systems are natural monopolies. And when owning such a powerful monopoly, it is hard to not abuse it ... witness Apple, they don't even have a monopoly yet and are acting like total jerks. Witness Google for that matter and how they basically killed WebOS and MeeGo.

Is it fair? Probably not, but MeeGo is also dying because of Nokia's incompetence and WebOS is also dying because of HP and Palm. You can't blame only Android for that.

I got my first computer 16 years ago. It came with a licensed MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups. It was built by a local computer shop. It was a lot cheaper than what I could buy from any US company.

> Office is a pretty good product.

Yeah... which was incompatible with previous version of itself, which happily saved deleted information in the file, crashed like hell and (in my opinion) taught people to just mark stuff and change it, instead of structuring documents properly.

Most people don't really care about most of the things you mentioned. Office was and is still stable, useful and easy enough for most people and businesses.

Not even close. WP was far superior to Word. WP didn't win out because WP Corp didn't make the jump to Windows fast enough.

MS lied to IBM about OS/2 - they were collaborating on it, until MS created NT.

MS history is filled with strong-arm tactics and lies.

Ever wonder why it was so hard to find a Dell/OEM with Linux, OS/2, or BeOS, instead of Windows?

http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html

"Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements"

Nice. Explains Google commoditizing mobile operating systems (complement) to increase demand for their product (search).

Search is not their product; adspace is.

It's not rational either to only necessarily netting his contribution in the positive.

Just ask yourself these two questions and you'll see what I mean.

Did Microsoft contribute in advancing certain areas of computing and speed up the adoption of Internet technologies?

Did Microsoft contribute in impeding certain areas of computing and slow down the adoption of Internet technologies?

Surely Microsoft innovated, in a less-than-spectacular way most of the times with things like direct3d, plug-n-play etc. They added tcp/ip stack to windows and created internet explorer, even brought the internet directly to the desktop initially. While they did use their monopoly to push their products thus eliminating rivals, they did not directly block competition. You could still install netscape and windows is still a very open platform. I 'm not going to defend MS monopoly tactics of course, or make a scientific account of microsoft's pros and cons, but Windows had competitors in the open market, and yet they prevailed, not always because they were the better system, but they were not significantly worse than others.

Compare that to the oft-praised Apple model: directly block competitors from making similar functionality instead of competing with them and lock people into their systems. Does that model not impede technology from advancing?

like direct3d

You just brought up the horrible memories of computer gaming pre-directX/3d. What a mess it was.

Wonder if I have a floppy lying around with all my old custom autoexec.bat files? :)

This. I remember having to play games without any sound because I couldn't figure out how to fit the SCSI Hard Disk driver and CD Rom driver and soundblaster driver into the 640k especially since lots of games flat out refused to work if you loaded himem.sys or QEMM which allowed you to load the drivers into the extended/expanded memory areas.

Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL?

Plug-n-play? That's a standard?

Adding TCP/IP - thanks, Microsoft, for not embracing and extending that one.

Internet explorer? Gee, thanks Microsoft for abusing your monopolistic powers to knock out Netscape and start embracing and extending the HTML platform?

The best defence you can mount is that they prevailed because they weren't significantly worse than others. That in itself says a lot -- but I'd make the argument they prevailed because they used tactics that make it hard for others to compete (including illegal ones).

Plug-n-play? That's a standard?

It is in the "ISA-compatible hardware that doesn't need jumpers" sense, yes. It has a silly-sounding name, but it's a very specific set of hardware standards.

It was a huge, huge advance, speaking as somebody who got multiple graphics and sound cards working, simultaneously, with jumpers, back on an old pre-PnP 486 tower. I literally had a piece of paper with my IRQ and DMA channels and what cards they were assigned to, along with similar mappings for memory ranges, so that I could move the jumpers to reasonable locations for the next piece of hardware I added.

If you screwed it up, the new peripheral (and the old one it fought with) just stopped working. And then you got to go remap everything by literally moving a little fiddly piece of plastic from pin to pin on a card you had to open your computer to get at.

Plug-and-Play was huge. I originally griped about it too, back when it meant new hardware wouldn't work in my 486 :-P

Plug-and-Play was a shitty alternative when far superior systems existed on other platforms. Instead they opted for a really horribly limited system. Compare Autoconfig on the Amiga, for example, which was older and provided far more advanced capabilities and was well documented if they could've been bothered to at least copy something that worked well instead of coming up with yet another technically inferior solution.

I bought one of the early Amigas. They used commodity hardware, but would alter the connector so you had to buy it from them. No thanks.

Microsoft did the same with software. It's called "Embrace & Extend". Of the available evils at the time, the Amiga was ridiculously better thought out and implemented.

The PC hardware of 1995 was still quite far behind the Amiga hardware of 1985 (which had 14 bit stereo DMA sound or 4 channel 8 bit DMA sound, 2D hardware acceleration and sprites, and more). The PC operating system of 1995 was starting to equal the Amiga operating system of 1985 (Win95 had separate memory space, which was better than AmigaOS 1.0's shared space -- but otherwise, Win95 was mostly inferior)

I'd wait 1-2 years for cheaper standards. I'd rather pay a little more for getting to the future 10 years in advance.

Your comment about "the future" is interesting, considering how little the Amiga actually resembles what was eventually common or popular by 1995 ;)

For the hardware comparison to be fair, you'd need a 1985 PC, I think.

Let's be generous (to the Amiga) and assume a 1995 PC would probably be a 66MHz 80486DX2 with 8MB RAM, a VLB graphics card, and a Soundblaster of some description. Even at the same clock rate, a 486 of this type would handily beat the Amiga just from having a more efficient CPU and from not having a dirty planar framebuffer layout. But as it is, it is clocked 9x faster.

In practice, for 1995, a Pentium would not be THAT unlikely...

Your details are correct. And yet ...

That Soundblaster was capable of 8-bit stereo; if you wanted to do anything non trivial like changing the sample rate, or mix more than one channel, that cost you a significant amount of CPU -- and most probably, you couldn't get more than 8 bit no matter what. The amiga had 14 bits (8 bit digital + 6 bit analog scaler, on each of 2 channels per side) in 1985, with hardware mixing.

You wanted a mouse cursor? that was zero cost in 1985's Amiga, thanks to hardware sprites; it was hell to get right on the PC (and while Windows mostly solved that if your app ran on Windows, WHICH WAS NOT A GIVEN in 1995, many apps still had cursor bugs, even in Windows).

Yes, the 1985 68k was slower than the 1995 486. But 2D hardware acceleration made up for a lot of it -- the Amiga 1985 GUI was more responsive than the 1995 Win95 GUI (that's hard to appreciate on emulators today -- you had to use it to believe it).

And finally, multitasking with 512K ram on the Amiga 1000 on AmigaOS 1.0 actually worked properly - way better than Win 3.11 (which was what you had on the PC until 1995), and mostly on par with Win95, even though the latter had MMU separation to help (which 68k did not in 1985, but 68020/AmigaOS 3 did in 1995, IIRC).

Really, look at Amiga games like Shadow of the Beast (1989), Sword of Sodan (1988), The Great Gianna Sisters (1989), and compare it to PC games of 1995.

The Amiga hardware of 1985 was better than the PC hardware of 1995 in every way except raw CPU power.

"Except raw CPU power" is not much of an "except". If you have raw CPU power, that fixes everything. You don't need a blitter, and you don't need sprites, and you don't need playfields, and you can do your sound mixing on the CPU. Then 256 colours makes up for some of the things you'd use the copper for; the rest, the CPU power will sort out. A byte-per-pixel framebuffer memory layout makes easy what would be a thorough pain on the Amiga - though with a faster CPU, not like it would be a massive problem anyway.

"Except raw CPU power" is why the Amiga had all the custom junk in the first place - it didn't have the raw CPU power to do without!

(As for the mouse cursor, what need is there for a zero-cost one? Just draw the cursor at the end of the frame, when you're done. No problem. I don't remember any mouse cursor problems in games; presumably they all did what I suggest, because it's the obvious, easy, reliable thing to do.)

Some PC games I remember playing in 1995, or before: Doom II, Hi-Octane, Magic Carpet, Syndicate (the Amiga version of this on a stock Amiga was a sad joke), Command and Conquer, Wing Commander (the Amiga version of this was pretty poor, even on an Amiga 1200), Comanche: Maximum Overkill, Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix, Stunt Island, various of the X-Wing series, and Indianapolis 500.

Looking at the games you cite, I think the PC ones are much better! Better graphics, due to having more colours or resolution. More interesting play, due to having more CPU time to do interesting stuff. Yes, even better sound, because you've got as many channels as there's CPU time for, and more accurate stereo positioning because of it.

OK, so I like the art direction of Shadow of the Beast. That's about it.

> Then 256 colours makes up for some of the things you'd use the copper for; the rest, the CPU power will sort out. A byte-per-pixel framebuffer memory layout makes easy what would be a thorough pain on the Amiga

That's simply not true.

Take e.g. Doom II from your list; In order to have double buffering (required for smooth screen update), it had to use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_X which is .. a planar mode even if it is 1-byte per pixel (in a slightly nicer way than the Amiga's planar mode; but switching planes cost an arm and a leg in I/O communication, so to actually work efficiently with it, it was as bad as the Amiga's planar mode).

> If you have raw CPU power, that fixes everything. You don't need a blitter, and you don't need sprites, and you don't need playfields, and you can do your sound mixing on the CPU.

I remember one (1) reasonable multi-level parallax scrolling game for the PC with reasonable performance, but not its name. (I remember it well, because I spent a few afternoons with a debugger trying to figure out how the f*ck they managed). CPU was NOT enough to not need all of these.

Almost all the games you mentioned have a 3D point of view (those that I'm familiar with, anyway) - for which the Amiga's '85 2D acceleration wasn't helpful, of course. But the 2D games of the PC, especially scrollers, were inferior.

Non of them, as far as I can tell, had 3d sound or multi channel stereo mixing in 1995 -- PC mod players back then were struggling to go below 30% CPU (I know, I wrote one of the fastest ones), and no game could afford them.

I released a sideways scroller for the PC in '94, that achieved constant 60fps (with not a lot of CPU to spare) on the 486DX of the time, and a respectable 30fps on the 386 that were still super common. To get that, I needed to use ModeX, used Adlib for music so I can use DMA sample playing for the effects (also, pure adlib was _still_ common enough to warrant support if you didn't have a soundblaster). It needed an awful lot of tricks to get reasonable performance; The graphics engine was all assembly, and some of the game logic too. And I needed continuously recalibrating the int8 timer to get interrupts at the vertical retrace so that everything worked properly without wasting CPU.

I never got to do an Amiga version, but it would have been 100 times simpler. And would have worked equally well on an 1985 Amiga 1000.

> Plug-and-Play was huge.

Those are some rose-colored glasses there. I remember the plug-n-play days and there was a reason that people nicknamed it plug-n-pray. It wasn't until PCI that plugging boards into PCs became sane.

It was far from perfect. But do you remember just how awful it was to go fishing for jumpers in your computer's tower case after they popped off? And you had to keep lots of spare jumpers around because some memory addresses and IRQs required more physical jumpers to specify than shipped with the card. Yes, yes, jumpers were cheap... But also hard to order and impossible to get hold of on short notice unless you had friends with spares.

I occasionally rearranged which IRQs/memory cards used specifically to use fewer jumpers so that I would have enough.

PnP wasn't technically amazing. Yes, PCI was much better. Jumpers sucked.

Direct3d? Why not use OpenGL?

Because OpenGL is Not Good, even to this day. It's a brutally fragmented system that's got little going for it except ubiquity; the problems with it are numerous and ugly. (But you can't expect much from something where everything's a frigging GLuint, can you?) It is popular because it's everywhere, not because it's good.

Setting the precedent that web browsers should be free (even for commercial use)?

Adding XHR to javascript?

Making plug & play work (yes, it's a standard now)?

MS prevailed because at almost every critical junction over the last 30 years they've managed to put together the best collection of compromises that maximized utility for the average computer user.

Look at the evolution of the Macintosh throughout the 1990s and 2000s as a comparison. Through almost every iteration it has continued to try to hew to some "higher" standard than the average PC. When PCs were using IDE Macs were using SCSI. Until Macs started using IDE too. When PCs were using tcp/ip over ethernet Macs were using appletalk, until Macs started using tcp/ip too. Firewire/usb. PowerPC/x86. Etc.

There's a reason why the de facto filesystem for flash drives is FAT32 and it's not just because windows is so popular (if so it would just be ntfs), it's because it represents a well balanced compromise and is dead simple to implement.

Windows has been a fairly decent embodiment of "worse is better" for a long time.

>>Setting the precedent that web browsers should be free (even for commercial use)?

That's revising history. There were plenty of free browsers back then. Netscape itself was derived from NCSA Mosaic which was free.

Actually, Netscape was not derived per se. It was a complete re-write by people from the Mosaic team who had left to start Netscape.

Microsoft licensed Mosaic from Spyglass, who held the rights by virtue of a deal with the University of Illinois.

Adding TCP/IP to Windows was an innovation? Winsock was pretty much lifted from BSD. The API is so compatible that you can target both with a simple include file to #define away some differences (that's a good thing, but it hardly indicates innovation on Microsofts side), largely because Windows can't easily support the equivalence between filehandles and sockets that implementing the BSD socket API 1:1 relies on.

I didnt list it as an innovation. It sped up the adoption of internet technologies.

Direct3D was initially much worse than OpenGL, which they saw as a threat because it was cross platform. To this day they are doing something similar with the refusal to adopt WebGL as a standard in their browsers.

The price of cheap hardware was Windows and the price of AJAX was IE6 (5.5, technically). Kinda like roses and thorns, but a lot nerdier.

I disagree that Gates made computers affordable. Computers were made affordable by Moore's Law. The increasing density of transistors in an integrated circuit made it feasible to simplify circuit boards without sacrificing performance.

Indeed, I can argue that Bill Gates made computing significantly less affordable to the international world. Today, the cost of a Windows license can be as much as the cost of the hardware. How many people are being shut out of computing because of the forced subsidies OEMs have to give Windows?

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