“…Soon the mainstream computer companies started making bids
for this emerging market. DEC made a CP/M machine. So did NCR and I
believe HP and Sperry-Rand did also. Badly designed and marketed,
they were laughed off the market, and promptly discontinued by
their respective companies. By late 1980 we had gone 16-bit, with
the i8086 and early models of the i80286 CPUs, which were the
powerhouses of that day. Then IBM announced the PC.”
“We looked this thing over, and laughed ourselves sick. Of all
the big corporate entries into the microcomputer field, this was
undoubtedly far and away the worst. It had an already obsolete
8-bit i8088 CPU, the most benighted memory model any of us had ever
seen, a mere 8 HW interrupts, was limited to two serial ports, and
didn’t even have hard disk support in the HW or in the OS! When we
were once again able to stand, we relegated this turkey to the
backs of our minds, and went off to work on real computers with
real OSs.”
“…I think the important path for Linux is to fully support
the Windows Office Suite and all other major Windows applications,
yesterday if not sooner. Support of the VB environment is crucial
to this. Development of freeware and shareware clones for these
applications will follow once the Linux market is established.
The day someone like me can walk into a CIO’s office and show him
that his Excel spreadsheets and macros, his PowerPoint
presentations, his databases and his groupware work under Linux,
cost less to support, look and feel much the same, interact
seamlessly with his existing environment, and cost him a fraction
of what he’s paying today, that’s the day we can start replacing
Windows with Linux 100,000 machines at a time.”