> Think about where we'd be today if Microsoft actually succeeded in what it set out to do long ago.
I like to imagine where would we be if Wintel never happened. Would we be running multi-core RISC machines running Unix-like OSs since the mid-90's? Would computers be completely different? Would we be running something inspired in Plan 9 or Smalltalk or Lisp Machines?
> It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.
It's because they were so successful we only got consumer-level 64-bit CPUs in 2003 and multi-core ones in 2004 and it took longer for those to become mainstream.
If you see what an Amiga could do in the mid-80's, what Atari was doing with Transputers, you realize Microsoft was not leading - Microsoft compatibility actually held us back.
I like to imagine where would we be if Wintel never happened. Would we be running multi-core RISC machines running Unix-like OSs since the mid-90's? Would computers be completely different? Would we be running something inspired in Plan 9 or Smalltalk or Lisp Machines?
> It's only because they failed that we are having this discussion.
It's because they were so successful we only got consumer-level 64-bit CPUs in 2003 and multi-core ones in 2004 and it took longer for those to become mainstream.
If you see what an Amiga could do in the mid-80's, what Atari was doing with Transputers, you realize Microsoft was not leading - Microsoft compatibility actually held us back.