[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Carl R. Friend]

    On Sat, 9 Aug 2014, Liam Proven wrote:

> The IBM PC compatible didn't succeed because of any technical
> excellence, because it never had any. It succeeded because it was
> cheap, open and easily cloned. The x86 PC is the original COTS
> hardware platform.

    Save for the original BIOS which was as closed an architecture
or product as any.  It took a clean-room blind rever-engineeering
to clone the blasted thing which was a tour-de-force -- first one
team produced a spec from the existing one, sometimes by observation
if not outright disassembly, and then a completely different team
to produce something that obeyed the spec produced by the first
team.  This torqued IBM off immensely, but due to the process they
couldn't do anything about it.

    I view the PC as the beginning of the end for interesting computing.
Yes, it ultimately resulted in insanely cheap (in all meanings of the
word) hardware, but also in a monoculture that is one well-written
virus away from a global freeze of bibilcal proportions.  Quite likely
ARM may be the sole survivor.

    Cheers.

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
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