[rescue] NeXTSTEP or OPENSTEP?

[Mike Meredith]

On Sat, 9 Aug 2014 15:40:40 +0200, 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.

I'm not sure that it qualified as "cheap"; definitely not in the UK
where it was priced at B#1=$1 (so about double), and probably not in the
US. There were definitely business orientated machines around in the US
that were a lot cheaper in 1981; I think the Osbourne transportable was
released in 1981.

It succeeded because you "don't get fired for buying IBM" ... there
were plenty of small business, or managers in larger organisations that
wanted to 'computerise' and decided buying IBM was safer than doing the
research.

But did eventually become the commodity computer.

> Very few manufacturers caught on to the idea of aping PC standards --
> e.g. supporting cheap commodity components like IDE hard disks, ATAPI
> CD-ROMs, memory SIMMs or DIMMs. Instead, they wanted special

There were a few attempts at standardisation. For example, SGI's
Indigo^2 was built around an industry initiative which I can't remember
the name of. With the exception of the Indigo^2, it vanished without
trace.

And if you look at some PC standards, you can see their origin in
workstations/minis/etc. such as SCSI which lives on to a certain extent
in SATA, SAS, and even USB.

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