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It was thus said that the Great Yossi Kreinin once stated: > > Can I ask you again - why did Windows 3.11, which had a totally > dysfunctional parody on the concept of "kernel", won the desktop market, > and Unix, which was 2 decades ahead in it's development, lost that market, > despite it's amazingly well thought-out semantics? MS-DOS gained the lion's share of the market when it came out because of a few reasons: 1) IBM 2) which legitimized home computers to the business community 3) MS-DOS was the *cheapest* operating system for the IBM Personal Computer [1] and 4) Lotus-123 was the killer app of the early MS-DOS world. All of that happened pretty much in 1981-1983, and at the time, there was no real credible competition to IBM for the business market (for home or PC computers). The other thing that Bill Gates did was to retain control of MS-DOS from IBM, allowing them to license the operating system to other 8086-based computers, and this issued in the era of PClones [6]. These issues alone meant that PCs had a large market share by 1990, when Windows 3.0 came out. In 1990, the Intel 80386 had been out for four years and even though they were in PCs at the time, you're still talking about machines that were in the 30-50MHz range, and 4M of RAM was considered a lot for a PC. They were also fairly expensive (286s on the other hand, were cheaper). There was also a relative lack of operating systems that would take advantage of the advanced features of the 80386 [7] and those that did (mainly Unix systems) cost a good deal of money, and generally didn't run on stock PC hardware. Again, Windows was cheap, and would run on top of the existing operating system of PCs (MS-DOS or PC-DOS, depending upon your brand of PC). You're a small business (which basically, makes up at least 50% of all businesses in the US). Would you rather spend, say, $2,500 for the hardware (PC), and about $100 for the operating system (MS-DOS/Windows) and about up to $500 for the killer apps (Lotus 1-2-3, Word Perfect) or $6,000 for the hardware, $1,000 for the operating system, and $1,500 for Word Perfect and be out a spread sheet if you wanted Unix? Dispite having better thought-out semantics, it was more expensive than the alternative, which was "good enough" for most people. For the record, the first usable distributions for Linux didn't show up until late 1993 (or very early 1994). And it was very picky about hardware, even if it was free. -spc (This is what I get for attending a university across the street from IBM Boca [8]) [1] When IBM released the IBM PC in August of 1981, there were three operating systems available for it: PC-DOS (MS-DOS rebranded), CP/M-86 from Digital Research [2] and UCSD-Pascal. Of the three, PC-DOS was not only cheaper, but the one that IBM supported. [2] Even though it was widely believed that Gary Kildall blew the IBM deal (Bill Gates initially sent IBM to DR for the operating system, but were rebuffed [3] at the initial meeting; when Bill found out, he then told IBM they could supply the operating system and quickly licensed Q-DOS from another Seattle software company [4]) [3] Gary Kildall was out of the office that day [5] and his then wife was wary of signing the NDAs that IBM presented. [4] Yup. He initially licensed it. It was only in the mid-80s did he finally buy all the rights from the other Seattle company. [5] He was flying his plane, but different parties report he was flying for different reasons (business or pleasure). [6] Bill Gates was *very* smart in realizing that it was software that was important, not hardware. [7] Bill Gates argued with IBM that OS/2 should support the 386 and higher; IBM, however, didn't want to compete with itself, and thus demanded that OS/2 support the 286. This was one of the reasons why Microsoft split from IBM and went with Windows. [8] Where the PC and OS/2 were developed.There's stuff above here
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