h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think we are missing out with the new operating systems. Sure window's allmost everpresent blue screen of death has alot of things in common with CPM's question mark ( except of course you could try to figure out what the question mark meant and then correct it. ) , but we don't get the build up or humour of the older operating systems . For instance , on a PDP 11/34 running UNIX " somethings funny , somethings funny , somethings funny , PANIC, PANIC, PANIC " followed by a core dump . My all time favorite though has to be " System broken , get a technician to fix to fix " .

Sounds similar to the Amiga error message "Guru Meditation" followed by an address. These messages were taken away as the Amiga got more main stream, before of course it went along a dark alley and was mugeed by a gang of PCs.

Chris

Actually it was more Commodore killing it so it couldn't compeat with thier flagship C64 machines. A gang of PCs couldn't have moved fast enough to mug an Amiga. I gather Gateway is dropping thier Amiga project now , probably don't want to go head to head with Microsoft by releasing a working operating system.

Sorry - I don't see the connection? Microsoft? "Working Operating System"?

On the "Useless" and "Microsoft" connection, we can include any "informational" message which pops up during an operating system task such as Scandisk which takes so long that it usually will be left to run unattended, which freeze the task until you have responded to the question "Would you like to see this message again?" - -the end result being that you come back to use your machine urgently after four hours have elapsed and find the task stopped after ten minutes.

I suspect we'll need a new forum with maybe extra storage space ( much like Win2000 ) if we are going to start listing problems with the Windows GUI and the crippled MSDOS OS underneath it.

As you two guys seem to know what your talking about, anyone got an opinion who is going to win out of Windows CE or Epoc on the PalmHeld market. As my Psion is know my best friend, but having had to say goodbye to my Amiga, with it's working OS, I don't want to go thru the same pain again

Chris

Who will win , or who should win? Right now I wouldn't want to put real money down on a bet. Alot depends on what happens in the US court system with Microsoft. If they can keep stalling , they will win through shear economic clout , just as they have in the past. For instance DRDOS worked fine , was generally more stable then MSDOS and had features often 2 years ahead of MSDOS . But if you wanted to load say WIN3.1 on DRDOS , it would refuse to load and claim you needed to "upgrade". However if you loaded WIN3.1 on MSDOS , and then blew away MSDOS and ran with DRDOS , WIN3.1 ran just fine.( this is all from personal experiance ) Digital Research showed in court that the same applied to WIN95 , they did win in court but by then Microsoft had pretty much put them out of business , so they lost the war even if they won the battle.
If the courts break up Microsoft and make the source code available to competators , then maybe we'll see some attempt by the baby microsofts to actually write stable code , they have the resources , but up till now it's made more sense to write junk and sell upgrades , that and it takes real effort to make sure new additions don't run afoul of old code. Microsoft's practice of having "official code" that they sell to third party developers who want to work in the windows environment and internal code thats kept a house secret for use by Microsoft's own developers , hasn't helped either. From what I've heard CE will have all that baggage to deal with , so my gut reaction would be to mistrust it. But will it win , probably.
A little side observation , I was listening to a NASA space shuttle mission while the ground crew and the shuttle crew spent several hours trying to make the Windows NT system on the shuttle, running Back Office , load the morning email. If you think about how much it costs to train , launch and support one of those missions and how many hours they have , just how dammaging was that? Consider what would be left of Microsoft if they were actually held accountable for the dammage thier operating system has caused over the years ( how many hours of work have you personally lost for instance ).