Bill Gates isnt all bad afterall

[KenKeith]

Uh.....Gates wasnt the one who first delivered a product that didnt cost thousands of dollars to implement. Ever heard of DOS??

Thought so, and he wasnt the one who made it, he bought it.

And are you telling me Apple didnt accomplish this first?

Last time i checked, Apple sued MS for infringing on their rights.

MS won that battle, and thats what really paved the way for them.

I am not arguing any of the above but that doesn't make Gates a great businessman. Right time, right place and technical acumen as I see it. He didn't need to reinvent the wheel? Just build on and enhance through technology a household device that is affordable, user friendly and have needed utility.

I have had training and experience in machine language, assembler, PC-DOS and other. None are user friendly, and don't have the facility as GUI over DOS.

It has been pointed there are alternatives, go for it!

[Aznmask]

Originally posted by ShawnD1
oh my god, your school has a huge budget problem if you're still on 95.

i dont think we have any problem.. since we using the PC on word processing, excel, powerpoint, Qbasic, etc..

What school you have ShawnD1?

[Slade54]

I find it easy to navigate through dos.

Not like you need to learn complicated command to learn how to move around.

Only need to know a few things really.

While a GUI def is better, sometimes it can be cluncky too (but that is easier fixed then in a text based environment)

For less adept people, the GUI is def the better bet.

[Slade54]

Seems about what my school has (but with alot more classrooms, more like 150+, we are a Class A school, thats 1500+ students for those of you who dont know, right now we have 2000+ enrolled though)

But weve just recently upgraded from the Macs to the PC during the past few years, so we have Windows98.

I was told that we would soon upgrade to 2000, but were waiting for all the schools in our school system to get their networks up first.

Its questionable whether thats gonna happen now with budget cuts (but $10k worth of new comps did come in that me and my friend custom built for a comptuer class, score!)

[ShawnD1]

my school has about 1600 students.

just out of curious, what is the graduation rate at your school? i'm graduating this year and i just found out that the graduation rate is just over 70% lol. it's amazing how dumb some people are.

[iceblue]

i believe my school has a similar amount of students... we have 2 computers avg in each room (nearly all with this config: P41.5/128/20gb/dvd/zip) and the remaining are PIIIs of the 733 and 866 flavor, running windows 2000 with nearly everything disabled and internet so highly filtered that google is impaired. way too much of the budget wasted on these disabled comps imo..

[ShawnD1]

the computers in my school are mostly half P2, half P3. the P2s are just over 300mhz i think, the P3s are something like 566 or some weird number like that. all of the computers have 192mb ram.

with the stuff we use them for, we really don't need any faster. all we use them for is internet explorer, MS Word, MS Excel (to a small extent). the computers in the CTS lab are all P3s and also have AutoCad on them, CAD really needs that extra bit of power.

[cwin]

Most the PC in my school are 800MHz ? Our school only has 5 CD drives and we have 4 XP servers (i think) . A few notebooks on a wireless network - more coming, a few note books in the science lab.
Dont know how many pcs we have in our school, but we have 4 IT rooms (2 IT , 1 Maths, 1 English) and basically every room has a PC, every teacher has a notebook, and we are on a internet WAN.
We have a few old broken ones in the library, that wont run XP

I think our school has way to many PCs

[cwin]

I hate the stupid restrictions,
School project, tobacco,
Search tobacco - filtered under drugs and drink.

[Slade54]

ok, having P4s in the average school comp is huge waste of money.

A comp thats ment to run word processing and interenet should not have P4s.

Granted a few comps in the school would really benifit with a P4, but when your buying them by the dozens, honest to god, dont waste you money.

Our schools have P3 933s and P3 550s all with 128mb 10gig hds (all accounts are stored on the network, so the HD only needs the program files) and we have a T1 line for internet access. (i know nothing of the actual network)

And there is one class room (computer graphics) with has a bunch of different computers, some newer, some older, some kick **** awesome, other slow POS.

And for some reason i cant fathom, all comps in the school are Gateways, cept for some old Macs in the the chemistry rooms (like, 24mb of ram old macs) and the library. For some reason they decided to upgrade all the old crappy macs to newer crappy macs.

And filters in our school arent bad. Cept there was that one time they blocked CNN. Of course all you had to do was goto yahoo, type in CNN, and go through there. Our school really should see about new filter software, cuz that is a pretty big loop hole.

[MickMitani]

I started PC programming in 1979 when I bought a TRS-80 (4K RAM, 4K ROM Basic). I spent 22 years in the Air Force, most as a computer programmer. I learned programming with coding sheets, keypunch, and limited time on terminals. When I got interested in computers, there were only a few choices, and they were all expensive. Now keep in mind that I am talking 1979 dollars when I quote prices below: At the time I was making $440 a month as an Airman and the basic TRS-80 cost $799 for the entire unit - with the specs above and audio cassette mass storage (250baud) and a converted black and white 12in TV with uppercase only and 64 characters per line max. That compares to the Apple II, which cost $2100 with 16K RAM, cassette storage and RF modulator to display color on a standard TV at 40 characters per line. A floppy disk drive would set you back $800 plus controller, and 90K, single sided, single density floppy diskettes cost $60-80 per box of ten, name brand, or $40-50 for white box generics. The Commodore Pet was $999 for the 8K version, with builtin cassette and monocrome monitor. There were other computers out there, but most were much more expensive like nearly $4000 for a North Star Horizon CP/M computer. Hard Drives? - $3999 would get you a 5 megabyte Corvus drive with 8 inch diameter platters. However, there were only a few computers that supported it, and the controller would cost another $300 to $500. Printers? - a standard Centronics printer with a 9x9 dot matrix would cost about $1500 and adding a printer port to your computer would cost $150-$300. I had a TRS-80 screen printer, a device that burned dots on rolls of metallic paper 4 inches wide and only cost me $499 (used). When I finally could afford a floppy drive and controller I bought Radio Shack's TRS-DOS disk operating system, which cost me $79. It was a real pain to use so I bought NEWDOS80, which cost $199. There was a special version of CP/M for the TRS-80, but it cost $599 and required 32K to run in. The OS prices for Apple computers were similar - the basic APPLE-DOS was cheap and often bundled with the drive and controller - while more powerfull packages could cost almost as much as the entire computer.

So basically, a decent DOS cost a half-month's salary for a E-2 back in 79. If that trend had continued, that would mean that Windows XP Home would have cost $700 in 2002. Anyone can look around and see that has not happened. Windows could cost hundreds more and it seems nobody would be surprised if Bill Gates charged that much - but he doesn't. Back in the middle to late 80's before Windows was a big draw, IBM charged $149 for the IBM-specific DOS compared to $89 for MS-DOS or $59 for DR-DOS. How does that compare to hardware at the time? A serial two button mouse cost $79, a 3.5in floppy was $99 and a 14in VGA monitor cost $600-$1000.

The OS is the single most important piece of software on any system. If it doesn't work, nothing does. I shake my head in wonder at people that complain about paying $100 to $200 for their computer OS and yet gladly plunk down $40-$50 a shot for video games. The young airman that I work with spent $1600+ on tires and rims for his Honda, which is $1200 over what stock wheels would have cost. Twelve hundred dollars purely for show - and then complains that $179 for the upgrade version of WIN XP PRO is too expensive.

Does Microsoft sell buggy software - sure - do they work to fix it - yes. Can they fix it as fast as we break it - not a chance. Could Windows be as stable as a MAC OS - sure if it only had to support a limited number of configurations like the MAC does.

Is Bill Gates good or bad - I don't know how it is east of the Rockies, but out west you would be hard pressed to find a college or hospital that hasn't received funds from a Bill Gates foundation. He gives away more money every year than Michael Jordan would make in a lifetime.

Oh, and if you want a secure and stable operating system, UNIX is behind OpenVMS. Being the best isn't saving OpenVMS though.

[iceblue]

very well said.

[mireland]

Originally posted by iceblue
very well said.

I can't believe there are people who fight tooth and nail for Bill Gates..

[KenKeith]

I can't believe there are people who fight tooth and nail for Bill Gates..

I don't recognize anyone defending (no need) Gates. The comments report the facts, and there is a comparative analysis that cover a specific time line. The figures speak and people can judge for themselves.

Would the dynamics of the computer evolution be cheaper/better without Gates? Who can say? But I am not complaining about prices, and I have purchased every O/S from W95 to XP. But users can remain with W95 without a changing everytime there is a new version. (kernal for XP).

[mireland]

Originally posted by KenKeith

I don't recognize anyone defending (no need) Gates. The comments report the facts, and there is a comparative analysis that cover a specific time line. The figures speak and people can judge for themselves.

Would the dynamics of the computer evolution be cheaper/better without Gates? Who can say? But I am not complaining about prices, and I have purchased every O/S from W95 to XP. But users can remain with W95 without a changing everytime there is a new version. (kernal for XP).

I'm sorry but people who don't complain about Bill Gates prices have an unlimited income!! Some of us don't have 300 dollars to buy an OS that cost $50-$100 at the most to come up with...Hell He's probably charging you 100 bucks just for the stupid box!