CompuServe Messages

Don, that's an assumption, not a fact…. and I disagree with it. If IBM hadn't introduced what was not only _old_ technology, but a technology that demonstrably _reduces_ a programmers ability to create programs above a certain size, we would be FAR ahead of where we are now. All those programmers, working with shackles on their keyboards… <shaking head> What makes you think someone else wouldn't have gone where IBM went – and probably done it right? Hmmm? IBMs acceptance was partially their name, but the market was ripe for a reliable, carefully engineered machine, which is what IBM gave them. They jsut saw it first. You think pet rocks made it because what's-his-name innvented them? Nah, if you had invented them, the _same_ people would have bought them. The _market_ was there. It's jsut our sorry state that IBM got there first, is all. I'm inclined to agree (sort of) with one point you made – we probably wouldn't have the Amiga, or the Amiga as it is today… we'd probably have more bitplanes, the _dope_ who limited the addressing capability to 8mb would be hanging in chains in some dungeon, or writing "I will implement the entire address range in my next design 2^32 times on a blackboard somewhere in the institute for Mentally crippled engineers, right alongside the pinhead who arbitrarily limited the color specifier in EXEC to 8 bits… We'd for sure have a higher-end processor, and I feel reasonably certain that chips for blitting and so on wouldn't be limited to tiny areas of memory (Talk about _stupid_…) like they are today. IBM. <sticking finger down throat> –Ben–