On 2018-11-07 11:33 p.m., nospam wrote:
In article , SilverSlimer
wrote:

Windows was DOS with a pre-built menu system plus a few simple to use
settings (such as customising the menus for different users). It was
essentially useless until 3.x.

win 3.x was only slightly better than earlier versions. as i said,
windows '95 was when it was actually usable.

Not true, essentially since many companies at the time used Windows 3.11
for their businesses and some still use it to this day.

win 3.x was only slightly better than dos. it wasn't until win '95 when
windows took off because only then was it functionally better than what
existed before.

put another way, win '95 caught up to where mac os was a decade earlier.

microsoft word and excel were on a mac long before they were on windows.

True about the first part, but Windows 95 was actually a much better
operating system than the Mac OS of the time

no, it definitely wasn't.

so they didn't catch up as
much as they improved upon Apple's archaic design.

mac os wasn't archaic in the least and was well ahead of what existed
at the time.

win95 & win98 still had dos under the hood.

It had DOS as much as it needed to since people, by using Windows 95,
were migrating from a massive platform onto a new one and still needed
some sort of assurance that their software would continue to operate.
Much of it could within Windows 9x, but some couldn't and being able to
load DOS to run it became necessary. However, 9x in general was more
capable than MacOS at the time and even Apple knew it. That's why they
started to develop Copland in response to it and eventually felt the
obligation to attempt to purchase BeOS. It didn't happen and they moved
onto NeXT.

There's more. FWIW, I preferred DOS over Windows, and OS/2 over both.
I liked Mac OS, but didn't like Apple's unwillingness to permit device
customisation beyond what they decided was acceptable. A DOS machine,
and hence Windows, was almost infinitely customisable.

complete nonsense.

apple did not stop *anyone* from customizing anything, and in fact, mac
os was designed to be tweaked and modified in all sorts of ways, with
full documentation as to how to do it.

because of that, a whole category of mac software and hardware existed,
doing things not possible on dos or windows.

That must be why Steve Jobs specifically stated that he wanted the Mac
to have proprietary ports, no internal expansion slots and an operating
system which looked the same no matter whose machine you were using. In
other words, that must be why Jobs did the exact opposite of what
Wozniak did with the Apple ][ whereupon he insisted on forcing people to
upgrade a whole computer to get one or two additional functions.

he didn't say that, the ports weren't proprietary, and nobody had to
upgrade a whole computer to get additional functions.

The original Mac line was very much proprietary.

it was not.

You clearly see the Mac's history with rose-coloured glasses and have a
skewed definition of proprietary.

Read the line about the
Macintosh 128k at Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_128K#Peripherals

Absolutely none of what the Macintosh included as ports was standard and
that's one of the many reasons you couldn't just buy any printer and had
to rely on whatever Apply would ship.

nonsense. the original mac used two industry standard rs422 serial
ports, a superset of rs232. wikipedia is wrong when it calls rs422
nonstandard.

as for printers, that required little more than writing a printer
driver, or putting postscript in the printer.

there were non-apple printers, although not that many early on since
writing a printer driver was fairly involved and printer companies were
still deciding whether supporting the mac was worth it from a business
perspective. apple did not prevent anything.

Yet, had Apple used the same ports as what the PC and other platforms
were using, chances are that the number of available printers would have
been multiplied. They purposely chose a different standard and limited a
customer's options.

in fact, the pinouts of the ports were documented in inside macintosh,
a book available in any bookstore, along with full documentation of mac
os. *anyone* could buy it, not just developers. the information was not
secret.

mac os was *very* customizable. anyone who claims otherwise doesn't
know what they're talking about, regurgitating the old myths.

You have a very bizarre idea of what proprietary means. It's not closed,
it's proprietary meaning that it belongs to Apple and is not shared by
other companies. Proprietary comes from the French word "propriété"
meaning that it has an owner which, in this case, is Apple. In the same
way that the Macintosh had proprietary connectors, so did the PCjr and
the PS/2 in the MCA internal expansion port.

apple did design quite a bit and the ip did belong to them, however,
the details were available for anyone to write apps or design hardware.

many companies did exactly that.

as i said, inside mac was sold in normal bookstores alongside other
computer books. *anyone* could buy a copy and start writing apps,
without apple even knowing about it, let alone approve it.

We're still at an impasse in regards to your definition of proprietary.
Proprietary does not prevent anyone from developing for a platform.
Windows is proprietary yet people develop for it all the time. However,
on the PC side, only the operating system is proprietary if you use
Windows and the hardware is very much standardized across the board,
unlike the original Mac and much of Apple's hardware going into the late
90s.

snip

--
SilverSlimer
Minds: @silverslimer