On 2018-11-07 12:11 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 so they didn't catch up as
much as they improved upon Apple's archaic design.

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. 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.

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.

As was
Commodore's OS, but that's another story.

actually, not as much, but the key problem was it had very little
software available compared to mac, dos and windows. software
developers were not interested.

In comparison, sure. THAT is a correct statement especially the further
users got into the lifespan of a Commodore Amiga machine. However, fewer
titles does not translate into a machine being completely ignored by the
public or developers either.

it was mostly ignored. not zero, but close enough.

That's a much fairer assessment.

--
SilverSlimer
Proud recipient of special entitlements and fierce adversary of equal rights
Minds: @silverslimer