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Paul Allen has died at age 65:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/15/paul-allen-co-founder-microsoft-dies
Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with his childhood friend Bill Gates, has died. He was 65.
Allen's company Vulcan said in a statement that he died Monday. Earlier this month Allen said the cancer he was treated for in 2009, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, had returned.
Allen, who was an avid sports fan, owned the Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks.
Of course the article has more information. There was more to Paul Allen that just mentioned above. Bound to hit multiple sources with different takes so be on the lookout for something from a source you like.
takyon: Allen Institute bio and Vulcan Inc. statement.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @09:07AM (3 children)
Xenix, MS's version of Unix, was a Microsoft aim from early days. As a project it pre-dated DOS, which was bought only as a stopgap to secure the foothold on the IBM PC, and Xenix as the successor to DOS remained an aim until superseded by the OS/2 project.
Unfortunately the public just continued to suck up DOS, so in the end MS just decided to put a GUI on DOS, which, in its earlier days, was the can of worms called WIndows.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 16 2018, @09:39AM (2 children)
Unfortunately the public just continued to suck up DOS, so in the end MS just decided to put a GUI on DOS, which, in its earlier days, was the can of worms called WIndows.
Your looking at it from the wrong direction. I hope that is not intentional. There was never any pull from the public. The push was from the OEMs due to the illegal per-processor fees [www.ecis.eu] (warning for PDF) that forced the OEMs to pay for DOS for each PC sold regardless of OS.
Allen himself was a patent troll [businessinsider.com], known for suing everyone over anything [wired.com]. That is on top of the damage he did to the industry through spreading M$ products. He, Gates, Ballmer, Myhrvold, and the others there have held the industry back a few decades. They need to be taken to task over that.
As for his "buddies", Gates and Ballmer, they were plotting behind his back to rob him [techrights.org] once they learned he was ill and probably would die soon.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Nuke on Tuesday October 16 2018, @12:57PM (1 child)
It was push and pull. DOS and Windows were generally pre-installed, so the buyer bought apps that ran on DOS or Windows, and after that the buyer resisted any change of OS that broke their apps. Eg, Windows 9x was only kept going for years because so many games and consumer-grade printers* would not run on anything else, not even on WinNT/XP that should have superseded Win9x by 1996/7.
* Those "Designed for Windows 95" stickers which gave Joe Public a warm feeling were really saying that the thing would not work with anything else.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Tuesday October 16 2018, @03:42PM
Let's not get too deep ino M$ revisionism. Those "Designed for Windows 95" stickers came with a lot of strings attached, at least for the software packages sprouting such nonsense. In order to develop for Windows 95 you had to also sign a contract to also develop for Windows NT. The latter contract came with a stipulation restricting development on any competing operating systems. That meant that MacOS and GNU/Linux could not be developed by the same teams. Few software houses were willing or able to support three isolated development teams, so we know how that went. There's probably still someting at Groklaw about that.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.