Re: Seeing VERSIONINFO under Vista?

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"Daniel James" <wastebasket@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:VA.000010da.133a1170@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In particular, I blame IBM for not understanding that the PC was NOT a "niche
product" -- I bet a lot of IBM execs have blamed themselves for that, over the
years, too.

This is all a little unfair of me

I think it probbaly is - but I bet one or two then at IMB now have 20-20 hind sight as you suspect :-)

I remember waiting for "home computers" to become available at reasonable prices. For some time I was holding out until I could get a machine with 1MB RAM for £100. I reckoned that would be powerful enough at an affordable price which wouldn't be too big a loss if it was useless.

In the end I relented by factor 6 and got 0.5MB for £300 - an Atari ST520 with the Mark Williams C compiler. I added other stuff to it (like a box the size of two conflake packets containing a hard drive) but in the end I found it not powerful enough for my ambitions and bought a 486-66 with 5MB RAM and the then new-fangled Windows 3.1 and the Borland C++ compiler which was much more affordable than Microsoft's.

All this started becoming attractive to me (and I guess many others) rather slowly and gradually, so it isn't that surprising that initially IBM did not foresee the desktop revolution, even if they *were* in at the start of it. In fact surely one of the main factors which resulted in the dominance of the PC with Windows is that IBM made the hardware spec public so that anyone could build them. If they'd had their eyes on PC$s then that may not have happened, making them more expensive, and slower to catch on?

Dave
--
David Webber
Author of 'Mozart the Music Processor'
http://www.mozart.co.uk
For discussion/support see
http://www.mozart.co.uk/mzusers/mailinglist.htm


.

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