On Dec 8, 4:00 pm, Roy Schestowitz <newsgro...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Bizarre Windows promo video unleashed
Almost more like Windows porno video.
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | According to the actors, W-W-W-Windows/386's main selling point
> | is that it looks "just like OS/2", and it can even allow multitasking.
Amusing really, by the time OS/2 1.2 was released, it's user interface
was substantially better than that of Windows 386. As for getting a 4
page document, black-and-white only, pulled together in less than 4
hours, including the time required to install Windows 385 - I
seriously doubt it.
Maybe, if the line-art was already "cooked", and the chart were
already provided in the form of pre-programmed macros.
Of course, if the same task had been assigned to someone using SunOS
4.0, it would have taken 1 hour, and not only would the content be in
color, it would have been mass-distributed to all of the intended
recipients within an hour after that. It would also have been sent to
each of the major news-wire services, and would have been national
headlines before the market opened the following morning. T-Bone
Perkins wouldn't have stood a chance.
As it was, all she got done was a printed copy that was good enough
for a photocopy, and would still have taken about 3-5 days to
circulate via USPS mail.
What I didn't see was the "General Protection Fault" message that was
so common on Windows 386 machines, if they gave you a message at all,
or the hung Windows. And the "Word Processor" looked more like
notepad than Brief or even Word. Where was the WYSIWYG editor?
At least frame-maker let you view all the different types of content
in a single window, and converted that into a postscript file which
could be compressed using Limpel-Ziv compression. Of course, today,
we call that PDF.
Latex could generate the fully annotated graphics, and NROFF with TBL
could generate the nicely formatted tables. Awk could convert text
files in comma or other delimiter format into nice pretty tables,
complete with generated tbl to nroff or latex tables.
There was also encapsulated postscript, but if you wanted to edit your
own postscript picture, you could use the fig editor.
There was even this editor that was part of the Athena Project, it was
created with the Andrew Toolkit (AUIT), it was called EZ, it created
documents in SGML, which included embedded pictures (postscript or
GIF), spreadsheets, charts, and text, into a single document that
could be viewed very easily. The technology was funded by IBM,
Hewlett Packard, and Digital Equipment Corporation.
The amazing thing is that these same tools are available today, many
of them in very enhanced forms with improved user interfaces that have
easily exceeded the capabilities of their Windows counterparts.
> | It's easy to see how far we have come in twenty years of hardware
> | upgrades: Vista's main selling point, after all, is that it looks
> | just like OS/X and can it take advantage of multicore processors
> | to allow multitasking.
The irony of course being that SunOS supported multi-processor
systems, shared memory, and offered true multitasking (preemptive
multitasking), along with many other features just now being
introduced by Vista, back in 1990. Many of these features were
already there when Windows 386 was first announced.
I find it a bit amusing that Microsoft now claims that it is Linux
that is violating Microsoft patents, even though so much of Linux
technology predates Windows by as much as a decade or two.
> `----
>
> http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37252
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