Re: About standards and politics (sorry, I had to fix it :-)

["Bud Beckman" <n7su@micron.net>]

Jean wrote

>I had a Betamax.  What killed it was the fact Sony tried to keep it
>proprietary.  That meant that there were more VHS available, so more
>VHS users, so more videoclubs and then people stopped buying Beat
>because the nearest place where thay could hire Betamax movies was ten
>miles away.  And Beta died.

Because VHS was not proprietary, it was cheaper to buy because of the
competition amoung the makers of VHS. Sony held to a higher standard and
a higher price and lost market. Consumers were eventually stuck with an
inferior product. A la MS.
>
>
>DOS was as difficult to use as Unix.  But PCs were cheap.

I'd disagree, DOS was simple because all that was necessary was to put a
disk in the disk drive, turn on the computer, wait, pull the disk out,
put in the disk you wanted to use, such as Word Perfect, type WP and
viola, a word processor. You had to set it up of course but the manuals
were simplified enough to get started. And that free telephone call to
Utah if you did not know what you were doing was a godsend to the new
user. WP lost out because it could not compete with MS, maybe if MS
allowed WP to have the code for Windoze?

A PC was not cheap in those days. Maybe I was just poor! A 320 K disk
drive was $250.

>But Linux is different: it is not expensive and that means home use,
>people who learn by themselves without anybody to soften the learning
>curve. Those Linux users need easiness of use as badly as DOS people
>in the eighties.

More so, Jean, more so.


Bud