Jack Stein wrote in a message to Roy J. Tellason:

 JS> Roy J. Tellason wrote in a message to Jack Stein:

 JS> I have WIN95 installed and my wife and kids occasionally use it 
 JS> for some stupid crap that doesn't run on anything but WIN.

 RJT> Same here.    Though I'm not even gonna consider upgrading 
 RJT> the w95 machine here to 98,  much less that new version that's 
 RJT> out there...

 JS> You will be forced to upgrade eventually, just like you were 
 JS> forced to install WIN95 to begin with.

Nope!  For one thing I already *have* w98 here on cdrom,  and choose not to
install it on there.  For another I didn't choose to install w95 on that
machine,  it was on there when we got it.  Along with a whole bunch of baggage 
pertaining to its former corporate owners (a corporation that effectively
doesn't exist any more as such) and lots of fun stuff like references to
network drives that it's not connected to,  etc.  I had a lot of fun ripping
that junk out of the registry,  and I'm not quite done yet.

 JS> You and I, and most of us here would choose never to see a WIN 
 JS> logo on any screen on earth, yet we all run it, either at home 
 JS> along side OS/2, or at work.

I _had_ a w98 box.  That drive has been pulled (more as a matter of saving me
some time just in case I want to fire it up for some reason) and that machine
is now running Linux.  What's currently here in terms of machines is this:

   cpu      ram   OS             Function

1 5x86/133  16M   dos-dv&OS/2    bbs (this box)
2 486dx2/66  8M   dos&win311     games
3 P200      64M   Linux          development, file server, 'net (eventually)
4 486dx2/66 40M   OS/2 only      bbs configuration,  possibly cdrom server
5 P66       16M   w95            games, recreation,  WP,  print server

That should give a pretty good indication of what my priorities are.

 JS> For example, wife bought a travel guide book for our vacation 
 JS> and it came with a CD that attempts to tell you the fastest, 
 JS> shortest, most senic routes to places.  It only runs in WIN95 of
 JS> course.

 RJT> Typical.  Those folks will learn,  eventually.  If their 
 RJT> software is of such limited appeal that they end up putting it 
 RJT> in the back of a book (seems to be happening to a lot of people 
 RJT> these days),  then they may be more approachable to supporting 
 RJT> other formats,  or at least providing source or maybe an API to 
 RJT> let others get to the data.

 JS> That will not happen unless or until WIN no longer totally 
 JS> dominates the desktop.  That will not happen I'm afraid.

It's already started.

 JS> There was a good opportunity from 1991 to 1995, but IBM made 
 JS> certain it did NOT happen.

IBM decided that _they_ were not going to do that to the market place,  no
doubt because of the impact that such a decision would have had on other
things that IBM was doing.  IBM also has refrained from a lot of things with
the hardware,  too,  and look what happened -- they LOST their domination of
that part of the market early on.

 RJT> Reminds me of the guy I used to work with -- 24 years old (I'm 
 RJT> now twice that age) and he considered himself to be "the best 
 RJT> technician in there" because he'd "immersed himself in w98 and 
 RJT> now knew it inside and out",  though I did see him get stumped 
 RJT> a couple of times and have absolutely no clue as to how to 
 RJT> proceed from there.  This guy was the "sales manager" of this 
 RJT> retail computer store, which is now closed up.

 JS> I'm sure he had no trouble finding another job.  WIN dominates 
 JS> totally.

Before that job he worked at a car dealer in the area.  

 JS> I guess thats how it is everywhere today....

 RJT> I'm sure that it seems like "everywhere",  but it's not as bad 
 RJT> as all that.  Only looks that way sometimes because they 
 RJT> dominate the personal marketplace for the most part.

 JS> No Roy, they dominate the marketplace, not just the "personal" 
 JS> market place.



They're not that important _here_.  And apparently in a number of other places 
as well.  I was rather pleased,  a while back,  when I was watching the news
and heard an item to the effect that,  in spite of much "courting" on the part 
of m$,  the government department in Mexico that had the final say as to what
was going into all of the schools in that country had decided on something
else,  instead.  (I guess they were upset about the bribes paid?  :-)  I
didn't know what it was at the time,  but "gnome" is a window manager that
runs with X,  the base OS being Linux!  Old billyboy had a most unhappy
expression on his face that day.

Without a serious study of the numbers,  and a lot of that coming from places
outside of this country,  I'm just not going to accept that point above as
fact.

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