Tim May writes:

(Caveat: I used Microsoft Basic on Intel MDS systems (8080-based), circa 1977-78, bought a PC in the early 80s, bought "Microsoft Word" Version 1.00 when most people were buying Samna Word, Wordstar, and other such vanished products, and even bought the execrable, terrible, crufty, horrible "Windows 1.0" when it first came out, circa 1984. And for my Macintosh, I bought Microsoft Word 1.05 and used it for many years in various versions. I currently use no Microsoft products on a daily basis.)

I remember MS Word 1.0 for MS DOS. It was the first crude WYSYWYG on the CGA: it displayed primitive boldface and italics on screen, unlike most other word processors of that era that mostly used markup languages. I used Windows .9beta quite heavily and even wrote some primitive GUI hacks using the SDK. One of them was a front-end to a DES encoder/decoder. It has 3 areas for entering a key: as text, as hex, and as binary; updating one area immediately updated the other 2. That was circa 83 or even 82. Of course all the APIs are different under newer windows. Anybody cares to see it? Of course, Windows 1.x and 2.x were a miserable failure in the marketplace because the requisite hardware wasn't there yet. So was VisiOn, but Windows had bill gates support. 3.0 was moderately successful; 3.1 was actually profitable. Microsoft lost a lot of bets before this product line finally took off. Microsoft spent a lots of money on the "Bob" project which was a complete failure. I also got OS/2 1.0 from Microsoft in 1988, together with the Microsoft/Ahton Tate SQL server (based on Sybases's). SYBS stupidly sold their pricey product to microsoft, figuring the micro market would never be of use to SYBS. Microsoft then decided to pull the rug from under its OS/2 users, so I switched to IBM OS/2.

The appearance of Ralph Nader, Jamie Love, and executives of Netscape (who are miffed that _their_ attempted monopoly is being threatened by MS!), in the (ironic) "Microsoft Bash," along with opportunistic actions by various states' attorney generals, and with judges imposing million dollar a day fines.....

Well, it's all a familiar pattern. I hate to say it, but read parts of "Atlas Shrugged" to see this piling on, this "taking down the successful a few notches" behavior.

I hate to admit it, but I agree with Timmy on this one.

Attila T. Hun is, for some reason, bashing MS a lot. I'll use one of his posts to make some specific points:

If Hitler gasses Goebbels, would you object?

At 10:15 AM -0700 12/21/97, Attila T. Hun wrote:

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge Friday told Microsoft Corp. he easily uninstalled the company's Web browser without breaking Windows 95 and ordered company officials to explain why they could not do the same. "Windows 95 functioned flawlessly" with Internet Explorer uninstalled, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson told Microsoft.

mistake #1: dont piss off a federal judge --let alone try to show that he is ignorant.

If IE does include some important bug fixes for the OS (like MS Office does), then Microsoft ought to make these patches available as OS patches and not bundle them with other products. "Ought to" doesn't mean it's illegal for them to only bundle...

PC makers like Compaq, Dell, Gateway, etc., are in fact perfectly free to bundle Netscape Navigator (or whatever the Do Everything version is called) with their systems. Microsoft is then perfectly free, in a free society, to say "Fine, then don't put Windows on your machines."

Ah, but they'd rather sell their hardware with a bunch of pre-installed software, and charge the poor consumer for it. If you buy an IBM Thinkpad, they refuse to sell it without Windows 95 preinstalled, and America Online software (probably charged for it), and a bunch of Lotus software (123, some wordprocess, etc); even if the first thing you intend to do is to reformat the hard disk and instal Linux. In an ideal world, MSFT would be free to refuse to sell its OS to hardware makers because they're owned by gooks; to demand that the hardware makers pay MSFT a licence fee for every piece of hardware they sell, whether or not they included Win95 with it; and to insist that the hardware makers include a big disclaimer saying they don't support Netscape products as a condition for getting an MSFT licence. But we're not living in a free country.

Customers can then make their choices. Or can buy Windows in the nearest software store. The way it used to be done.

They refuse to sell "bare hardware" because they get part of the profit on selling it with the software pre-installed: typically not just the OS, but a bunch of useless apps that most users never use. Likewise try to buy a scanner without a bundled useless Windows software that's "supposed" to go with a scanner; or a color printer without bundled finger-painting software for Windows; or a modem without bundled "communications software" (which almost always includes a Netscape browser). You can't avoid paying for the media and the license to this useless shit.

Yielding to pressure from the court, MS is now allowing PC makers to also include Netscape Navigator. Well, none have yet elected to do so...quite probably because Netscape is _charging_ for this, and MS is not.

They would if the consumers demanded it. Of course the consumers can get netscape for free if they want it. Lots of folks use their computers for more productive work than interenet browsing and don't want any browser at all.

(To Ralph Nader, and perhaps even to Attila, that MS is _giving_ away its browser, free for the download and free to the PC vendors, is itself a crime.)

Sure - unfair competition. :-) They'll go after GNU and linux too, given time. Remember how Ziff-Davis publications refused to acknowledge the exietence of free software or sharewre (and mostly still do)? Remember the talk about licencing software developers?

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this is my one big fear: the DOJ will accept a plea bargain like they did last time and it will be back to business as usual for M$ --and they will be back in court within a year having gained even more horizontal and vertical control of the entire communications and information industries --and claiming again that they are misunderstood --and complying with the order, etc.

Customers are voting with their pocketbooks. They like the MS offerings more than they like the competing offerings...of which there are still many.

Microsoft has gone through many failures before they finally came up with products that consumers preferred. Microsoft benefited from very stupid mistakes made by IBM and Sybase and Digital Research at various times, but they've made pelnty of stupid mistakes of their own. Right now they're being rewarded for trying many product only some of which sold well.

(Macintosh, Unix in several flavors (incl Linux), and loyal followings for older OSes. Sun and Oracle and others are pushing for Java-based systems to obsolete the MS products. This is a major struggle which analyses about Microsoft's "domination" seem to ignore.)

Java's dead. However no one is preventing Atilla from writing e.g. a word processor superior to MS Word and letting it compete in the marketplace.

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there is only one solution to organizations like M$ which are operated without ethics: treat them to the pleasures of not only the antitrust laws but the exquisite delights of RICO.

I cannot understand how Attila can so enthusiastically support this. His "exquisite delights" even recalls Torquemada and the Inquistion. A suitable term for what is being to MS, in my view.

I have mixed feelings about this... MS is a turd of the same shitpile as DOJ, Ralph Nader, and Nescape. If one of them fucks another one of them in the ass, as opposed to fucking an innocent bystander, we can gloat.

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M$ is a cancer; it has fully metasticized and is gorging itself at the banquet of the vanquished.

Ralph Nader would probably be interested in hiring ATH as a speech writer.

Given free competition, MSFT would go wither away and die under its own weight. Look at the stupidity they've unleashed in Windows 98: * yet another user interface (while people are still retraining from 3.1 to W95/NT4) * No support for NTFS, but yet another wasteful file system (FAT32) [This is really something. It's hard to fine a disk drive under 2GB these days and the FAT filesystem is extremely inefficient on it. Instead of supporting NT's NTFS (fairly fast and efficient; similar to OS/2 HPFS in many respects :-), MSFT introduces yet another filesystem, that's actually slower than the 16-bot FAT and wastes more disk storage in unsused clusters than any I've ever seen)

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anyway, just think where M$ would be with Royce today! Gate$ and Ballmer might be down at the local MCC for a few free 3 hots and a cot, all expenses paid, "enjoying" a well earned vacation from screwing all of us.

I take it that ATH means that because something like 20 or 30 million Americans chose to buy Windows 95 (and thus gain the benefits we Macintosh users have had for many years :-}) that this means "we" were screwed?

In a sense, yes - if everyone freely chooses to use Windows 95 and not, say, OS/2, and as the result the companies that developed software for OS/2 go bankrupt (as most of them indeed did :-), and then there's no application software for OS/2, then OS/2 users like myself are indeed screwed. And it is Microsoft's fault for offering a more popular product; or perhaps IBM's fault for fucking up OS/2.

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Other than the usual ills of a monopoly, what really irks anyone with a modicum of intelligence is that Gate$ intends to migrate the entire package for the benefit of the couch potatoes; Gate$ intends to dictate not only what we use to view his trash, but that only his trash is splashed.

Why not pick on Intel? Intel is, if anything, even more of a "monopoly" than MS is. While customers have some reasonable choices in OSes (Windows/NT, Unix, Linux, Macintosh, AmigaOS, Inferno, Java-based developments, etc.), the fact is that all of the surviving OSes are being ported to the Intel platform (pace recent announcements by Sun that Solaris will be on Merced at its rollout in 1999, and earlier announcements by H-P, DEC, and IBM along the same lines).

Although I always buy Intel CPUs (afraid of compatability problems), there are now plenty of clones from AMD, Cyrix, and IBM. Back in 8088 days I avoided using Intel and insisted on the NEC clone. Intel's architecture is very popular, but it's not necessary running on intel-made chips, or (more relevantly) chips whose sales give Intel revenues.

But neither MS nor Intel are "monopolies." They are just the People's Choice. Which always tends to cluster...the big really do get bigger. For awhile, at least, until the paradigm shifts and the big can't adapt quickly enough.

The way Microsoft seems to be unable to adapt to large hard disks :-)

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After the hearing Friday, Christine Varney, a former Federal Trade Commissioner now representing Netscape, was jubilant. "I think the judge has understood the seriousness of the issue," she said.

she had every reason to be jubilant --so far. even if the judge did not fully understand the technological bullshit M$ was trying to slide on by, the judge fully understands that M$ was trying to blind pitch him --and insulting him to boot.

Of _course_ she's jubilant! Netscape wants its "rightfully-earned monopoly" back! Has anyone forgotten that in 1995 it was looking like Netscape would be on 95% of all desktops, Windows, Mac, and Unix, and that it was turning into the Big Bad Monopoly? Are memories really that short?

Netscape has been using its legal manouvers to attempt to stop Microsoft from horning in on _its_ monopoly.

(I hate using the term "monopoly," but if critics of MS are going to use it, hey, when in Rome....)

I should also mention that Netscape was engaging in pretty nasty (although legal) behavior by "enhancing" its browser to support non-standard HTML extensions; some assholes uses these extensions on their web sites and then theycould only be browser properly with a Netscape browser.

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Microsoft stock closed at $128.69, down $2.19 on NASDAQ, where it was among the most active issues.

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yes, down almost 20 points since their fiasco with the DOJ started. before it's over, I hope to see M$ listed with the junk bonds and issues --in the penny stocks.

Yep, sort of the way Netscape stock went from its IPO price of around $25 (in today's shares) to $80 when it looked like Netscape Navigator and related products were going to be the Next Big Monopoly....and then plummeted down to the $30-40 range as it appeared this was not the way things were going to turn out....

Netscape stock is currently at $27 3/4, just about where it began trading in '95.

I haven't look at NSCP's reports at all, but I presume most of their revenues comes from their server sales, not the browser licenses?

Perhaps the graphics chip companies facing extinction as Intel puts massive graphics capabilities into new chips can sue on antitrust grounds and get a "special master" to dictate to Intel what features it may put into chips?

it's funny that you mention this: I was just talking to someone who mentioned that Lockheed-Martin is threatening INTC with anti-trust if Intel puts graphics features in its chipsets that would hurt the sales some Lockheed-Martin subsidiary. I suppose S3, Dimond multimedia, et al will b happy to join.

(Certainly the long-departed Weitek might have survived a few more years had Ralph Nader turned his unsafe at any speed attention to the floating point processing market and gotten an injunction against Intel putting onboard floating point instructions into the 486.)

Hmm - having used Weitek chips a lot (alongside Intel 386's) I doubt very much that Intel's integrating the floating point unit into the 486 contributed much to its demise. I personally quit using Weiteks when I discovered that their double precision operations were about 10 times slower than single precision, and in fact slower than ab Intel 80387 co-processor!

I cannot understand how any Cypherpunk can be advocating interference in the market the way Attila and a few others are doing.

Making jokes about Bill Gates is one thing, just harmless fun. But advocating the Men with Guns (TM) seize control of the products he offers to uncoerced customers is simply wrong.

best scenario: men with guns die from AIDS second best: men with guns shoot each other worst: men with guns shoot innocent bystanders MSFT is no innocent bystander. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

my understanding of the current MS debate is not flawless-- it's got a lot of minutia that's hard to follow. however: what TCM fails to mention is a basic point: MS signed an agreement a few years ago or whatever that they would not bundle their browser with their OS, win95. now MS is having second thoughts, and trying to weasel out of the contract by setting up a system in which the consumer is supposedly requesting the browser integration via the licensing agreement. the Justice department is doing nothing but enforcing a contract that MS itself signed. it seems pretty clear that MS is breaching its own contract. whether that contract was signed under duress, or the Justice dept is unfairly targeting MS, are valid questions but not wholly relevant to the current debate. if MS felt it was being persecuted it should have mounted that defense before it signed the contract on its own volition. personally, I have said before: I think Gates is finding that in todays business world, cooperation is as important as competition. the new climate has been described as "co-operatition" and other words. Gates has made many enemies in his megalomaniacal rise to power. make no mistake-- if you read books that discuss the behind-the-scenes, under-the-rock, behind-the-superficial-pr atmosphere of the company, the unmistakable conclusion is that Gates is something of a tyrant bent on world software domination. he has very few friends, and those that he might think are his friends are really just sycophants who are afraid of him. capitalism involves many freedoms. one of those freedoms involves doing business with companies that one prefers, not necessarily for rational reasons. i.e. if people begin to hate MS and abandon their products even if they are superior and priced better, that's within the system to do so. I personally think this is increasingly happening. there are also a lot of stories that Gates has stabbed companies in the back in deals in which he is supposedly "cooperating" or having "strategic alliances" with. this is way beyond the initial IBM thing. these rumors, which probably have some grounding in reality, will make his business more difficult and have already done so. in particular, Bill's inability to cooperate is evidenced in the company's clear-cut strategy of trying to undermine Java. what's interesting is that his company could just as easily make lots of money by embracing the standard, even without owning it themselves. there's a lot of bitterness being generated by their veiled opposition to it. programmers are far from stupid. Bill doesn't realize how few real friends he really has. he has made the mistake of thinking that business and cooperation are mutually exclusive. he'll pay the price.

Tim May writes:

At 1:53 PM -0700 12/27/97, Patrick May wrote:

...

The President should issue an executive order mandating that all government agencies immediately remove all Microsoft operating systems from their machines, to be replaced with Linux. All Microsoft products should be eliminated as well. The standard text format should be LaTeX. All businesses receiving money from government contracts should be required to use the same tools. [ . . . ]

Much to be said for this "free market solution." Certainly the Justice Department has no business screaming "monopoly!" if it's still "standardizing" on MS products. [ . . . ] On the other hand, requiring _any_ language, program, or OS is probably a mistake. If the Arctic Cartography Office wants to keep using its Macs, why should some bureaucrat force them to scrap their Macs and use Linux?

(Yeah, yeah, a form of Linux, MK-Linux, runs on Macs. But Adobe Photoshop doesn't run under Linux. And Mathematica doesn't run under Linux for the Mac (last I checked). And so on. The point is, why standardize at the end of a gun?)

Okay, so I'm a UNIX-head; I forgot about the Macs (a dangerous thing to do, given the ferocity of their supporters). If the government were to adopt my suggestion, two major results would be: - The third party market for Linux software would grow rapidly and enormously. - The government's software budget would be reduced dramatically. I consider both of these to be Good Things (tm). The government wouldn't be forcing anything at the point of a gun, they'd simply be making a financially responsible vendor selection (hey, there's a first time for everything). Our tax dollars shouldn't be wasted on substandard software when superior, cheaper alternatives exist. Regards, Patrick May S P Engineering, Inc.

landon dyer writes:

At 03:47 AM 12/29/97 -0800, you wrote:

...

[lots of linux-vs-microsoft stuff deleted, then:]

- The third party market for Linux software would grow rapidly and enormously. - The government's software budget would be reduced dramatically.

I consider both of these to be Good Things (tm). The government wouldn't be forcing anything at the point of a gun, they'd simply be making a financially responsible vendor selection (hey, there's a first time for everything). Our tax dollars shouldn't be wasted on substandard software when superior, cheaper alternatives exist.

i haven't touched unix or linux in a long time, but i submit that your ordinary GS-4 secretary can deal with microsoft word a lot more efficiently than s/he can deal with vi/emacs/latex. i assume there are better tools available on *ix platforms these days, which actually destroys my argument:

do you really want the government to be more efficient? :-)

This has no bloody crypto relevance, but the Applix word processor is just as easy to use as Microsoft Word. (And somebody should write a better free clone of MS Word as a student project.) Moreover I've some extremely stupid people successfully trained to use (character-mode) Wordperfect. --- Dr.Dimitri Vulis KOTM Brighton Beach Boardwalk BBS, Forest Hills, N.Y.: +1-718-261-2013, 14.4Kbps

This is largely a matter of personal preference (i.e., religious), but I'll say why I think Wm. Geiger's claims are unconvincing. At 9:58 PM -0700 12/29/97, William H. Geiger III wrote:

Lets see how many years before winblows were there computers??

It may be hard to believe for some of the "youngsters" on the list but people got quite a bit of work done before the fancy GUI's and the ever insistent push to "upgrade" every six months by Micky$loth.

The real boom in productivity has to do with users not having to memorize various command sequences for various programs. What the Macintosh made popular (though I won't get into the dangerous ground of saying it pioneered these ideas--see Note below) was the approach of having a relatively consistent set of commands across many applications. And with the commands visible in a menu bar. (Note: The Symbolics and Xerox Lisp/Smalltalk machines I used in the early 80s had similar features, with pop-up menus of commonly used commands. And, of course, with even heavier use of object-oriented methodologies than the Mac could afford to include. The idea of a unified, integrated environment is an old one, going back at least to Doug Engelbart in the 60s, and perhaps even further back. And the Bobrow book, "Design of Interactive Programming Environments," laid out most of the features we now call "GUI." Or some people call "GUI.") The effect of this all is profound. It means that a manager or secretary or whatever doesn't need to write down a bunch of funny commands for Wordstar, or Emacs, or Autocad...he or she can "muddle through" just by going to the "File" menu item to open files, save them, make copies, etc. Or to the "Edit" menu item to make changes, cut and paste, alter fonts, whatever. Specialists in some particular program of course become proficient even without a GUI or Menu-based system. But of course most GUI programs (Mac, of course, and Windows, and most Unices) offer various keyboard shortcuts. Maybe Wm. Geiger and others dismiss GUI or Menu interfaces as "training wheels." Perhaps. But it's very useful to have such aids when dealing with 5 or 10 or 30 different programs! (I started out on a Data General Nova, got a Proc Tech Sol as my first PC, then a VAX, then an IBM PC, then a Symbolics 3600 Lisp Machine, then a Mac, and so on. With my PC, moving from one program to another was always painful, and I had various keyboard overlays (remember those?) to help me transition from the "Cmd-Shift-Backspace" to select a word in BlueWord 1.00A to "Shift-Doubleclick" to do the same thing in SpreadSheet 1.5. Once I got my Macintosh, this all ended. No more keyboard overlays...they weren't needed.)

A well train and experienced secretary will be much more productive with a text-mode WP with a good set of macro's and keyboard accelerators. A mouse and a GUI is not only unnecessary but counter-productive.

Which of course explains why corporations are not using Windows or Macs! I disagree strongly that any corporation is more productive, overall, with such tools. Granted, a fast typist equipped with some special purpose text entry system (we used to have Laniers and Wangs as our "secretary engines"), but that typist will not be constrained by typing in a GUI window! But of course most companies, especially larger high tech companies, don't even have secretaries to type and retype letters, memos, and reports. Engineers, and even managers, and even very senior managers, type most of their own stuff these days. (Or so all my friends in Silicon Valley assure me.) I started typing all my own technical papers into my own IBM PC back in '83, using the first version of Microsoft Word. While it is true that I was being paid to be a scientist, and not a typist, it was far faster for me to write the papers on my PC, edit them, and so on, than to submit a longhand (arghh!) copy to a secretary, finagle to get her to work on it, get it back several days later, find numerous errors I had not put there, and even missing sentences and paragraphs. And so on. This experience of mine has been repeated millions of times in corporate America. Even my old boss, Andy Grove, now types all of his correspondence, which is now mostly e-mail. Or so he claims. In this environment, where people at all levels are using multiple programs--e-mail, word processing, drawing, spreadsheets, math programs, graphing programs, Web browsers, and so on--it is much more efficient to have an integrated environment, a common set of basic commands, a GUI.

I would take a good multi-threaded, multi-tasking, text mode system over the drivile that keeps comming out of Redmond, WA. anyday.

I think the quality of lack of quality of word processors is grossly overrated. Most features are not used in ordinary writing. I write a *lot* of stuff, and 99% of what I write is completely nondependent on bells and whistles in most word processing programs. (I could digress into discussing writing features I like to use for some projects, such as MORE's outlining features, or page layout features I use in FrameMaker. But 99% of my writing is now done for e-mail like this, using the straightforward text tools of Eudora Pro.) Most writing is done "typewriter style," with the ability to move words around just lagniappe. (And often dangerous lagniappe at that...most errors creep in when people move words and sentences around, often leaving them mismatching their surroundings in tense and awkwardly linking to often leaving them mismatching often leaving them mismatching...see what I mean?) Good writing comes from good writers, not from word processing programs. Those who can't put a decent argument together will not find solace in some "good multi-threaded, multi-tasking, text mode system." --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."

At 1:39 AM -0700 12/30/97, David Miller wrote:

This list was "supposed" to be about issues other than os bitches and gun talk.

Hey, try learning to _edit_. You foolishly included my entire article, .sig lines and all, before adding your little gem of wisdom. Learn to include only what is needed to reestablish context, or for specific discussion.

I called vi the best to shut this shit up. Let's talk about some (new) real cypherpunk shit. Not TEOTWAWKI like misc.survivalism. Ok, but give me a break.

Another illiterate discovers the Cypherpunks list, and then presumes to tell _us_ what the "purpose" of it is. A great many things are talked about. Learn to use a kill file, or to delete what you don't want to read. If you think the "purpose" of the list is, as some do, to talk about what a neat book "Applied Cryptography" is, or where to get a copy of PGP, then, fine, talk about that. Like so many yokels do. Even better, go back to where you came from. --Tim May The Feds have shown their hand: they want a ban on domestic cryptography ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^2,976,221 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."