Nineteen-ninety-eight changed the course of technology, which is to say that it changed the course of history. A nearly bankrupt relic of ’80s tech nostalgia released a gumdrop-shaped PC called the iMac. An innovative search engine originally known as BackRub became a company with an even stranger name. A fast-growing online bookstore hatched a plan to start selling, well, everything.
In hindsight, these were tectonic shifts, but they hardly registered as tremors compared to the earthquake emanating from Washington, D.C. On May 18, 1998, the U.S. Justice Department and 20 state attorneys general filed an antitrust suit against the most powerful tech company in America: Microsoft.
How the world has changed – now we look towards Brussels for monopoly-busting. In the current political climate I the US, it’s highly unlikely that technology companies today will be treated the same way Microsoft was 20 years ago.
I remember in the late 1990’s when a re-seller of Microsoft Small Business products had shown me flashy-printed Microsoft-supplied marketing material for marketing against Linux. Now, we have Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform supporting BSD/Linux operating systems and we have Microsoft accepting that open source operating systems are a reality.
I remember in 1996 after moving from C programming (32-bit Extended-DOS) to C++ programming (32-bit Slackware Distro from magazine CDs) on my Intel 386-DX33 (33 MHz !) white-box. I was very productive using the FVWM window manager (virtual desktop, xterms, terminal-based utilities for software construction, etc.) coupled with a fast and stable OS. There was no analog to the BSOD in Microsoft-land. Back then CD music was “in” and I remember running a simple GUI-based music-CD player program in the background during coding sessions.
I recently setup a couple of boxes for OpenGL-based game-engine research/programming; one for OpenGL 3.3 (2007 AMD AM2 dual-core 3 GHz, 8GB RAM, Quadro FX-580, 1 x 74GB WD SATA 10K RPM Raptor HDD) and one for OpenGL 4.5+ (2013 Intel i5-4570 3.6 GHz, 8 GB RAM, Geforce GTX 660, 2 x 74GB WD SATA 10K RPM Raptor HDDs). Both systems have “Debian 9” (Stretch) installed with XFCE window manager. I installed from a USB prepared using UNetbootin utility and the installations were straightforward and painless. NVidia drivers (legacy and latest, respectively) were installed. The systems boot quick, run well, compile software well and as a bonus this was for hardware that had been lying around unused (previously owned by friends who later moved on to OSX and a “faster” Windows machine, respectively).
My point with the above description is that open source operating systems like {BSDs, Linux distributions} have massive traction/potential for the grey-market (2nd-hand) sectors. You would never automatically think to install the current version of Windows (for those people who still rely on that 600-pound gorilla) on 10-year old hardware. But for BSDs/Linux, admirably functioning 10-year old hardware is a realistic option. These “free” boxes (used for ideas/algorithms testing) are meant to be a stepping stone to a more modern OpenGL setup (Threadripper + GTX 1070+); later ?.
It may be my respect for the power of a unix terminal session or my general view on open source operating systems, but whenever I come across a “windows” box (through conversation or physical access) I get this impression that “windows” is just a “gimmick”.
Sadly, Windows is more than just a gimmick. It’s a less than optimal OS that most people learn to use early in life, and think is pretty good because they’ve never been exposed to anything better. I used to have my mother-in-law on an Ubuntu box (at the time my 5 year old Shuttle, which she ran until it was 10 years old). She ran that for ages until the GPU burned out (Radeon 8500LE), then someone “gifted” her a Windows laptop. She couldn’t keep that thing running for more than a few weeks at a time due to the malware problem that plagued Windows. Configuring it (especially networking), and running updates was also something that she could never seem to figure out (and both of these processes have actually gotten worse in Windows 10…), whereas on Ubunutu, everything just worked. She eventually just stopped using PCs altogether because the experience was so terrible. Now her primary computer is her cheap Android based smartphone or tablet. Times have changed – Windows is no longer ascendant the way it once was.
Windows requirement since Vista have been flat (many even say they decreased with each release), so a 10 year old PC runs Windows 10 just fine…
And your “old” Linux boxes have much more RAM than was typical when they were new… heck, 8 GiB of RAM is still not the norm, most PCs I see beeing sold still have 4 GiB.
I first got online in the mid-1990s at college, when Netscape was still king (and the college also had DEC and Sun Unix workstations, and IE was never available on that platform). I then had a couple of years without reliable internet access until about 2002, which was the start of the XP and IE6 era. I used Linux for whatever I could, and Windows for whatever I had to use it for (mainly word processing) and I was one of those who would install Firefox before they did anything else when first using a Windows machine. The main problems I remember from that era were that a whole bunch of websites had been designed purely for use on IE6 which was not a standards-compliant browser, so that if you were using Mozilla or the upcoming Firefox, a lot of websites wouldn’t run (or were set to detect your browser and refuse to run on anything but IE, which led to Mozilla building in an “identify as IE” option). This was all after the antitrust case, so MS still had a major monopoly on the browser well into the 2000s which only really broke when the desktop computer lost ground to tablets, so WebKit browsers like Safari and Chrome became the most popular (and that technology originated with KDE as KHTML). Microsoft got really very lazy in the 2000s; the OS was notorious for security problems and you couldn’t use it without an anti-virus package hogging the system, and even then the Blaster worm managed to get through, while IE lagged behind Firefox for years and didn’t get another major update until 2006. The antitrust case didn’t dent their monopoly; only the coming of the tablet and the decline of the desktop PC did that.
“The decline of PC” is overstated, tablets aren’t that popular; Safari/iOS have, like Macs, minority usage share; Android (mostly via phones) displaced Windows in global (not in developed world, where Windows still reigns) web usage stats only a ~year ago, while Chrome and earlier Firefox took users from IE over the last decade+.
And IE6 was often a improvement in standards-compliance over what came before, brought much needed stabilisation after chaotic times (only then it fell into other extreme, lasting too long…)
It didn’t upend Silicon Valley. Most of the consequences were reversed by a changing of the guard. No break up.