Re: XP has no significant bugs that any significant number of users want fixed

This is too much like an advocacy thread for my taste,
so I am not going to debate these off-topic issues. My
purpose is only to inject a few facts which I happened
to be positioned to know.

"Fred Abse" <excretatauris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:pan.2005.04.16.13.08.39.300103@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> On Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:48:57 -0700, John Larkin wrote:
>
>> On Thu, 14 Apr 2005 20:54:09 GMT, Joerg
>> <notthisjoergsch@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>The only OS from Microsoft that is high quality by my standards is
>>>MS-DOS.
>>>
>>>
>> That's because IBM debugged it for them.

The report I have heard, from one of the people who was
at Microsoft during the development of MS-DOS after an
early version was purchased from Tim Paterson, is that
IBM was a very important customer, able to have their way
with respect to features, but that the ongoing development
of MS-DOS was done at Microsoft. Among others who
contributed to that effort was Tim himself. We can thank
IBM for the '\' as path component separator, against the
better judgement of the developers who were using Unix
at the time for development support. (Those developers'
influence can be seen in the DOS 2.x API evolution.)

> They hadn't written it anyway, AFAIK, they bought it in.

Tim Paterson wrote the pre-1.0 version that Microsoft
bought from his company. Shortly afterward, Tim was
hired by Microsoft and was working there as of 1997.

> Buy ***.

I doubt that very much. I worked with Tim for several
years and knew him to be meticulous programmer who
rarely wrote bugs. Of course, I never saw the code he
sold to Microsoft, but I doubt he metamorphized from a
sloppy programmer to a careful one.

> Get IBM to rewrite it.

Did not happen.

> Sell it.
> Become market leader.

As an early shareholder, I'm not complaining.

--
--Larry Brasfield
email: donotspam_larry_brasfield@xxxxxxxxxxx
Above views may belong only to me.


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