maddog: Letter to InfoWorld: Linux 64-bit since 1995!

[Fred]

On Sunday 08 January 2006 09:34, Ted Roche wrote:
...
> Yup, I thought Microsoft had a good plan in keeping Intel on the
> straight-and-narrow and giving UNIX a run for its money with Intel-
> AMD / PowerPC / Alpha / MIPS rollouts of NT. I saw NT demoed on Alpha
> at Valinor in Manchester, and it was a snappy machine. Instead, the
> multi-platform support just turned out to be another head fake,
> causing their customers to waste a huge amount of time, resources and
> effort chasing an opportunity that Microsoft wouldn't support. It
> just amazes me the number of times that Microsoft has pulled the rug
> out from under their own customers.
>
> Ted Roche

Yep, which is one of the many reasons that this former NT "guru" is now 
solidly in the Linux camp!

But what can I say? For a while during the 90s, anyone with NT experience was 
heavily sought after and *paid well.* It was all about the money, nothing 
more. I had wanted to go Unix after the fall of Commodore/Amiga, but there 
were already too many Unix guys on the market!  Had I not been newly married 
and a baby on the way, I might have stuck it out anyway.

And for what it was, NT was at least 32-bit, and saved me from having to do 
really smelly 16-bit Windows development. NT was smelly enough, still 
carrying over the legacy bass-ackwards 16-bit Windows API and event model, 
which they should've by all rights dropped, burned, nuked and back to the 
drawing board to get it right. 

And Microsoft was notorious for its "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" technology 
'adoption' principles. Anybody with half a brain knew this. Customers so 
foolish as to jump on anything not Microsoft Mainstream were doomed from the 
very beginning.  Well, you were kinda doomed with the Mainstream stuff 
anyway, but at least you didn't get fired. ;-)

Oh, I recall the NT-beta days with glee. If you managed to get by 5 minutes 
before you saw the dreaded "blue-screen-of-death", it was a miracle. By all 
rights it should've been called "NT-alpha", but that might have caused some 
confusion. :-)

-Fred