__/ [ BearItAll ] on Wednesday 04 April 2007 13:57 \__
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>
>> Open Source Software On the PC World List of Top 50 Best Tech Products
>>
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Everybody loves lists psychologists tell us... if only to argue with
>> | them. PC World has released a list of what it calls The 50 Best Tech
>> | Products of All Time and I want to enter my dissent.
>> `----
>>
>>
>
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/open_source/2007/04/oss_on_the_pc_world_of_top_50.php
>>
>
> Nice one.
>
> "The ability to squeeze circuits on to smaller and smaller bits of silicon
> is just physics"
>
> Yeah right, and the ability to get a man on the moon is just logistics.
>
> And Roy, you know how upset I get if I have to agree with a jerno, his part
> about UNIX and Linux, please don't post from jernos that I might agree
> with, thankyou.
I think this one is a technical blogger, not a writer.
> Netscape at No1? You know I wouldn't have put it there off the top of my
> head, but actually it was an amazing product right from the start, leaps
> and bounds ahead of MS explorer/email client etc at the time. Better
> integrated than anything else for quite some time.
I only stopped using it when IE was integrated with the O/S (as thus quicker
an lighter as well). The free CDs with IE provided some ugly (version 3,
IIRC) application that lacked function.
> I would definately place Lotus above all of those from 1 to 4 though. Huge
> businesses were ran on the back of Lotus for years.
My mom was using it when I was a child, before Microsoft began with the dirty
tricks that we see in the leaked E-mails today... back then, not everything
was Microsoft, not even DOS.
> Hayes deserve a place in the list, despite many a battle trying to get
> local and the remote stations chatting away, typically in the middle of the
> night with just a gateguard or cleaner to work with at the other end, and
> trying to get them to type the right command strings only to find that they
> keep wandering off, in seven hours it will be 8:00 monday morning and no
> link from Aldershot to Edinborough and all he has to say for himself is
> 'one a clock is me rounds time I ad t' go and do me rounds'. But still,
> when working they were very good, the modems I mean, not the gateguards.
It's this kind of endless scenario that convinces many of us to just not get
started with over-the-phone assistence. What would take you 5 seconds to do
can take 15 minutes with somebody else over the telephone.
> Wordperfect should be at the top with Lotus. Do you know that many of the
> key combinations still used in all GUI's and office software are still
> those that Wordperfect came up with. Many features that are now common
> place started life on Wordperfect. Stylesheets for one, were a god send,
> the ideas behind our PS styles advanced a great deal because of
> Wordperfect. If anyone deserves those patents in the US, Wordperfect
> deserve the biggest bucket load. It just occured to me that the database
> connection strings we still use today, I am sure the first time I came
> across those was on a Wordperfect client. There must be a huge list of
> patents that belong to Wordperfect and Lotus (who owns the lotus these days
> anyway?).
>
> Doom. You know I think I have only played Doom about twice in my life.
I first saw that in Wolfenstein though. It predates it. It seemed amazing at
the time. Unbelievable in fact.
> But
> still I have to say it deserves a place in the list. Mainly because it was
> the first to show a proper realism in movement and graphics, shot dynamics,
> general background graphics. I had mates who would stop in on a Saturday
> night just because they were up to a good bit in Doom and wanted to carry
> on with it. I know, hard to believe isn't it, Saturday night!!!
I played it for many years. I still have it on my hard-drive in fact and I
wonder if Wine runs it nicely. IIRC, it was originally developered for OS/2.
Its developer recently ditched Windows as well.
> Of cause we would all give a different 50 best products of the last decade,
> not many on his list would have made it onto my list. The tricky part of
> such a list is, well, isn't it really hard to remember the computing world
> in chronological order? I mean I can talk about things of the past computer
> years, but try and pin me down to a year on most of them and I'm stumped.
It's all about entertaining the reader. They wouldn't care about tubes and
transistors.
> Take his list, PC-Talk was 1982. I remember for years the talk software
> being passed around, talk was about five small functions the only purpose
> of which was to communicate live, versions were available in every
> programming language known with bits and pieces added by many a programmer
> , you could almost say that everyone who used it added something, MS used
> it too, it was the base for their Talk. But was that pre-1982 ? Doesn't
> seem to fit, I think we were all still on the bulletin boards, or were we
> still on one-to-one. Bulletin boards were a bit like a forum 'Help lads I
> bought in some Geniscos and I can't get the key codes mapped properly' then
> two weeks later after you have written the new key code file over many a
> late night, 'I have one of those, here is the list of keys- ....'.
--
~~ Best wishes
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