- May 19, 2011
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Christie's Likens Microsoft's Work On MS-DOS To Einstein's Work In Physics - Slashdot
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: "If Einstein paved the way for a new era in physics," explains auction house Christie's in a promotion piece for its upcoming offering of 150+ "objects of scientific and historical importance" from the Paul G. Allen Collection (including items from the...
hardware.slashdot.org
To begin with I think it's reasonable to say that claims of "revolutionising" have to largely revolve around "company X did it first and succeeded".
I'd argue that the IBM-compatible PC hardware spec and standards for it revolutionised personal computing, and that MS-DOS's only virtue was that it was the de facto standard OS for IBM-compatible PCs. AFAIK Microsoft's only claim of being first might be accurate for technically being the first to produce operating systems for IBM-compatible PCs (my knowledge of that era of computing is rusty admittedly, so I'm happy to be corrected), otherwise other companies succeeded at being first in selling OS implementations that were ahead of DOS/Windows.
Thoughts?