This article/blog on the Linux Today list (from home page of our Forum) strikes me as the kind of thing we might look back on 5 years hence and say "that's when it started to change":
http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1552.html
I'm old enough to remember clearly 1982, the year personal computers actually became available to folks of average means (Commodore 64). It wasn't much, but you could actually afford a real computer in your home, and do interesting things with it.
Then came the IBM PC two or three years later, with DOS and spreadsheets and word processors. That was, of course, when microcomputers began their invasion of the business world. It was also when the hardware architecture standards started locking down, which enabled competition in both the engineering and economic domains. With a standard PC architecture generally accepted, big resources started flowing into operating system developments, and of course we know how that came out. I personally loved OS/2 Warp, but IBM got out-marketed by the Redmond gang, leaving only Apple and its devotees with a useful alternative to Windows. And of course, driving some to pursue Linux development, to have an open source OS that isn't locked to a proprietary license.
There really has not been what I would call an "inflection point" in the development of hardware and operating systems since Windows 95 became the defacto OS for the "masses", in the late 1990s. I'm not one who is disrespectful of the value of Microsoft's success in that regard, because I feel we all benefit with low cost hardware as a result. But, it's just been an incremental progress on the hardware and OS side -- even Linux is basically an improved unix, IMO (I played with SCO Unix 386 for awhile in the early 1990s). As a result, it feels real stagnant, and the dominance of Microsoft's OS is the main reason for the stagnation. Nothing would help move the technology forward more than some serious competition in the OS domain, in my opinion, and it just hasn't happened -- we're "2 percenters" here, alongside the Apple "4 percenters".
But, this $175 OLPC Linux machine, if fully realized and deployed to kids worldwide, could provide just the stimulus needed for a new wave of competitive technology development, both on the hardware side and the OS side. I can imagine the peripherals designers getting a "wake-up call" out of this development, regarding their lack of support to the Linux user community, not to mention some attitude adjustment on the part of Microsoft as well. I'm going to be watching this thing carefully, and crossing my fingers!
Today two cents' worth ....
http://www.daniweb.com/blogs/entry1552.html
I'm old enough to remember clearly 1982, the year personal computers actually became available to folks of average means (Commodore 64). It wasn't much, but you could actually afford a real computer in your home, and do interesting things with it.
Then came the IBM PC two or three years later, with DOS and spreadsheets and word processors. That was, of course, when microcomputers began their invasion of the business world. It was also when the hardware architecture standards started locking down, which enabled competition in both the engineering and economic domains. With a standard PC architecture generally accepted, big resources started flowing into operating system developments, and of course we know how that came out. I personally loved OS/2 Warp, but IBM got out-marketed by the Redmond gang, leaving only Apple and its devotees with a useful alternative to Windows. And of course, driving some to pursue Linux development, to have an open source OS that isn't locked to a proprietary license.
There really has not been what I would call an "inflection point" in the development of hardware and operating systems since Windows 95 became the defacto OS for the "masses", in the late 1990s. I'm not one who is disrespectful of the value of Microsoft's success in that regard, because I feel we all benefit with low cost hardware as a result. But, it's just been an incremental progress on the hardware and OS side -- even Linux is basically an improved unix, IMO (I played with SCO Unix 386 for awhile in the early 1990s). As a result, it feels real stagnant, and the dominance of Microsoft's OS is the main reason for the stagnation. Nothing would help move the technology forward more than some serious competition in the OS domain, in my opinion, and it just hasn't happened -- we're "2 percenters" here, alongside the Apple "4 percenters".
But, this $175 OLPC Linux machine, if fully realized and deployed to kids worldwide, could provide just the stimulus needed for a new wave of competitive technology development, both on the hardware side and the OS side. I can imagine the peripherals designers getting a "wake-up call" out of this development, regarding their lack of support to the Linux user community, not to mention some attitude adjustment on the part of Microsoft as well. I'm going to be watching this thing carefully, and crossing my fingers!
Today two cents' worth ....
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