Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
Oh, DOS.<p>It&#x27;s always sad to read histories of computing during the 80s. It was a lost decade in many ways. Much more powerful and competent paradigms were alive and vital at the start, but by the end, they were all collapsing. A few different choices, a little bit better business sense, and we&#x27;d have a computer world profoundly alien to the one we have now.<p>It&#x27;s still possible, of course. But it&#x27;d be wearing the hair shirt and being a lone hacker as you built up your system.<p>I refer, of course, to <i>both</i> Lisp and Unix machines, along with the various developments in parallel architectures. The Unix machines as sources of power and use lay quiescent for many years, until maybe the early 00s, and IMO the Lisp machines path has never been genuinely walked.<p>There&#x27;s an elegy to be written for the loss of the operator of the computer being turned into a consumer rather than a producer (unix) or symbiont (lisp). Maybe rpg will write it one day.