The 'DOS Ain't Done 'til Lotus Won't Run' Myth 425
Otter writes "We've all heard the story of Microsoft's battle cry of "DOS ain't done till Lotus won't run". Adam Barr investigates the myth, interviewing various Microsoft and Lotus old-timers (including Mitch Kapor), and finds no basis for its legitimacy or any case of 1-2-3 actually not running. Whom to blame for Lotus Notes is not discussed."
Re:I'm not anti-MS, but ... (Score:1, Informative)
That's not a case you have to worry about. Valid boot sectors must end in 0x55 0xAA (possibly the other way around, not sure) otherwise BIOS won't boot it. Assuming a uniform random distribution (probably rare), you have a 1/65536 chance of being confused by random data.
Plus the MBR containes the partition table -- if there's not a valid partition table, Windows must overwrite the MBR anyway, and probably wipe anything on the drive. (without a partition table, it wouldn't know where existing data was...)
Re:Never heard that one about DOS -- Agreed (Score:4, Informative)
I agree. I was at Lotus for quite a while starting in 1983. In the early days (1-2-3 v1 and v2, and MS-DOS 2.x and 3.x), Lotus and Microsoft were quite friendly, and we had NDA access to a lot of stuff from Microsoft, including MD-DOS releases. [I also saw early releases of Windows 1.x documentation and remember thinking how pathetic it was next to Inside Macintosh -- but that's a whole other story...]
Anyway... In the spirit of this "friendly" cooperation, I remember attending technical presentations from Microsoft about OS/2 Presentation Manager and how important it was for us to architect our applications in anticipation of OS/2 so we'd be ready when it hit the street; and feeling like we'd been had when Microsoft switched their emphasis from OS/2 to Windows 3.x, and had their applications all ready to go while Lotus was invested heavily in an OS/2 suite.
From that point forward, 1-2-3 was on the ropes vs. Excel and it seemed like every OS move by Microsoft with Windows kept us off-balance; there was also the issue that the Excel developers seemed way better informed about developing for Windows 3.x than the rest of us. There was wide speculation that Microsoft was publishing and encouraging the use of APIs that their application developers did not use. It was (and is) easily believable that there was a philosophy of "Windows isn't done until Lotus won't run."
On another, contrary, note, I also remember (later) a page 1 Wall Street Journal article about the development of Windows NT under Dave Cutler. IIRC, one of the points made in the article was that NT had a huge team of developers (50?) adding code to NT that was conditional on the application being run; i.e., "if the current application is PhotoShop, perform this operation this way" for compatibility. It was presented as a representation of Microsoft's commitment to compatibility, but, IMHO, it's a shitty way to write an operating system...
Re:Unacceptably Ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)
Heres what they did, from here [kickassgear.com]
Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging DR-DOS with Windows. One was to have Smartdrive detect DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. There was also a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows." This was not true, but rather, was an attempt to undermine the competition.
And heres a taste of the internal emails, from the same source.
Microsoft's David Cole emailed Phil Barrett on September 30 1991: "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect DR DOS 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface."
They threatend Frontpage with an MS bundled product in order to make them sell out.
They bundled DOS 7 with windows, called it win95 and killed dos competition.
They bundled Explorer with Windows to kill Netscape.
They buy up good software in order to discontinue support of competitive OS's. (sybaria, gecad, etc)
They buy up game companies and tie them to the XBox (halo was originally coming out for the Mac and PC. Not really unethical but damned annoying if you don't have an XBox.)
Tie sales of computers to sales of windows (Microsoft tax)
Astro turf campaigns to artificialy generate an image of public sympathy and support.
Prevented competitors products from being installed by OEMs. (Beos, Netscape, etc)
sigh..
MS's dirty laundry is endless.. With a history as tainted and ethically bankrupt as Microsofts, I just don't see how people can wonder if they intentionally sabotaged Lotus?