Global Nerdy

Happy 21st birthday, Microsoft Windows!

Although you've been of legal drinking age in France and Italy for five years, the United Kingdom for three and most of Canada for two, you're finally old enough to procure Bud Light in your home country!

In honor of this milestone, the site Connected Internet has published a list of 21 things you never knew about Microsoft, Windows and Bill Gates. Among the items in this list:

• The price: Microsoft Windows 1.0's retail price was US$100. The Connected Internet article states that 100 1985 dollars is worth about $177 today, which is about a dozen dollars short of what it costs to buy the full version Windows XP Home edition with Service Pack 2 at Amazon.com.
• Requirements to run Windows 1.0: 256KB of RAM (remember, that's kilobytes, not megs!), DOS 2.0 and two floppy drives.
• Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose: Windows 1.0 was out a full 2 weeks before it had to be patched to fix some bugs.
• Why Bill doesn't work in branding: Bill didn't want to call it “Windows”; his preferred name was “Interface Manager”. You've got to remember that this was the early days of personal computing. You have to remember that only four years prior to Windows 1.0's release, IBM's PCs were produced by an independent business unit whose name was “Entry-Level Systems”, which implied that PCs were something you bought as a gateway to buying a real computer.

If you're curious as to what installing Windows 1.0 was like, DigiBarn has a photo essay that goes through the whole procedure.

We'll close by leaving you with this cult favorite: a video of Steve Ballmer doing what I presume is an internal promotional video for Windows 1.0:

If you're wondering what Nintendo's up to amidst the noise surrounding the PlayStation 3 release, here it is:

Everything I hate about SOAP — the so-called “Simple Object Access Protocol” — has been summarized quite nicely in the dialogue The S Stands for Simple in Pete Lacey's Weblog.

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Kevin Barnes has posted a FAQ for programmers about living in India on his blog, Code Craft. The questions covered in his FAQ are:

• How did you end up going to India?
• How much do jobs pay in India?
• How can you live with yourself for helping to move American jobs to India?
• What’s the cost of living? / How can people there live on so little?
• Can someone from the US get a job working in India at US wages?
• What’s the visa/tax situation like?
• What’s it like raising your kids in India?
• Aren’t Indian programmers better/worse than US ones?
• Don’t you hate … in India/Bangalore?
• How long will you stay in India?

“If you want a more artistic sense for my feelings about India,” writes Kevin, “read this or this.”

I had hoped that these three entries chronicling my troubles with installing Release Candidate 1 of Microsoft's Vista operating system would mark the last of the annoyances I'd encounter, but that wasn't to be. My new problem: registration.

Vista would nag me time and again: “You have to register this software, otherwise it's going to stop running! You have x days left!” As Murphy's Law would have it, the OS would always nag me when I had something more important to do.

The period during which I could run Vista without registering with the mother ship in Redmond passed while I was away at ISPCON. When I returned, my PC desktop greeted me with a dialog box telling me that if I wanted to use the computer again, I would have to register. I clicked the button to start the registration process, and that's where the trouble began.

“You are not connected to the internet,” said a dialog box. This wasn't true: I'd been using the machine to surf the net before I left, and I hadn't changed any settings nor any of the cabling leading to the machine.

I decided to be thorough and eliminate the obvious culprits first. I took the network cable from the PC and plugged it into my PowerBook, and I was still able to connect to the net. I checked to see that the ports on my network switch were working, and they were. After going through a few more simple checks and fiddling with the cables, the only conclusion I could come to was that the machine was in fact connected to the net and that Vista just didn't realize it.

One of the options that the Vista dialog box gave me was to try to alter my internet connection settings. I chose this option. The only connection option it offered me was PPPoE — typical for home DSL and cable modems, but completely wrong for the office network. I might have been able to fix this by going to the internet or networking control panels, but I was effectively locked out of them until I registered Vista.

Another option offered by Vista was to register via modem. This was a non-option, as the machine didn't have one.

I was left with one final option: registration by phone. I dialed the toll-free number, where a voice activated system suggested that I try registering using the online method, as it's the easiest one. It then asked me to read eight or nine groups of numbers displayed on the screen and then asked me to enter eight or nine groups of numbers. The whole process took about five minutes and was as painless as a process like that could be.

Once the registration was complete, the system showed a dialog box informing me that I should reboot the machine, which I did. When the reboot was complete, I fired up a browser and found that the machine was connected to the 'net again. Even though I was relieved, I groaned — why did it mangle the 'net connection after my “trial period” had ended, only to restore it after I'd registered?

Experiences like this are why I find myself using Windows less and less.

Over at the blog that I'm paid to write — the Tucows Blog — I've posted a podcast of the ISPCON Fall 2006 keynote featuring Doc Searls and Tucows CEO Elliot Noss, Internet Service: The Fifth Utility?, in which they talk about the 'net as a utility on par with things like roads, water, electricity and waste management. The podcast runs nearly 59 minutes, which is good if you've got a long commute home tonight.

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Microsoft's Zune wasn't the only gadget to hit the street this week. The New York Times has this story on the launch of Sony's PlayStation 3:

Angel Paredes, who otherwise lives in a Manhattan apartment, spent three nights this week on a sidewalk at 56th Street and Madison Avenue. That is the price he paid to be first in line at Sony Plaza to buy a new PlayStation 3 — that and the $600 cost of the video game console.

“Everybody in my family thought it was pretty crazy,” said Mr. Paredes, a 31-year-old stock-market day trader. It could have been worse, he said: Sony left the bathrooms open.

And at least he had company. Die-hard video game players began standing in line over the last few days in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere to be among the first owners of the Sony PlayStation 3 when it went on sale at midnight last night.

Sony may be a minor player in PCs, and a has-been in portable music, but they've still got a massive franchise in console gaming, so they too have a strong position in the battle for the digital living room.

The pricing of the PS3 looks like a giant weakness: Microsoft's Xbox 360, which has had a year-long head start, sells for $399 (the Xbox 360 Core doesn't have a hard drive, and goes for $100 less), and Nintendo's Wii (to be released this Sunday) undercuts them both at $249. Moreover, Microsoft has had a year to get their production to scale and for their component prices to drop. At this point, iSuppli estimates that Microsoft's costs per Xbox 360 are actually lower than the retail price. Sony may get there in time, but the same iSuppli teardown report has Sony losing $241 on every 60GB unit they sell for now.

On the other hand, it sure makes the PS3 look like a bargain: $840-worth of computing power for only $600.

Hey, kids! Go tell Mom and Dad about the great bargain you found them!

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Tags: Sony, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, Microsoft, Nintendo, Wii