Microsoft Gets Royalties from 55% of the Android Ecosystem

[bystander]

[citation][nom]back_by_demand[/nom]Allowing the tech to proliferate rather than litigation and blocking is a lot better for the consumer don't you think? Apple could learn a lesson here.[/citation]

I agree. Although I do agree with some of the sentiment about the patent system being broken. I just don't know a better solution, but I do believe a better one could exist.

 

[Guest]

They knew the basics of the Amiga. The threw together the Atari ST with an 8mhz 68000 (same as Amiga and Mac) the GEM/TOS "OS" was pretty much MS-DOS with a Macintosh look. Apple made Atari degrade the interface... and GEM/TOS had all the limitations of MS-DOS, but with a GUI.... 8.3 file names, no multi-tasking.

A company "Digital Research" made a GUI called GEM as a compedator to MS Windows. Microsoft took DR to court claiming it copied Windows "look and feel". DR lost, and had to ripe the guts out of GEM. Atari purchased the source code to GEM and used it for their ST series of computers. They basically translated the source to run on the 68000 processor, and use a dos like layer to make the DOS system calls work.

GEM/TOS had co-operative multitasking, the same as Microsoft or Apple, at that time. You could run 6 Accessory apps, and the main app. The only limitation on the size of accessory or main app was memory, and it had 800KB after the OS was running, in the days when MSDOS machines had 640KB before the OS was running.

Talking of DOS, I believe DR-DOS was made by Digital Research. This was why Windows 95 came out, because the dos was an "integrated" part of windows, it killed the other dos makers. No more running DR-DOS and running windows on top of it.