They recognized that PCs were the next big thing and needed one of their own. Large companies don’t move fast, and IBM is certainly no exception, but they had to move fast now. So they took a bunch of off the shelf components that anyone else could have bought and called it their PC.
Everything except the BIOS. It regulated how the OS interacts with the hardware. Almost to the point where you could argue DOS isn’t an OS at all, but just a thin command line layer over the BIOS, plus a simple minded file system.
Anyway, some people at Compaq make a cleanroom implementation of the BIOS and release an “IBM PC compatible”. This quickly becomes the basis of everything we call a PC today. But IBM doesn’t get to profit off it in the long run. They sold off their PC division decades ago.
The show “Halt and Catch Fire” has an excellent fictional example of the reverse engineering process.
Nah, nobody cares about their monopoly anymore. They got outmaneuvered on mobile, and they’re stuck being a desktop OS while the rest of the market moves around them.
Happens a lot with monopolies. IBM was the biggest name in mainframes, but their PC division made a standard that other companies would take and run.
Microsoft wouldn’t have put as much effort into WSL if it was just performative.
Nonsense. It’s a simple continuation of something that has always been around. They would have needed to actively and purposefully changed it. The first company that tried to sell “1 Megabyte/s” instead of “8 Megabits/s” is shooting themselves in the foot because the number is smaller. If it was going to change, you would need everyone to agree at once to correct the numbers the same way.
Modems were 300 baud, then 1200 baud, then 56.6k baud. ISDN took things to 128k baud, and a T1 was 1.544M baud. Except that sometime around the time things went into tens of k, we started saying “bits” instead of “baud”. In any case, it simply continued with the first DSL and cable modems being around 1 to 10 Mbits. You had to be able to compare it fairly to what came before, and the easiest way to do that is to keep doing what they’ve been doing.
Ethernet continues to be sold in the same system of measurement, for the same reasons.
That would mean Obi-Wan lied. Not only that, but he apparently didn’t bother looking for Luke on his birth planet. This whole theory is a mess and I hope it’s not true.
(Dropping the act, I really do think it was a mistake for Lucas to pull this trigger. Made for a great moment in movie history, but sets up a whole lot of problems in the larger plot.)
Could you imagine a Voyager where the ship is no longer constantly running towards home? One where they have to stay and gather materials to get their warp 10 drive working. The species they meet will be the same species around a few seasons later, and the relationships they build with them matter. Maybe stasis isn’t good enough, and they have to hold everyone in a transporter buffer, which means rebuilding huge sections of the ship to support having all the crew inside transporters at once. They expect this to take years, but it’s still by far the shortest way home. A few shuttles get modified and they send couriers back to the alpha quadrant. So they have some contact with Star Fleet, but it’s not as simple as opening a channel.
If there’s only enough story material here to support a few seasons, then maybe something comes up that means they have to go back and fix it. Maybe some Borg shit. Make up a reason to keep the Maquis crew around (not like Star Fleet gives a shit once the Dominion War is underway).
Good thing they never gave us that nightmare of a show.
For that matter, they didn’t even use it well at the time. Their accuracy of jumping with the spore drive was shown to be good enough that they could jump inside the shield bubble of every Klingon supply base, launch a bunch of torpedoes, and get out. War = done.
I agree on Pulaski. She could have been a great character if she had more than one season.
I don’t think there’s a truly great episode in TNG’s first two seasons, though. They range from “utter garbage” to “fine” . Season three is massive improvement. Watching it back to back, it’s almost jarring how much better it gets. Barely seems like the same show.
DS9 ranges from “I’ll watch it, I guess” to “holy shit this is amazing”. Kai Winn is a fantastic villain straight away, and would be the most talked about villain in any other show. The only reason she isn’t is because there are so many great villains in DS9 that she gets lost.