A fundamental difference

[rcarring]

A fundamental difference between Pcs and Macs is stunningly obvious. Macs are made by Apple who also develop and install proprietary software and an operating system for the Mac so that it works out-of-the-box. PCs are IBM-clones that run a variety of operating systems suitable for the i386 Intel platform (apart from MacIntel) including Linux, Windows and ReactOS. None of these PC systems is made by the manufacturer of the PC. Granted in the old days, you would find people like Toshiba issuing their own brand of DOS that worked on the T1000 etc, but now because people can choose to build their own systems, all that out-of-the-box advantage has gone -- with the exception of OEM branded Windows that has all the required drivers and codecs etc pre-installed and System76 that has Ubuntu pre-installed.

I expect the reason that Windows is such a sod to install is that it still requires third party drivers, software and so on to get it to work. If you're building it up from scratch then you usually get driver disks with each component and these driver disks then all have to be used to install support for each component. It won't get easier, logo supported hardware requirements for Vista is going to be even more stringent.

In the old days of DOS and Windows 3.1x many games ran under DOS as the game developer needed to mess about with the system hardware at a low level, such as sound cards and graphics displays and input devices like joysticks. They did a good job too.

I am not sure where this is all going but I thought I would post it anyway.

[fluffington]

In the old days of DOS and Windows 3.1x many games ran under DOS as the game developer needed to mess about with the system hardware at a low level, such as sound cards and graphics displays and input devices like joysticks. They did a good job too.

Ah, those were the days. I wish I still had some of the stuff I wrote back then.