Quote:
No Spyware, no viruses.
Why do people keep perpetrating this myth.... there are Mac Viruses..... not a lot sure.... because the hackers just haven't bothered to attack such a small niche... after all it's all about "spreading" the virus and the kudos that comes with it....
The higher the infection rate... the higher the kudos..... "Hey man I wrote this really smick virus... but it only infected 100 machines before it ran out of hosts"..... just isn't gunna elevate up amongst the elite
Regardless... they do exist.... and companies do write virus scanners for Macs.... and Apple do issue patches to protected against buffer overflows and other similar "exploits"
TimC wrote:
ever since Apple made the decision to start is OS from scratch. Something M$ has only just thought of, with its new Windows 7.
Not true at all .... from Wiki... a history of DOS and Bill Gates...
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It could be said that DOS was written from scratch, although we all know that good old Bill actually brought the base code of 86-DOS (an operating system developed and marketed by Seattle Computer Products for its Intel 8086-based computer kit). Initially known as QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) the name was changed to 86-DOS once SCP started licensing the operating system.
86-DOS had a command structure and application programming interface that imitated that of Digital Research's CP/M operating system, which made it easy to port programs from the latter. The system was purchased by Microsoft in December 1980 and developed further as PC-DOS and MS-DOS.
86-DOS was created because sales of the Seattle Computer Products (SCP) 8086 computer kit, demonstrated in June 1979 and shipped in November, were languishing due to the absence of an operating system. The only software which SCP could sell with the board was the stand-alone Microsoft BASIC-86, which Microsoft had developed on a prototype of SCP's hardware. SCP wanted to offer the 8086 version of CP/M that Digital Research had announced, but its release date was uncertain.
In April 1980 SCP assigned 22-year-old Tim Paterson to develop a substitute for CP/M-86.
Paterson designed 86-DOS with the same API and most of the user commands of CP/M. At the same time he made a number of changes to address what he saw as CP/M's shortcomings. CP/M cached file system information in memory for speed, but this required a user to force an update to a disk before removing it; if the user forgot, the disk would be corrupt. Paterson took the safer but slower approach of updating the disk with each operation. CP/M's PIP command, which copied files, supported several special file names that referred to hardware devices such as printers and communication ports. Paterson built these names into the operating system as device files so that any program could use them. He gave his copying program the more intuitive name COPY. Rather than implementing CP/M's file system, he used BASIC-86's FAT filesystem to maintain compatibility with systems that SCP had already shipped
In late 1980, IBM was developing what would become the original IBM Personal Computer. CP/M was by far the most popular operating system in use at the time, and IBM felt it needed CP/M in order to compete. IBM's representatives visited Digital Research and discussed licensing with DRI's licensing representative, Dorothy McEwen Kildall, who hesitated to sign IBM's non-disclosure agreement. Although the NDA was later accepted, DRI would not accept IBM's proposal of $250,000 in exchange for as many copies as IBM could sell, insisting on the usual royalty-based plan.[1] In later discussions between IBM and Bill Gates, Gates mentioned the existence of 86-DOS and IBM representative Jack Sams told him to get a license for it.
Microsoft purchased a nonexclusive license for 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products in December 1980 for $25,000. In May 1981, it hired Tim Paterson to port the system to the IBM-PC, which used the slower and less expensive Intel 8088 processor and had its own specific family of peripherals. IBM watched the developments daily, submitted over 300 change requests before accepting the product and wrote the user manual for it.
In July 1981, a month before the PC's release, Microsoft purchased all rights to 86-DOS from SCP for $50,000. It met IBM's main criteria: it looked like CP/M, and it was easy to adapt existing 8-bit CP/M programs to run under it, notably thanks to the TRANS command which would translate source files from 8080 to 8086 machine instructions. Microsoft licensed 86-DOS to IBM, and it became PC-DOS 1.0. This license also permitted Microsoft to sell DOS to other companies, which it did. The deal was spectacularly successful, and SCP later claimed in court that Microsoft had concealed its relationship with IBM in order to purchase the operating system cheaply. SCP ultimately received a 1 million dollar settlement payment.
You could say that the original windows GUI was written from scratch, although I've now doubt that you'll say it was a copy of the Mac.... true.... but it was written from scratch, based on extensions to DOS......
And so along blundered M$ watching Apple nibble at it's heels.... realizing that DOS couldn't be pushed much further... even with tweaks to the FAT file system => FAT32.... and struggling to produce a "stable" GUI based opsys.... that eventually became know as Windows 95.....
However it would most likely have been Windows 97 or indeed been abandoned for a port of OS-2 had it not been for a fortuitous event.... Digital Equipment Corporation's invention of the first 64-bit CPU...... at that time light years ahead of the competition and lightening fast with a deliberate ten-fold upward scalability designed into it.....
One problem existed for DEC though.... to port it's VMS system to 64-bit and Alpha chip would take some time, and sales would still be limited to enterprises... while the desktop market exploded....
Enter Dave Cutler, the architect of VMS and one of the great, if not the greatest computing minds in history....
Digital wanted an operating system for desktop machines based on it's Alpha chip... Microsoft wanted an operating system that could "look" like a Mac and could take advantage of the latest (then high speed) Intel chips.... but Intel was playing hardball with licensing....
A deal was struck..... Cutler and the entire VMS code team went to Redmond to help Microsoft get Windows into shape... eventually Windows 95....
On the contra arrangement that DEC would develope an opsys written from the ground up that wasn't bound by the limitations of DOS and could be ultimately scaled to 64-bit.... and would become the basis for Microsofts windows products based on Digital Alpha processes...
With automatic load balancing, redundant, automatic failover, clustered servers, sharing memory and raid data banks (now known as SANs)... capable of seemless operation as a single entity regardless of the location of the hardware and meeting the strictest military security ratings...
Indeed Cutler and the team embarked on a totally ambitious project and developed two versions of the operating system concurrently... a 32-bit system for Intel based systems and a 64-bit system for Digitals Alpha chip......
And so Windows NT was born.....
When Microsoft released the first version of Windows NT in April 1993, the company's marketing and public relations campaign heavily emphasized the NT (i.e., New Technology) in the operating system's (OS's) name. Microsoft promoted NT as a cutting-edge OS that included all the features users expected in an OS for workstations and small to midsized servers. Although NT was a new OS in 1993, with a new API (i.e., Win32) and new user and systems-management tools, the roots of NT's core architecture and implementation extend back to the mid-1970s.
Anyone who knows the internals of VMS ... knows how much of the VMS base code and concepts are embedded within NT and subsequently XP, or more particularly "Longhorn"
Sadly, with Digitals purchase by Compaq, problems between M$ and IBM etc etc....
Microsoft parted company and lost it's way... flogging a dead DOS based horse with Win 98 while NT languihed (despite a ten year road map when developed) ... and completely with the release of Windows ME.....
Win 2000 was a return to the roots of NT.... but it's only now that many of the load sharing, cluster principles of VMS are coming to fruition in Windows Server 2008, and "Longhorn"
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