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It reminds me even more of Stac Electronics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law... In 1990, they put out Stacker, which did transparent disk compression, effectively giving people twice as much disk space. It was a huge hit, so Microsoft called them up about an acquisition, entered discussion, and as part of the due dilligence process, even looked at the source code. In 1993, Microsoft released their own version of Stacker as part of the OS. No thank you, no money for Stac, just a giant middle finger. Stac sued and eventually won some money, but it was never the same. Everybody keeps telling me that Microsoft is different these days. About how they love open source now. And it's true that after decades of erosion of their primary monopolies, they can't get away with being as lazy and awful as they were in, say, the early IE era. But this suggests to me that deep down they haven't really changed. |
I think I had a 200MB hard drive at the time.