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by dnautics 4764 days ago
it was a closed system... I remember my dad shelling out $500 for MS Visual basic for me, and then $500 for MSVC++. Visual basic was fun, but I didn't do anything with it. I never got past MFC in VC++ and I wound up using borland's C++ instead for my science fair project.

Now, I can put ubuntu linux on my machine - for free (or in my case, preloaded from DELL at a discount over windows) and get a million different toolchains with free documentation online.
2 comments
ghshephard 4764 days ago
You are conflating, "Closed" with "Wide Availability of zero-cost toolchains."

Windows was as open as open can get, in the sense of, "Do I need to ask anyone's permissions to create, install, and sell a binary for this platform?"

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dnautics 4763 days ago
a fair criticism. It was de facto closed. Keep in mind during the 90s, the internet was limited (for quite a bit of that time I didn't even have a 2400 baud modem). It wasn't until my second year in college that my friend introduced me to linux, and I still didn't actively start using linux until 2006-ish (I spent 1999-2003 in BeOS and 2004-2006 in FreeBSD)

i guess the part of my complaint that had the most to do with 'closed' was the MFC/developer licensing part. I knew enough to know there were APIs lying underneath that weren't exposed to me that I could do awesome stuff with if I was able to see it. At least with BeOS it "felt" like the most important part of the API were exposed - and with linux I know that they are in principle, even though I never use them.

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amscanne 4764 days ago
There are plenty of free and open source toolchains and languages for Windows... in particular the same ones available on your Ubuntu installation (gcc, openjdk, python, etc.).

Microsoft sells and supports development toolkits, and they happen to be better than a lot of the free ones. I bought PyCharm for Linux -- that doesn't make it closed.

The only thing closed about Windows is the kernel source (and even that isn't that closed, start your reading here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963901).

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dnautics 4763 days ago
true enough, but we're talking about the late 90s here.
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