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Everybody seems to have come away with something with the ruling by the federal appeals court in the anti-trust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice against Microsoft.
In the trial court, Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson had determined that Microsoft is a monopoly, and the remedy for this continuing pattern of criminal conduct was to break the company into two or more parts. Jackson's judicial methods have come under strong criticism from the Defenders of Greed and other supporters of our President, but let us recall that the judge was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and leave it at that.
Microsoft appealed Jackson's ruling. The appellate court recently upheld Jackson's finding that the company is a monopoly, but did not agree with the remedy he ordered, and so it appears that Microsoft will stay in one piece.
But is Microsoft really a monopoly? That is, can someone with normal computer equipment perform a customary task, like writing a column in Salida and sending it via modem to Denver, without using any Microsoft product?
Building a Microsoft-free environment took a few hours. The project began with scrounging a used motherboard with a 350-mhz AMD-K6 CPU. I had to buy a cheap case and power supply, then fill the box and board with parts that had been gathering dust -- an old Adaptec 1542 SCSI controller, two SCSI hard drives and a CD-ROM jukebox, 128 mb of PC-100 RAM, 28-kpbs ISA modem, a bizarre Permedia video card that Windows won't work with, a Logitech bus mouse from 1987, etc.
It took about an hour to install a non-Microsoft operating system: Red Hat Linux version 7.0, which costs about $30 from Red Hat, and is available for free if you're patient enough to download it.
The CD-ROMs come with a host of software, including a
text editor named joe
which can easily be configured
as jstar
to work pretty much like the 1992 version
of WordStar for MS-DOS that my fingers know so well, and it
saved the trouble of learning emacs or some other
complicated editor. There's also decent a spell-checker,
which was tricky to find because it's called aspell
when all the references call it ispell.
Once a column is written, it needs to be reformatted -- the Post's computer expects things in a certain format, with special headers and footers and transmission codes. Over in the Microsoft world, I wrote a program that reads WordStar and produces text suitable for the Post.
But I don't have that tool on a Linux machine. Writing a quick and dirty conversion program in the Spitbol programming language would be relatively simple, except that I still haven't managed to nag my friend and neighbor Mark Emmer into porting his MS-DOS Catspaw Spitbol compiler to Linux.
That left several options, none pleasant. Inserting
those codes with a text editor looked impossible, since
Linux uses a different end of line
character than
the Post's system does, and such things are usually
invisible to text editors. Linux has some tools like
gawk
and perl
that would likely do the job,
if I knew how to use them. I don't, though perhaps the day
will come.
Linux also comes with a compiler for the C programming language, and it has only been a decade since I took a C class. I liked the class, but I didn't like the language, and I've never used it since then.
But the C compiler was at hand, as was one of the most
misnamed books I've ever seen -- The Joy of C.
Despite the improbable title, it's a decent tutorial and
reference, and in a couple of hours, I had written together
some ugly code that did the job.
The transmission to Denver with the Linux minicom
communications program eventually went through, and the job
was done.
So it is possible to perform a regular task that involves a normal personal computer without using any Microsoft products. Thus it must be concluded that Microsoft is not a monopoly.
But was it worth the trouble? The hacking and experimenting reminded me of learning to do these things on an Osborne in 1986, back when computers were fun, rather than appliances. And it was refreshing to be getting the computer to do what I wanted it to do, rather than trying to figure out how Windows wanted it done.
It seems to boil down to whether you want to control your computer, or have it control you. Given Microsoft's immense market share, it's easy to see that most people are firmly in favor of putting someone else in control. And that probably says more about American culture than it says about Microsoft.
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