Re: NEC-LIST:Help with NEC2D and all its variants running on Windows XP

Good day Ralph,

I'm still using EZNEC-M v.1.0, and the NEC2D executables compiled by Jos
Bergervoort (pardon my spelling). At the end of last year, I went to
Windows 2000, then when I had some antenna design work to do recently I
found that Win2000 was very stingy with RAM in DOS mode so I went to WinME.
I have had no problems running these old programs in WinME. I've been told
by a couple of people that I should've stayed with Win98SE, but I'll stay
with WinME unless I have stability problems.

Your comment about Windows being a moving target and MS compilers having the
fewest compatibility issues prompts to restate my rant about Microsoft. The
anti-trust people were very late about getting after Microsoft. They were
arm-twisting and selling under cost in the days before Windows. They also
used their OS clout to stab competitiors even in those days. For example,
when they came out with DOS 4 (which had to be fixed almost immediately)
IBM's Displaywrite word processors would no longer run. I switched to DR
DOS 6 and 7, because they did not have backward-compatibility problems. I
only went to Win95 in early '97 because I had to have results in an
environment my then-employer was using. I have always felt that Windows is
an environment for people who can't spell, type, or remember much. Its only
good features are the clipboard concept and a push towards standardization
in the handling of graphics. Both of these features could've been added to
DOS if the various software houses had gotten together and done a little
industry standardization.

Recently I heard that Bill Gates was in court arguing that his dominance in
the OS market is what's led to the widespread use of PCs and consumer
benefits. I say baloney. The first springboard to creativity was IBM's
uncharacteristic decision to make the PC an open hardware system so that
anybody could add to it, and the OS was open enough for anyone to write
applications. The second big market driver was and is game players. They
have been the big push in the spiral of larger applications and faster
machines. Even though I don't play computer games, I'm grateful to them
because I would never have been able to afford a machine only sold on the
engineering market, e.g. the HP98xx series that sold for $10k in the '70s
and '80s.

Doug Miron

-- 
The NEC-List mailing list <nec-list_at_gweep.ca>
http://www.gweep.ca/mailman/listinfo.cgi/nec-list