they tried, in a roundabout way - there was a trend a few (okay, 15ish) years ago of cheap "WinPrinters", much like WinModems which came a little later, where Windows itself would render GDI commands to a bitmap and send it to the printer in a pretty uncomplicated fashion. All the printer 'driver' needed to tell Windows was a little about the capabilities of the device - the WinPrinting core did the rest.

GDI itself is *supposed* to be device-independent, but didn't have much in the way of decent type rendering when they came up with it-TrueType support didn't appear in Windows until Windows 3.1 (until then, Adobe Type Manager was an immensely popular utility).

If they'd done it a little later, after they gained a complete monopoly and killed DOS, they would have probably got away with it, but back then too many people needed printers to work when they *weren't* running Windows for it to be feasible.

Plus, of course, the same problems that people had with WinModems - that they were cheap, nasty, and they didn't realise until a little too late that printers could render stuff a lot quicker than a 25MHz 386 with a couple of meg of RAM (and that was if you had a high-spec machine).

Mind you, they didn't die out completely when there was a real price drop in laser printers a little while ago, WinPrinters had a bit of resurgence, but they tend to support at least some other page-description language (e.g., PCL) as well. Still caused a few headaches for the CUPS guys as I recall, though.

Anti-competitive behaviour is fine.

That's what a lot of people don't seem to get: it's not anti-competitive behaviour in and of itself that falls foul of investigations and commissions and rulings, it's the combination of a monopoly position and anti-competitive behaviour in order to attempt to create new monopolies.

The problem is, though, once it's happened, and the world has moved on, what is an appropriate remedy? Forcing Microsoft to unbundle IE would have been a perfectly good remedy back when Windows 98 was released (it would have meant that there would still be some real competition in the fledgling browser space instead of years of stagnation), but it's not really appropriate now: people expect an OS (or rather, a computer) to ship with a web browser.

There are lots of potential options, but the whole XP "N" edition thing showed that some of them are quite time-sensitive in their execution if they're to be anything other than a fiasco.

Not before DoubleSpace (and later DriveSpace, the non-infringing version) were used by millions of people, though.

The fact that DoubleSpace was bundled with DOS 6 meant that nobody needed to bother buying Stacker for the couple of years before whole-drive compression became mostly unnecessary. While that certainly was what killed Stac, what we don't know is what they might have come up with if they'd stayed in businessâ"after all, Stac was an innovator, while Microsoft just ripped of the technology.

It's not silent at all. I upgraded to 5.0 today, and it popped up a dialog asking me to agree to the new updater policy with a link to read more about what it did/how it works.

actually, now that I think about it, I used to run a roomfull of 486DX2-66s with 16MB of RAM and 500MB hard disks. They ran Debian âoePotatoâ (2.2), just to give you an idea of vintage. They ran it rather *well*, at that.