A recent survey found that 67% of the Americans polled had a favorable view of Microsoft. It's too bad the question was so vague, I'd like to know if that same percentage trusts Microsoft without any reservations. In general, the coverage of the court findings in the Microsoft case have not mentioned any of the facts that led Judge Jackson to rule against Microsoft. So I thought it might be a good idea to go over some of the specific allegations against Microsoft that have been ignored in most discussions. Rather than going through them all, and there are plenty, I'll concentrate most on Microsoft's campaign to squash an one of their competitors in the early 1990's, Digital Research Inc. To set the scene, I'd like to take a stroll down memory lane. As someone who lived through this seemingly early phase in computer history, I am recalling this from memory, so bear with me. Back in the days when computers were not rated solely by MHz, but also by which Intel processor they had in them, a single office might have "286", "386" and "486" computers in them all at the same time. Windows 2.something was out, and it ran on top of DOS 4. At that time, basically the early 1990's, Windows was not a clear standard operating system. However, it was a step in the right direction, and it ran neatly on top of DOS (disk operating system), which was the operating system that all PCs used back then. IBM had a faltering version of DOS (IBM DOS), Microsoft has it's version (MS DOS), and a new star on the scene, Digital Research Inc., had come up with a new and improved version of DOS, known as DR DOS. The problem with DOS back then was the infamous 640Kb memory barrier, and how to use extended or expanded memory for applications larger than 640Kb. There was a heck of a lot of idle memory in PCs at that time, and people were looking for ways to use that extra memory, other than setting up a "RAM-drive". Digital Research was about to release a new version of DOS, "DR DOS 6", and Microsoft was very worried. According to Microsoft's own documents and internal email messages, DR DOS 5 was a superior product to their own upcoming "MS DOS 5", it was cheaper, and it would be out first. At that point, they began a campaign to flood the information channels with hype about MS DOS 5, and how it had advanced memory management, and was superior to all other products. This is standard business practice, but what followed, as outlined in Microsoft's own internal documents and memos, went far beyond that. Microsoft released MS DOS 5 in 1991 and Windows 3.1 in 1992. They were both big hits. DR DOS 6 was coming out, and was considered a superior product by many power users, and sold well. Then owners of DR DOS started getting error messages when they tried to install Windows 3.1 on their systems. It turns out that the developers of Windows were instructed to "make sure DR DOS has problems with Windows". The following are selected Microsoft emails that were entered into evidence in the trial. Microsoft's David Cole emailed Phil Barrett on September 30 1991: "It's pretty clear we need to make sure Windows 3.1 only runs on top of MS DOS or an OEM version of it," and "The approach we will take is to detect DR DOS 6 and refuse to load. The error message should be something like 'Invalid device driver interface." Microsoft had several methods of detecting and sabotaging DR-DOS with Windows. One was to have Smartdrive detect DR-DOS and refused to load it for Windows 3.1. There was also a version check in XMS in the Windows 3.1 setup program which produced the message: "The XMS driver you have installed is not compatible with Windows. You must remove it before setup can successfully install Windows." This was not true, but rather, was an attempt to undermine the competition. Brad Silverberg, the Microsoft exec who had been responsible for Windows 95, emailed Jim Allchin (now Senior Vice President of MS) on September 27th 1991: "after IBM announces support for dr-dos at comdex, it's a small step for them to also announce they will be selling netware lite, maybe sometime soon thereafter. but count on it. We don't know precisely what ibm is going to announce. my best hunch is that they will offer dr-dos as the preferred solution for 286, os 2 2.0 for 386. they will also probably continue to offer msdos at $165 (drdos for $99). drdos has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future." Jim Allchin replied: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)". Andy Hill emailed David Cole, Windows group manager: "Janine has brought up some good questions on how we handle the error messages that the users will get if they aren't using MS-DOS.