[Steve Firth]

"Rick Hughes" wrote:
[snip]

If Steve Jobs had not been so adamant that only Apple could sell anything
running MacOS .... and had instead licensed the MacOS system, Windows
would never have got off the ground.

No, that's absolute ********. The Apple II with a CP/M card was the darling
of bean counters because it would run Visicalc. When Jobs released the Lisa
the bean counters fell out with Apple. The Lisa was too expensive, didn't
run CP/M, and it didn't have Visicalc. IBM offered a computer running
something that looked a lot like CP/M, it had Visicalc and later Lotus 123.
It was cheaper than the Lisa and no one knew what Microsoft was or cared.
The OS was just something given away with computers.

The Mac was Lisa-lite, but it was more powerful and better specced than PCs
of the day. The corporate suits saw it as a silly little machine that
looked to them like a games machine. Besides which no one got fired for
buying IBM. Sp the suits would continue to spec and buy PCs.

There were no PC clones to port MacOS to, the PC was too slow to run a GUI,
it had crappy graphics with rectangular pixels and it was limited to 640K
of RAM. Not only that but MacOS relied on a unique feature of the 68000
series processors for speed (exception trapping) and it needed the Mac ROM
to function at all. Also MacOS was big endian and the PC was little endian.

It was never going to get ported to the PC.

Microsoft got big by shafting their client IBM and in the process helped to
kill IBM as a maker of desktop computers.

Funny that people see him almost God like.

Funny that people are blinded by what they assume other people think of him
to the point that they fail to see what he did achieve.

[Rick Hughes[_4_]]

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
...
"Rick Hughes" wrote:
[snip]

No, that's absolute ********.



I disagree ...
As someone who used Macs during that time they were slow ... very slow, but
easy to learn and intuitive. when PC's came out with far more processing
power at a much reduced per unit cost ... Mac sales and business use
plummeted. (apart from some niche graphic useage)

The business went bust as far as MAC PC's concerned in mid 90's (not sure
if that was when Jobs left) ... the iPhone turned it round in past 5 years
for sure.
Interesting though Android has much higher market share than Iphone .. and
that is by giving away away an open platform (Android) ... pattern forming
here?

Microsoft simply provided what business (and eventually the public) wanted
.... cheap, powerful, easy to use m/c .... with cheap s/w and like it or
not Microsoft brought that.
At the time of AppleIIe you had Spekturm, BBC, Dragon, Acorn, Commodore 64,
Atari ..... they all died ...

It took business software to make things happen. ( MS Word, Excel)

[The Other Mike[_3_]]

On Thu, 03 Nov 2011 16:35:28 +0000, Tim Streater
wrote:

In article ,
"Rick Hughes" wrote:


It took business software to make things happen. ( MS Word, Excel)

Mmmm. Available for the Mac some 5 years before there was a Windows
version. I was using Word 4 on the Mac in the mid 80s or so, well before
there was anything other than a joke version of Windows. Excel was
released as a Mac program two years before any Windows version. Things
like FrameMaker and PageMaker (since replaced by InDesign) were
developed on the Mac too, as there was no other decent GUI-based system
at the time.

Interleaf was around a long time before Framemaker, maybe 10 years.


--

[Rick Hughes[_4_]]

Microsoft simply provided what business (and eventually the public)
wanted ... cheap, powerful, easy to use m/c .... with cheap s/w and
like it or not Microsoft brought that.
At the time of AppleIIe you had Spekturm, BBC, Dragon, Acorn, Commodore
64, Atari ..... they all died ...

It took business software to make things happen. ( MS Word, Excel)

Mmmm. Available for the Mac some 5 years before there was a Windows
version. I was using Word 4 on the Mac in the mid 80s or so, well before



The issue was the company I was with (Major International) kept getting hit
with MSoffice on MAC being 18 months behind PC - but no doubt what killed
Macs in business were for any given performance level, they were twice the
price of a PC.

The company had to take a huge Capex cost to swap every Mac out ... but they
did, and everyone that time was so glad, as the PC's were much faster that
the Mac PowerPC they replaced.

I was a Mac fan so liked the prodcut ... and was a user up until system 7.5