"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.