“That is why Apple, not IBM, perfected the personal computer, why the Wright brothers, not the French army, invented powered flight, why Jonas Salk, not the British National Health Service, invented a polio vaccine, why Amazon, not the Post Office, invented one-click ordering and why a Finnish lumber-supply company, not a national telephone monopoly, became the world leader in mobile telephony.”
Another good one from Robert Graboyes.
I’m afraid that neither Apple nor IBM “perfected” the personal computer. We’re not running anything on 6502 microprocessors, the mouse and modern GUIs came from Xerox, MS produced early sort-of workable operating systems, and Linus Torvald invented the operating system that most internet servers, the computer I’m currently using (ubuntu 22.04), and all Macs run. There were many disparate influences for PCs, including CP/M, Amiga OS, etc. And so far, things still aren’t perfect.
The reason Apple didn’t sue Microsoft for stealing Windows was because Apple stole the whole concept from Xerox. Xerox developed the point and click PC but had absolutely no clue how to market what they had.
Nope. Buckle up for a Stanford Research Institute presentation from 1968 where they introduce the concept of a mouse pointing device and offer some examples of utility such as a word processor with operations like cut and paste.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6rKUf9DWRI
In 1973 Xerox PARC developed a computer with a graphical user interface that looked suspiciously identical to Doug Engelbart’s team from 5 years earlier.
It’s impressive that you managed to get nearly every single technical fact in your comment wrong.
But the overall point is there. Modern PCs aren’t perfect but gawd did Apple produce a lot of overpriced underpowered crap after Steve left.
I am of course talking about Wozniak. The Steve who actually produced serious value at Apple.
Unme
Not sure when Wozniak left, and am not EVEN close to being an Apple officiando…..BUT, the 14″ Mac Book Pro I bought in 2010 is and continues to be an ABSOLUTE BEAST. Since upgraded to a 500gb SSD and increased the RAM along with having had it tweeked to accept the latest OS.
How many of you still have your laptop from 2010..??
My back up is a ThinkPad T460P, also totally upgraded.
Both tough as nails.
At an earlier date, in 1986, my partner and I (@ SAIT), did our final report using I do believe an 8086, dot matrix printer and 6″ floppys….”Word Star” for those who may recall…and our calculators were a SHARP PC1401 fully capable of writing BASIC code for Physics – Strength of Materials courses – I still have it and it still works as good as the day I bought it.
Them’s were the days…
I’m…astonished that you managed to upgrade anything by crApple. They are notorious for selling mediocre hardware at leading-edge price and welding the parts in so it’s impossible to upgrade.
I will admit I’ve heard multiple comments from people who really liked their 2010s Apple laptops, and not long before that they may have made some really good computers for hardcore AV purposes….but I’ve also seen Louis Rossman repair videos where he has to fix these laptops and oh lordy Apple makes some badly designed laptops. Ex Putting the CPU electrical feed right next to the display electrical fee is a brilliant way to turn some spill damage into a fried CPU.
Steak,
I still have my old clamshell iBook from 1999, it still works well and comes with a carrying handle, which is great because it is heavy!! It has firewire, a dvd player and composite video out so one could watch dvd’s and output to a larger screen. It was one of the first wi-fi capable commercial laptops. I upgraded the ram (easy) and the hard drive (difficult) and was using it as my main travel laptop for a long time! An upgraded Newertech battery provided 13 hrs of useful life!
I also have an old graphite wifi base station that was given to me, broken. It had 2 bad capacitors on the power board. I replaced those with upgraded units and it has been running for over 20 years now! I leave it plugged in as proof of point, it is slow, by today’s standards, but has great range.. I also completely replaced all the capacitors on the mobo of an old eMac with Rubycon units, which, due to a bad batch of capacitors in those years, (which also plagued Dell compact cpus and others and was purported to be a case of industrial espionage gone wrong), it is also still running, with a startup time of 30s from power button push to stable desktop. I have a more recent iMac that starts up in less that 15s to stable desktop, also heavily modified.. I started my apple journey in 1986 with my own macintosh that I still have, boxed up and stashed away and while I wont say that apple makes/made the best computers, I like the fact that there is a CHOICE…
Sliderules Rule!
Human powered
Now where’s that decimal point?
Read and learn
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto
“MS produced early sort-of workable operating systems”
Gates in turn approached Seattle Computer Products. There, programmer Tim Paterson had developed a variant of CP/M-80, intended as an internal product for testing SCP’s new 16-bit Intel 8086 CPU card for the S-100 bus. The system was initially named “QDOS” (Quick and Dirty Operating System), before being made commercially available as 86-DOS. Microsoft purchased 86-DOS, allegedly for $50,000. This became Microsoft Disk Operating System, MS-DOS, introduced in 1981.
https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=99
You must watch the squirrel video at the end! Tons of fun!
For sure. Same guy who developed the glitter bomb for porch pirates I think.
Steve
It was a grand vid to watch…Squirrels…damned smart..!!
It’s Hedley
Clarus the Dogcow says: “Moof!”
My ancestors invented the wheel, around which everything revolves.
Except for First Nations. They didn’t see any need for the wheel.
And they weren’t your distant relatives either.
You can almost hear the pocket protectors being removed…
A “Professor Langley” was appointed by the gubmint to be in charge of research which would, in due time, point the way to scientifically based manned powered flight.
Or, perhaps, it was just a cushy lifetime sinecure to see off any unwashed enthusiasts who might just scare the horses to no good purpose.
The Wright bros got to work and invented their way to practical flight.
Prof Langley invented a steam powered submarine with wings. lol
The Wright Brothers did a lot of work, and then realized that all the aeronautical tables were wrong.
And with a buddy, they invented a wind tunnel to make all new research results.
And then they did a whoooole lot of grinding and modelmaking and recording.
And then they did gliders, and put together motors, and did even more calculations with their math sister’s help, and learned to sew silk, and picked out a place in North Carolina for testing, and….
The amazing thing is how they kept on going, mostly with just supportive help from their family members and close associates; and how they funded themselves. It was a crazy lot of work, for a project that they couldn’t be sure would ever work at all. And they knew they could die doing it, because a lot of men died in glider crashes.