How would you have steered the Computer Industry ?

[haqking]

If you were there at the start with the opportunities and power that Gates, Allen, Jobs, Woz had, who would you have been and how would you have done it ?

I mean would you of made everything open source and kept it that way throughout ? bare in mind that the closed source market drives the open source we know today.

also if you had made it open and free from get go and kept with it then without the licensing deal struck with IBM would we still have the computer industry or would computer development of taken a different turn and we wouldnt be sat here typing on our home computers ?

also remember primarily Gates and Allen drove the software industry and without the home computer from Apple perhaps it would of gone differently and vice versa.

Those of you who dont know the history, please research it before answering.

intelligent discussion please without attacks (on a thread in the cafe ? no way....LOL

enjoy guys ;-)

[handy]

It basically was open-source from the beginning.

[haqking]

It basically was open-source from the beginning.


I guess what i meant was rather than create the industry we have today which has been done with selling closed source software and the licensing, would you make the industry today more like the Linux industry, so most of what people use and have is open to development from anyone and so people are not tied into a given manufacturer or brand or product ?

and this is purely as i am interested in how people see the decisions and deals that were made and how they could of been different and how the posters themselves would of steered things ?

[SoFl W]

If everything was different how would you do things differently?

[haqking]

If everything was different how would you do things differently?

is that philosophy or are you asking how i would have done it differently ?

To be honest i dont think i would have, i am happy with the way things are. Which is my point, the reason i asked is i hear so much slander of the industry and the people that steered it when to be honest if it was any other way i dont think we would have one.

I like the fact the masses it catered to with windows (whatever the opinion) it allows the majority of people with no techie knowledge to get what they need done...done.

Linux and others are out there for people who like it another way and i think the market will always be that way for the most part and its how i like it.

[handy]

@haqking: That is a huge question, with an enormous number of implications.

If I truly did the in depth research on the topic & wrote the book, I would very likely be able to earn a doctorate for it. :)

Without going into it very deeply, it would seem that the world would have been better off, if we had of left closed source software & software licenses off of the agenda for IT completely.

Though I think that if the complete history of IT was studied closely we may find that if we had of gone down the alternate hypothetical open-source route, it may have caused some hugely unpleasant side effects (stuff just never happening in both the hardware & software industries) as well as the positive ones.

Really, we'll never know will we.

[haqking]

@haqking: That is a huge question, with an enormous number of implications.

If I truly did the in depth research on the topic & wrote the book, I would very likely be able to earn a doctorate for it. :)

Without going into it very deeply, it would seem that the world would have been better off, if we had of left closed source software & software licenses off of the agenda for IT completely.

Though I think that if the complete history of IT was studied closely we may find that if we had of gone down the alternate hypothetical open-source route, it may have caused some hugely unpleasant side effects (stuff just never happening in both the hardware & software industries) as well as the positive ones.

Really, we'll never know will we.

of course it is a big question, with no right or wrong answers, just views and opinions.

It is the cafe for discussions and fancied something more than if i eat noodles or do i want oreos with breast milk...LOL.....which by the way to those thread starters, i found them both amusing and i participated ;-)

and no we will never know, perhaps Sam beckett will leap back and change the course of history ;-)

[Dangertux]

How would I have steered the computer industry?

I am not greedy enough or enough of a business man to be like those guys, so probably into a ditch ;-)

[haqking]

How would I have steered the computer industry?

I am not greedy enough or enough of a business man to be like those guys, so probably into a ditch ;-)

ha ha isnt it in there already ? LOL

[3Miro]

I vote yes, but my view is that some software should be "non-free".

Drivers and essential OS software (browser, media, office) should be free in all ways imaginable.

Entertainment software like games, can be mostly free. Look at civilization, they give you 90% of the code and a whole lot of tools to mod the game and share the mods. The user gives up some freedom, but the user has powerful weapon against the game makers, if the game designer messes with us, we won't buy the game. This is different from the OS essential software in the sense that we "need" internet and simple office apps for our everyday work, games are optional.

There can be 100% non-free software, but this should be specialized software for corporations only. One corporation negotiating with another is a fair game.

[Dangertux]

ha ha isnt it in there already ? LOL

Well, yes and no.

Yes in the fact that most software is broken from the get go, closed-source developers tend to be lazy and arrogant, open source developers are way too hippie trippy to be consistant (no offense to present company). The reality is it doesn't matter how good or bad the product is because some 21 year old punk with 2 certs and an AS in comp-sci is going to screw it up once it hits a data center anyway.

No, because despite all of those realities it all seems to just work. It doesn't work like a well oiled flowing machine. It works more like a family at a holiday get together. Slowly , begrudgingly , and usually efficient only when outside help is consulted.

[haqking]

Well, yes and no.

Yes in the fact that most software is broken from the get go, closed-source developers tend to be lazy and arrogant, open source developers are way too hippie trippy to be consistant (no offense to present company). The reality is it doesn't matter how good or bad the product is because some 21 year old punk with 2 certs and an AS in comp-sci is going to screw it up once it hits a data center anyway.

No, because despite all of those realities it all seems to just work. It doesn't work like a well oiled flowing machine. It works more like a family at a holiday get together. Slowly , begrudgingly , and usually efficient only when outside help is consulted.

ha nice answer, i agree.

The in a ditch thing was just to generate thoughts

personally i am happy with the way things happened and still are

[Dangertux]

ha nice answer, i agree.

The in a ditch thing was just to generate thoughts ;-)

personally i am happy with the way things happened and still are ;-)

Me too, my job would be very boring if everything worked ;-)

[handy]

...

There can be 100% non-free software, but this should be specialized software for corporations only. One corporation negotiating with another is a fair game.

A problem you strike there is that many home users like to use various pieces of software that has been written for the professional world & made by the likes of Adobe for example, to work with their own private media.

But I guess really there is no problem there is there... Apart from the price.

[haqking]

Me too, my job would be very boring if everything worked ;-)


deleted

[3Miro]

A problem you strike there is that many home users like to use various pieces of software that has been written for the professional world & made by the likes of Adobe for example, to work with their own private media.

But I guess really there is no problem there is there... Apart from the price.

Photoshop is very general, with little skill you can edit your hope pictures and stuff. You can put Photoshop in the "gaming" category.

When I say specialized I mean Maya (really heavy duty 3D) or some Geophysical programs that I have seen. Basically this is software that you would only use if you are specially educated and working in that industry.

[handy]

Photoshop is very general, with little skill you can edit your hope pictures and stuff. You can put Photoshop in the "gaming" category.

When I say specialized I mean Maya (really heavy duty 3D) or some Geophysical programs that I have seen. Basically this is software that you would only use if you are specially educated and working in that industry.

I wasn't just talking about Photoshop. Adobe make specialised software for working with movies & they make suites of software that are highly integrated & made to work together to produce the desired result.

Other companies make expensive sound & video software (Apple for example) that is used by both people at top of the field & home users. Again, the problem is that because it is used by the pro's it is expensive.

Drawing the line re. what is & what is not specialised software that people have to be highly trained to use is an incredibly grey area.

Just because someone can use Photoshop for example, to do what they need to do with their home photo collection doesn't mean they know how to really use the software. There are professionals that state it took them a couple of years of using the software everyday at work before they actually knew how to use it...

[KiwiNZ]

Stop Governments/judiciary interfering and allow market forces do their thing.

[handy]

Stop Governments interfering and allow market forces do their thing.

Then the American Dream can continue to upgrade the standard of living for all life on Earth.

[KiwiNZ]

Market forces reflect what the consumer wants not what a group of politicians / judiciary believe they want. This is true software freedom. If the market chooses Windows then so be it.

[haqking]

Then the American Dream can continue to upgrade the standard of living for all life on Earth.

The American dream is like God, everyone has there own version.

and indeed keeping the govt and such like out of it would create the freedom we often think that we already have.

[TMundo]

Hard to say. I guess while I enjoy free things, I still believe that open market competition drives one company to make a product better than the next. People are driven to make open source programs to make something better (and free) than the corporations, and in a sense that is a push-back at corporate greed and monopolization. However, in the beginning, when no one knew what programming was, and there was only a handful of programmers, well, what would be the motivation for people to get involved in open source programming.

They want something better. It's almost the same as open-source now, except, in this case it's not something better than the corporate driven monopoly, it's somethings better than writing by hand. Or endless dry arithmetic (you like that, I just made that up.) It's innovation-driven. I guess it's not as hard-core, so it may not work as fast. Not to many people will donate their time to a project that is groundbreaking if they aren't getting paid. Some people will, just not as many as there would be if they were getting paid.

Also, when you talk about making money and competing, while there may be more motivation to make one program better than the next, there is also greed, and that motivates people to make a program more sinister. It's hard for the law to regulate how a program functions if they don't know much about how it functions. Some programs are intrusive, they try and hijack all your settings when you install them. And it may be a program you need to use, one that has value, but the company creating it wants to market themselves by hijacking your personal stuff.

So there are some pros and cons. Motivation in an open market that benefits through competition vs. greed and intrusiveness vs a lack of motivation to get anything done at a rate faster than do I have the spare time to write innovative open-source programming.

[handy]

Market forces reflect what the consumer wants not what a group of politicians / judiciary believe they want. This is true software freedom. If the market chooses Windows then so be it.

As much as I respect you Mike, I consider that to be a load of simplistic rubbish.

People are constantly barraged with spin via all of the media, which tells them to consume (as that will make you feel satisfied - of course the satisfaction doesn't last for long).

Hell, there exist top marketing firms that study how to make advertisements that will appeal to the toddlers! So they can start to manipulate the way the child's brain works & have the child work on its parents to have them buy this, buy me that.

The material values that have been engendered in an ever growing number of the worlds population is what has caused us to mine in places that we shouldn't, to over fish & in concert with the huge amount of fertiliser, chemicals & plastic, pollution from our industrialised societies that is waste mostly washed down our waterways, we have managed to change the ph of the oceans of the world (acidifying) & are in the process of dramatically upsetting the balance of life in the oceans. To the point where we have growing dead zones.

All of this, has been predicted by experts in the field to leave us with dead oceans in roughly < 30 years time. Which by the way, by then will have gone through the process that leads to & gradual cessation of the flow of the oceans currents that exchange the warm surface currents with the deep cold, thereby oxygenating the deep (which keeps the denizens of the deep alive).

As this happens, without any other input we will have instigated worldwide climate change on a huge scale, as the surface temperature of the oceans has an enormous effect on the world climate.

Mono-cultural farming practices have caused countries like the US, for instance to have barely a river in their huge country that is not damned at least once & to mostly have little if any water at all running into the oceans.

China, has killed an enormous amount of farming land, due to the overuse of chemical fertilisers & pesticides they have grown their deserts.

This apart from the massive input of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, GM seeds, & the large scale destruction of the natural habitat & all that, that entails re. the wildlife both large & microscopic that had taken so long to evolve into the finest of balances in trillions of intricately interwoven systems that makes life on Earth what it is. & what it is, is becoming extinct. It is predicted going on our current rate, that by 2050 we will have caused over 50% of all species on Earth to become extinct. The far reaching effects of destroying bio-diversity on our Earth is only just starting to become understood.

The primary cause that is perpetuating all of this, is our market driven economy. The decision makers of this system must be sociopaths, otherwise they couldn't possibly make the decisions that they do.

Anyone who thinks that market forces should govern our planet must be blind. The US, is the prime mover of such forces & look at the shape they are in. On so many levels their country is falling apart.

They have proven that for all but the tiniest percentage of people the American Dream (you can have whatever you want, whenever you want & wherever you want, if you have enough money) is a total disaster.

If we don't somehow manage to make this corporate run reality that we are all living in, extinct, then it will be the end of us.

[Bandit]

If you were there at the start with the opportunities and power that Gates, Allen, Jobs, Woz had, who would you have been and how would you have done it ?.....

Sorry Jobs, Gates and the rest were not the start of software and most of it before was opensource. If you really want to know the code Bill and Steve took to make the first Mac actually was opensource unix code they modified and claimed was their own (much based on next step) and resold it. These days they wouldnt have got away with that and would have been sued.

[KiwiNZ]

As much as I respect you Mike, I consider that to be a load of simplistic rubbish.

People are constantly barraged with spin via all of the media, which tells them to consume (as that will make you feel satisfied - of course the satisfaction doesn't last for long).

Hell, there exist top marketing firms that study how to make advertisements that will appeal to the toddlers! So they can start to manipulate the way the child's brain works & have the child work on its parents to have them buy this, buy me that.

The material values that have been engendered in an ever growing number of the worlds population is what has caused us to mine in places that we shouldn't, to over fish & in concert with the huge amount of fertiliser, chemicals & plastic, pollution from our industrialised societies that is waste mostly washed down our waterways, we have managed to change the ph of the oceans of the world (acidifying) & are in the process of dramatically upsetting the balance of life in the oceans. To the point where we have growing dead zones.

All of this, has been predicted by experts in the field to leave us with dead oceans in roughly < 30 years time. Which by the way, by then will have gone through the process that leads to & gradual cessation of the flow of the oceans currents that exchange the warm surface currents with the deep cold, thereby oxygenating the deep (which keeps the denizens of the deep alive).

As this happens, without any other input we will have instigated worldwide climate change on a huge scale, as the surface temperature of the oceans has an enormous effect on the world climate.

Mono-cultural farming practices have caused countries like the US, for instance to have barely a river in their huge country that is not damned at least once & to mostly have little if any water at all running into the oceans.

China, has killed an enormous amount of farming land, due to the overuse of chemical fertilisers & pesticides they have grown their deserts.

This apart from the massive input of chemical fertilisers, pesticides, GM seeds, & the large scale destruction of the natural habitat & all that, that entails re. the wildlife both large & microscopic that had taken so long to evolve into the finest of balances in trillions of intricately interwoven systems that makes life on Earth what it is. & what it is, is becoming extinct. It is predicted going on our current rate, that by 2050 we will have caused over 50% of all species on Earth to become extinct. The far reaching effects of destroying bio-diversity on our Earth is only just starting to become understood.

The primary cause that is perpetuating all of this, is our market driven economy. The decision makers of this system must be sociopaths, otherwise they couldn't possibly make the decisions that they do.

Anyone who thinks that market forces should govern our planet must be blind. The US, is the prime mover of such forces & look at the shape they are in. On so many levels their country is falling apart.

They have proven that for all but the tiniest percentage of people the American Dream (you can have whatever you want, whenever you want & wherever you want, if you have enough money) is a total disaster.

If we don't somehow manage to make this corporate run reality that we are all living in, extinct, then it will be the end of us.

I agree with this to a limited extent however I was referring to such actions as the European Unions decision concerning Microsoft , e.g forcing them to produce a crippled Windows for the European market that no one wanted, they are now turning their sights on Google and no doubt viewing the Apple resources as a source of cash.

People should be presented with products and make their choice not forced to make a decision based on predetermined requisites set by Governments or the judiciary.

I don't however wish this thread to drift into general politics, lets keep it with in the rules "Discussions on religion and politics are not allowed, except for politics directly related to free and open source issues."

[3Miro]

Without anti-trust laws to prevent Unix from taking over, there would have been no windows in the first place (or at least nowhere near its present state).

Besides, the Windows version in EU is not "crippled", it is not missing features or functionality, it simply doesn't come with some MS applications by default (you can easily get them for free). The free market is based on the idea of free choice, in the US, if I chose to use Firefox, I cannot chose to not have IE. This means that IE has no intensive to really compete, why bother, they get to be installed anyway. Same with VLC and Windows Media Player.

Monopoly is the enemy of the free market. In the case of a monopoly, government intervention is warranted although only to the point of insuring fair competition and availability of choice. The government should never take over a company or favor one company over another.

[KiwiNZ]

Sorry Jobs, Gates and the rest were not the start of software and most of it before was opensource. If you really want to know the code Bill and Steve took to make the first Mac actually was opensource unix code they modified and claimed was their own (much based on next step) and resold it. These days they wouldnt have got away with that and would have been sued.

Nextstep was owned by Steve Jobs

[Bandit]

Nextstep was owned by Steve Jobs
Might have been openstep, but you know what I mean. I didnt bother to wiki it to double check my data.. hehe I am getting lazy.. :-)

[KiwiNZ]

Might have been openstep, but you know what I mean. I didnt bother to wiki it to double check my data.. hehe I am getting lazy.. :-)

Openstep was joint developed by Next (owned by Steve Jobs) and Sun.

[FlameReaper]

I am unsure, but most probably I won't start out open-sourced, because if I would I'd be with a partner and he doesn't like the idea of making whatever we're planning open-source (that might change with a bit of persuasion on my part, but I'm not a good persuader when it comes to him).

But I think he has a little idealistic issues. Creative Commons License? What is he thinking to do, do a commercial application with that license? At least if he takes a note or two on what the GPL licenses or maybe the BSD licenses are all about then I might tolerate a thing for two. But he's not going to do a Yet Another Photoshop Alternative even, he's thinking of doing something... in which it was only until he graduated before I did (because I had two semesters to repeat due to an accident) I found out that Xen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xen) has had it covered.

I guess I should tell him "dude, you better think of something else, looks like your idea was far from a revolutionary at all" some day.

[Phrea]

Ridiculous question.

[handy]

Ridiculous question.

That has already been stated in a variety of ways. BUT, the question has stimulated some thought.

Why do you use the "Cafe"? :)

[Macskeeball]

Sorry Jobs, Gates and the rest were not the start of software and most of it before was opensource. If you really want to know the code Bill and Steve took to make the first Mac actually was opensource unix code they modified and claimed was their own (much based on next step) and resold it. These days they wouldnt have got away with that and would have been sued.

Sorry, but except for the first sentence, this post was filled entirely with errors. Allow me to give you a rough timeline so you can know what actually happened. This is from memory, so there won't be many dates. Sorry for the length, but it should really clear things up. I bolded the particularly important parts (in terms of response to your post).


Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ("Woz") were introduced by a mutual friend because they both had an interest in pranks and technology. They became known for their phone phreaking blue boxes, which were used for getting free calls from pay phones by playing certain tones.
They got involved in the Homebrew Computer Club, a place where people shared ideas and schematics for electronics they were working on. There was talk of a revolution: computers in the home. Woz designed a computer, and Jobs decided that they should turn it into a product: the Apple I. Woz was an engineer at HP and didn't want to get involved in business. He wanted to stay at HP making calculators for the rest of his life, but Jobs was able to get people to help him convince Woz that he wouldn't need to get involved in the business side of things.
Jobs, Woz, and a third often forgotten co-founder (whose name I can't remember) started Apple in 1977 in a bedroom of Jobs' parents house, and it later moved to the garage. Woz was the engineer and programmer, while Jobs was the visionary and marketer who never wrote a line of code.
The Apple I did not have a case, and was very much a computer that people had to assemble themselves. The Apple II was a far greater success, largely due to a spreadsheet program called ViziCalc (sp?). It's the machine that made Apple known. The Apple III, on the other hand, failed. At around that time, Woz left Apple- for the most part. Technically, he's still on the payroll even today.
Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen created BASIC for Apple's machines.
Xerox had a unique project in their Palo Alto Research Center: the first GUI, and with it the mouse. Xerox didn't see the significance of the project, and allowed Jobs and other Apple employees to come and see it. Jobs was ecstatic, and Apple stole (and, some would argue, improved upon) those Xerox ideas to make the LISA. The LISA failed to sell, because it cost $11,000.
Apple began working on a less expensive but less powerful machine: the original 128K Macintosh, which was introduced January 24, 1984. It was the first machine to popularize the GUI.
Microsoft had been allowed access to Mac prototypes so that they could develop Word and Excel for it. Believe it or not, those programs were made for the Mac first. Microsoft looked at the Mac prototypes and ultimately copied Apple's ideas to create Windows. Gates was not an Apple employee and didn't make the Mac. Again, Apple's ideas were copied from Xerox PARC.
The original Mac OS (1.0 to 9.2.2), was not at all Unix based. For one thing, it was written in Pascal and, at first, 68k assembler (it was later ported to PowerPC). Unix was largely written in C.
In 1985, Jobs was kicked out of Apple by the board. He founded Pixar (which came from Lucasfilm) and later NeXT. NeXT made NeXTStep and its own hardware. NeXTStep was extremely advanced for its time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A), and was even used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web, but ultimately NeXT had poor sales and was running out of money.
I was born around the time of the events in #10. I mention this to show my own perspective of the timeline.
Windows 95 was released and began to dominate the market.
Without Jobs, Apple was also going through it's own dark ages. They tried various CEOs and product lines, but it appeared the company would go out of business. Also, Mac OS had become unreliable due to extension conflicts and spaghetti code. They needed a new OS. Apple considered buying BeOS but ultimately chose to buy NeXT in 1997. In the process, they also got Steve Jobs back as, at first, an interim CEO. MS made a $150 million investment in Apple (including non-voting shares, which were later sold) and agreed to make Office for Mac for the next five years. Apple introduced the original iMac G3s in 1998, which were very successful and also popularized USB. Later, they popularized WiFi with the iBook laptop.
After experiments like Copland were tried and cancelled, NeXTStep ultimately became Mac OS X, which was released in 2000 and was a completely different codebase compared to Mac OS Classic. Mac OS X is Unix based, but Mac OS Classic was not. OS X uses the Mach kernel and a BSD subsystem. This lower level is released open source as Darwin.
Other things which contributed to Apple's return from near death were the death of the Mac clones, a greatly simplified product lineup, Apple retail stores (2001), the iLife suite (iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, iWeb), the iPod (2001), pro apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic, the iTunes store (either 2003 or 2004), OS X for Intel (2006), Bootcamp and 3rd party virtualization, the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008) and the iPad (2010).

Sidenote (food for thought): While Steve Jobs was away from Apple, he was almost chosen as the citizen for the Space Shuttle Challenger. Christa McAuliffe was ultimately chosen instead, and she and the rest of the crew were tragically killed during the launch of that 1986 mission. Regardless of what one thinks about Steve Jobs or his company, it's hard to deny that he plays an important role in a company with a history of pushing tech industry trends in new directions (computers in homes and small businesses, GUI, USB, WiFi, MP3 players, legal music downloads, smartphones, tablets). Imagine how different the tech industry would be today if Jobs had died in that mission before he could rescue Apple. Not that McAuliffe's horrible death was in any way whatsoever a better outcome. It's just an interesting thing to think about in the spirit of this "what if the computer industry's history had been different?" thread.

I hope this post helps. Again, that was all from memory, but my sources include the books iCon and iWoz, the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, various interviews and keynotes from Woz and Jobs, the Computer History Museum website, the TWiT podcast episode about the 30th anniversary of Apple, the Retro MacCast podcast, Woz on the Engadget Show, and (several years before all that) whatever books and periodicals I used in my 8th grade history fair project as well as an email reply I once received from Woz.

[Macskeeball]

Those interested in computer history from a Linux perspective should watch the Revolution OS documentary.

[mips]

If I was the head of IBM I would have gone for the Motorola 680x0 series CPUs instead of the Intel ones for the first PC and hopefully all the clones would have followed.

[haqking]

Ridiculous question.

its the cafe most of them are !

It wasnt sent to you directly but i appreciate your well thought out answer and participation ;-)

There is no right or wrong answer it is just meant for discussion and opinion.

It is a cafe if you dont want to chat then dont sit at my table ;)

peace

[Bandit]

Sorry, but except for the first sentence, this post was filled entirely with errors. Allow me to give you a rough timeline so you can know what actually happened. This is from memory, so there won't be many dates. Sorry for the length, but it should really clear things up. I bolded the particularly important parts (in terms of response to your post).


Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ("Woz") were introduced by a mutual friend because they both had an interest in pranks and technology. They became known for their phone phreaking blue boxes, which were used for getting free calls from pay phones by playing certain tones.
They got involved in the Homebrew Computer Club, a place where people shared ideas and schematics for electronics they were working on. There was talk of a revolution: computers in the home. Woz designed a computer, and Jobs decided that they should turn it into a product: the Apple I. Woz was an engineer at HP and didn't want to get involved in business. He wanted to stay at HP making calculators for the rest of his life, but Jobs was able to get people to help him convince Woz that he wouldn't need to get involved in the business side of things.
Jobs, Woz, and a third often forgotten co-founder (whose name I can't remember) started Apple in 1977 in a bedroom of Jobs' parents house, and it later moved to the garage. Woz was the engineer and programmer, while Jobs was the visionary and marketer who never wrote a line of code.
The Apple I did not have a case, and was very much a computer that people had to assemble themselves. The Apple II was a far greater success, largely due to a spreadsheet program called ViziCalc (sp?). It's the machine that made Apple known. The Apple III, on the other hand, failed. At around that time, Woz left Apple- for the most part. Technically, he's still on the payroll even today.
Microsoft founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen created BASIC for Apple's machines.
Xerox had a unique project in their Palo Alto Research Center: the first GUI, and with it the mouse. Xerox didn't see the significance of the project, and allowed Jobs and other Apple employees to come and see it. Jobs was ecstatic, and Apple stole (and, some would argue, improved upon) those Xerox ideas to make the LISA. The LISA failed to sell, because it cost $11,000.
Apple began working on a less expensive but less powerful machine: the original 128K Macintosh, which was introduced January 24, 1984. It was the first machine to popularize the GUI.
Microsoft had been allowed access to Mac prototypes so that they could develop Word and Excel for it. Believe it or not, those programs were made for the Mac first. Microsoft looked at the Mac prototypes and ultimately copied Apple's ideas to create Windows. Gates was not an Apple employee and didn't make the Mac. Again, Apple's ideas were copied from Xerox PARC.
The original Mac OS (1.0 to 9.2.2), was not at all Unix based. For one thing, it was written in Pascal and, at first, 68k assembler (it was later ported to PowerPC). Unix was largely written in C.
In 1985, Jobs was kicked out of Apple by the board. He founded Pixar (which came from Lucasfilm) and later NeXT. NeXT made NeXTStep and its own hardware. NeXTStep was extremely advanced for its time (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j02b8Fuz73A), and was even used by Tim Berners-Lee to create the World Wide Web, but ultimately NeXT had poor sales and was running out of money.
I was born around the time of the events in #10. I mention this to show my own perspective of the timeline.
Windows 95 was released and began to dominate the market.
Without Jobs, Apple was also going through it's own dark ages. They tried various CEOs and product lines, but it appeared the company would go out of business. Also, Mac OS had become unreliable due to extension conflicts and spaghetti code. They needed a new OS. Apple considered buying BeOS but ultimately chose to buy NeXT in 1997. In the process, they also got Steve Jobs back as, at first, an interim CEO. MS made a $150 million investment in Apple (including non-voting shares, which were later sold) and agreed to make Office for Mac for the next five years. Apple introduced the original iMac G3s in 1998, which were very successful and also popularized USB. Later, they popularized WiFi with the iBook laptop.
After experiments like Copland were tried and cancelled, NeXTStep ultimately became Mac OS X, which was released in 2000 and was a completely different codebase compared to Mac OS Classic. Mac OS X is Unix based, but Mac OS Classic was not. OS X uses the Mach kernel and a BSD subsystem. This lower level is released open source as Darwin.
Other things which contributed to Apple's return from near death were the death of the Mac clones, a greatly simplified product lineup, Apple retail stores (2001), the iLife suite (iMovie, iDVD, iTunes, iPhoto, Garageband, iWeb), the iPod (2001), pro apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic, the iTunes store (either 2003 or 2004), OS X for Intel (2006), Bootcamp and 3rd party virtualization, the iPhone (2007), the App Store (2008) and the iPad (2010).

Sidenote (food for thought): While Steve Jobs was away from Apple, he was almost chosen as the citizen for the Space Shuttle Challenger. Christa McAuliffe was ultimately chosen instead, and she and the rest of the crew were tragically killed during the launch of that 1986 mission. Regardless of what one thinks about Steve Jobs or his company, it's hard to deny that he plays an important role in a company with a history of pushing tech industry trends in new directions (computers in homes and small businesses, GUI, USB, WiFi, MP3 players, legal music downloads, smartphones, tablets). Imagine how different the tech industry would be today if Jobs had died in that mission before he could rescue Apple. Not that McAuliffe's horrible death was in any way whatsoever a better outcome. It's just an interesting thing to think about in the spirit of this "what if the computer industry's history had been different?" thread.

I hope this post helps. Again, that was all from memory, but my sources include the books iCon and iWoz, the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, various interviews and keynotes from Woz and Jobs, the Computer History Museum website, the TWiT podcast episode about the 30th anniversary of Apple, the Retro MacCast podcast, Woz on the Engadget Show, and (several years before all that) whatever books and periodicals I used in my 8th grade history fair project as well as an email reply I once received from Woz.

Nice big post. To bad you got so much wrong in your post it isnt even funny.
I will just start out by posting about #5:
The original BASIC language was designed in 1964 by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz and implemented by a team of Dartmouth students under their direction. The acronym is tied to the name of an unpublished paper by Thomas Kurtz and is not a backronym, as is sometimes suggested in older versions of The Jargon File. BASIC was designed to allow students to write programs for the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. It was intended to address the complexity issues of older languages with a new language design specifically for the new class of users that time-sharing systems allowed—that is, a less technical user who did not have the mathematical background of the more traditional users and was not interested in acquiring it. Being able to use a computer to support teaching and research was quite novel at the time. In the following years, as other dialects of BASIC appeared, Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC dialect became known as Dartmouth BASIC.

Hmm Kay..

[handy]

@Macskeeball: I was put off due to the length of your post. It is full of errors, & I really didn't & still don't feel like going through & addressing them all to the best of my ability.

BUT, seeing as Bandit has started, I guess I'll add some other corrections too, though I'll take the easy way out & say have a read of the following as it covers much of what is in your post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak

[haqking]

@Macskeeball: I was put off due to the length of your post. It is full of errors, & I really didn't & still don't feel like going through & addressing them all to the best of my ability.

BUT, seeing as Bandit has started, I guess I'll add some other corrections too, though I'll take the easy way out & say have a read of the following as it covers much of what is in your post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Wozniak


ha i started the thread and didnt want to respond to it, i would be here all day...LOL

I will leave it upto research ;-)

[Macskeeball]

I appreciate you bringing my apparently faulty memory to my attention. I will do some research to find out what those errors were. As someone trying to become a tech journalist, accuracy is very important to me and I do apologize for my errors.

Regarding BASIC, what I actually wrote was indeed wrong. Worded that way, it would mean that Gates and Allen had invented the original BASIC language, which is false. What I meant and should have written was that they created a version of BASIC for the Apple II: AppleSoft BASIC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applesoft_BASIC).

One error I found was that I wrote Apple was started in 1977. They were incorporated in 1977, but started in 1976.

Another is that I said Mac OS X was released in 2000. Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released in 1999 and Mac OS X 10.0 (Cheetah) Desktop was released in 2001. The Public Beta came out in 2000, but betas don't count. Cheetah was the release I was referring to.

I will do more fact-checking later. This is actually a good way for me to practice fact-checking in preparation for becoming a journalist. I will fact check my post point-by-point and post the corrections. Unfortunately, I have a lot of other things that I need to get done today. I have one yes/no question: Were there any errors in 10-15 or in the bolded parts? Even better, listing the numbers containing errors (or, if easier, the ones that don't) would help me a lot.

Again, thank you for making me aware that there were errors. :)

[ScionicSpectre]

The fact is that computing DID start as open source. It was just so untainted that the concept of closed, proprietary software was unfamiliar, until somewhere around 1984.

I think we'd have far more interesting machines and software these days if it had never been a game bundling/restricting game. Not only far more interesting, but far more useful.

[KiwiNZ]

As IT salaries grew, and margins tightened in an ever increasing aggressively competitive market, companies needed to protect their investments to ensure competitive return on investment for their stock holders, thus the need to actively protect their intellectual property.

A good example of the aggressive competition is the price of Ram, in 1985 2MB was $US699, in 2010 4GB was $US98. Based on 1985 prices 4GB would cost in 2010 $US1,410,000.

With out that protection those returns would have slumped and reinvestment would have slowed to trickle and available capital for expansion, research and development would have been at a level to would have allowed the advances we have seen.

It would have been nice to see open source prevail but, money makes the IT world go around. Also users themselves were to blame for a lot of the protection measures just like locks on house doors.

[alexfish]

Voted NO

It is up to the developer of software house to decide, there is a mindset which thinks
everything should be free , yet think they can profit by what is free , yet also squawk at the highest level about open software,over the years ardent fans have been shooting themselves in the foot, if the same energy was applied in a positive manor then perhaps we may see more developers and software houses committing to linux orientated systems.

How would I have steered the computer industry.
Ha , Remember good old days of Commodore ,Attari and Acorn to name but a few , and yes there was a choice a IBM PC and Apple, home user which one could you afford,at the expensive end the choice would have been Apple.

Had a Amstrad portable with win 3.1 (weight of a full tower system)it nearly broke my back, don't laugh, ask any one who bought one. now we have tablets with many choices of configurations

In the end it will always be the masses of the end users that will steer the computer industry IE: by what they want and wallet.

As a foot note:
I will always remember the day my Bank Manager recommended installing pc's with win 95 installed (well not actually recommend) as it would be the only way do do banking on line ,+ other services,it kept crashing + the system got a trojan virus, have kept the hard drive for historical Purposes. And no I don't need to buy expensive anti virus software to cure the problems, just punch your bank manager in the eye if he recommends such systems. it cuts the conversation short, but at least he knows how you feel.

Have a nice day

alexfish

[clanky]

You need to understand that no matter how many neck bearded bleeding hearts are around pushing free software there will always be someone who can see a buck to be made.

Even if there had been no Microsoft and no Apple, there would have been someone else, in exactly the same way that if there had been no RMS, there would have been someone else puching the free software agenda.

There is no big conspiracy "steering the software industry" there is just a market and people ready to exploit the market.

[alaukikyo]

You need to understand that no matter how many neck bearded bleeding hearts are around pushing free software there will always be someone who can see a buck to be made.



rms pushes for software free as in "free speech" and not "free beer" . he himself has earned money seling GNU Emacs .
Read More Here (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html)

[3Miro]

Unfortunately this too has deteriorated into a big confusion about the meaning of "free".

Red Hat is a huge proponent to free software, which they sell and make a lot of money. You can have a billion dollar company selling free software.

The word free is used as in "freedom". It is not a matter of what you pay for it, but rather what you are allowed to do with it.

I don't like the word "free". We should just call it "freedom software".

[jhonan]

Red Hat is a huge proponent to free software, which they sell and make a lot of money. You can have a billion dollar company selling free software.
But you know what that means...

You're an enterprise user looking for a robust systems solution to <insert_problem_here> - Sure, you can go to their website and download the source. But then what? Are you going to sit there for 6 months getting it to compile for whatever configuration you're running, implement it across your infrastructure, migrate your data, train your users, and then support the system and make changes to the sourcecode when required?

Nope. You pay someone to do it. Most likely the company who's website you can get the 'free' sourcecode from.

<insert_witty_analogy_with_buying_car_kits_here>

[3Miro]

But you know what that means...

You're an enterprise user looking for a robust systems solution to <insert_problem_here> - Sure, you can go to their website and download the source. But then what? Are you going to sit there for 6 months getting it to compile for whatever configuration you're running, implement it across your infrastructure, migrate your data, train your users, and then support the system and make changes to the sourcecode when required?

Nope. You pay someone to do it. Most likely the company who's website you can get the 'free' sourcecode from.

<insert_witty_analogy_with_buying_car_kits_here>

Read my earlier post on how I think it is perfectly OK for one corporation to sell closed proprietary software to another corporation.

Corporations are powerful money making machines, they don't care about what product they sell, so long as they can get us to buy it. One corporation is equal to another corporation, however, one person is much weaker. The only way we can be on equal footing is if we organize into a community. Freedom software allows that.

The point of my post that you quoted was to note the difference between "free" and "commercial" (do you pay money for it) as opposed to "freedom" and "restrictive/proprietary" (what can you do with it).

1. Windows: restrictive and commercial
2. Skype: restrictive and free
3. RedHat: freedom and commercial
4. Ubuntu: freedom and free

Regular users should have 3 and 4 available to them, allowing corporation to make good profits. Only corporation to corporation software should be in categories 1 and 2.

[Zerocool Djx]

Honestly, Open source is what is killing Linux. I'd rather pay a reasonable fee for a product then have it for free and run like crap. Ubuntu, is incredible, but I really don't understand why they don't make programs for it and sell them cheap. I could understand a free OS system with basic functions for free, but I mean, I am a split second away from going to the bank and getting like 10g's and hiring a staff to make programs that run right and work together for Linux. Asking for donations as awesome, as it makes it free, but isn't really doing me any justice because 90% of the Linux programs are crap. I got tired of complaining about it so this is why I started making my game with Linux in mind.

Bottom line, serious programers on a mass scale will NOT, work for free,... would you? Don't you have a family to feed?

[haqking]

Honestly, Open source is what is killing Linux. I'd rather pay a reasonable fee for a product then have it for free and run like crap. Ubuntu, is incredible, but I really don't understand why they don't make programs for it and sell them cheap. I could understand a free OS system with basic functions for free, but I mean, I am a split second away from going to the bank and getting like 10g's and hiring a staff to make programs that run right and work together for Linux. Asking for donations as awesome, as it makes it free, but isn't really doing me any justice because 90% of the Linux programs are crap. I got tired of complaining about it so this is why I started making my game with Linux in mind.

Bottom line, serious programers on a mass scale will NOT, work for free,... would you? Don't you have a family to feed?


there is still confusion about "free"
Open source does not mean there is no fee to pay necessarily.

it is to do with freedom not how much you pay.

My original question wasnt necessarily about the pricing and gluttony aspects, nor was i stating as some posts here have mentioned that software started with gates, jobs etc etc.

It was purely a philosophical question about how people if given the chance would of done what apple.MS did differnetly ?

Open source = Freedom (as in free speech) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

yes gates and the like have made a fortune (and all power to them i say) they are pretty philanthropic about it.

I was just interested in views on how the industry came about as we know it that was all ;-)

[3Miro]

there is still confusion about "free"
Open source does not mean there is no fee to pay necessarily.


In a way I think the FSF committed suicide upon its founding by picking the name "free software". It should have been "freedom software", that would have been far more appealing and it would have avoided much of the confusion that we are dealing with today.

[Bandit]

there is still confusion about "free"
Open source does not mean there is no fee to pay necessarily.

it is to do with freedom not how much you pay.

My original question wasnt necessarily about the pricing and gluttony aspects, nor was i stating as some posts here have mentioned that software started with gates, jobs etc etc.

It was purely a philosophical question about how people if given the chance would of done what apple.MS did differnetly ?

Open source = Freedom (as in free speech) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

yes gates and the like have made a fortune (and all power to them i say) they are pretty philanthropic about it.

I was just interested in views on how the industry came about as we know it that was all ;-)

Good post..


To clear up the FREE part most so miss understand.
Journalist can write just about anything they want and publish the works, thats freedom "FREE". But if you want to read article, your gonna have to pay for the magazine. ;-)

[Bandit]

In a way I think the FSF committed suicide upon its founding by picking the name "free software". It should have been "freedom software", that would have been far more appealing and it would have avoided much of the confusion that we are dealing with today.

Indeed, I have actually stopped my college professors in the middle of class to correct them on this as well.

[Old_Grey_Wolf]

It basically was open-source from the beginning.

I agree.

I had a computers before the arrival of Gates, Allen, Jobs, and Woz. I started using them when you had to build your own motherboard from parts, and etch your own circuit cards. We had no concept of copyrighting the software we wrote, and we didn't even know that there was something called a patent.

[KiwiNZ]

there is still confusion about "free"
Open source does not mean there is no fee to pay necessarily.

it is to do with freedom not how much you pay.

My original question wasnt necessarily about the pricing and gluttony aspects, nor was i stating as some posts here have mentioned that software started with gates, jobs etc etc.

It was purely a philosophical question about how people if given the chance would of done what apple.MS did differnetly ?

Open source = Freedom (as in free speech) http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

yes gates and the like have made a fortune (and all power to them i say) they are pretty philanthropic about it.

I was just interested in views on how the industry came about as we know it that was all ;-)

Yes the meaning of "free" for open source is understood but...

How many here would pay for an OS, an Office App, a game or music and videos?

If Canonical started to charge $10 for ubuntu we would see membership here and usage of Ubuntu drop to next to zero. The same would apply to Fedora, Mint or any of the"free" distributions.

[haqking]

Yes the meaning of "free" for open source is understood but...

How many here would pay for an OS, an Office App, a game or music and videos?

If Canonical started to charge $10 for ubuntu we would see membership here and usage of Ubuntu drop to next to zero. The same would apply to Fedora, Mint or any of the"free" distributions.


i agree 100%.

I like the freedom of open source (free)

and of course i like not having to pay (who wouldnt) free also, but if there is an app i want and it is not free (as in pay) then i dont mind paying for it either.

I still run paid for apps in VM's, not that i use them much because linux accomodates me 100%, i use them for support and testing etc and do not mind paying for any of it.

My original question was if YOU (whoever that is reading the question) was the guy or guys who started the real home computer revolution (software and hardware) how if anything would you of made it different and if so how do you think it would of worked out.

I know computers, software and open source was around before the woz and gates etc but there not much doubt i dont think as to how the industry was shaped or directed by them or there decisions (right or wrong)

I mean if Sam Beckett could go back and be Bill gates (what is the wrong he would put right ? if any ? and so on and forth.

Perhaps he would only leap there to save something else unrelated to software or the future ?

i am a open source guy, and i use closed source, i like free and am happy to pay and not pay for software as long as it does what i need it to.

Am i happy with how things went, then yeah i think so cos i can do what i like how i like it when i like it with my software. Would i have changed anything the truth is probably not, though i would prefer more of a standard in things such as hardware and software and not so many variables, but how that could be achieved realistically i dont know im just a geek not a business major. ;-)

[Bandit]

Yes the meaning of "free" for open source is understood but...

How many here would pay for an OS, an Office App, a game or music and videos?

If Canonical started to charge $10 for ubuntu we would see membership here and usage of Ubuntu drop to next to zero. The same would apply to Fedora, Mint or any of the"free" distributions.

Well I used to pay for Linux distros, I still think I have copies of SuSE 7.2, 8.1 and (I think) 9.3 around here somewhere. I paid like $40 each time. But back then you got a huge book or two and it came with like 3 months of official support. I was happy to pay.

Mind you back then also everyone didnt jump to the next latest and greatest every 6 month. You can thank Ubuntu for most of this. Depends on your point of view if you see that as a compliment or not. I am not judging. Regardless back then when a new version was released, it was a big thing as it only happened about ever year to year and half. Also the distros came with tons of CDs and the software felt much much more polished. Currently all distros feel to me like they are in a state of regression. All that being said and considering current world wide economical situation, if Ubuntu was to change the non-LTS to more of a beta style release; I for one would pay 25-29USD for a fully stable, fully polished Ubuntu distro if it came with both 32bit and 64bit CDs, a professional looking install/quick start guide and 3 months official support. But of course my friend that is me, younger bunch we got in here now would prob never bother. Would we loose everyone, no.. But I guarantee the quality of people here would increase. ;)

[haqking]

Well I used to pay for Linux distros, I still think I have copies of SuSE 7.2, 8.1 and (I think) 9.3 around here somewhere. I paid like $40 each time. But back then you got a huge book or two and it came with like 3 months of official support. I was happy to pay.

.

ha yeah me too, i was sorting them out the other day, was gonna ebay them but i cant get rid of computer stuff...LOL

I have manuals and original CD/DVD for Suse 5.3 onwards. What i really miss and been trying to find is a T shirt that came with Suse 7 i? it was a White T-shirt with some mathematical model in Green on the front the same loga as on the box for Suse 7, i loved that T shirt and i am pretty sure my ex wife threw it out ;-(

If you have one i will buy from ya.....LOL ;-)

[Dr. C]

I voted No. There are some very fundamental economics here. If one goes back to the 1980'a and early 1990's propriety made all the economic sense, while Free (as in beer) software did not. It basically came down to this. The cost of developing a Free and propriety application was essentially the same, but with propriety software one could raise substantial licensing fees and further invest them in improving the software resulting in a massive gain in economic productivity and an economic boom during the 1990's. Furthermore the economic and social benefits by far outweighed the negatives, RMS not withstanding. One could justify Free software on ethical and philosophical grounds but on economic grounds.

Now fast forward 25 years and the economics are fundamentally different. One can develop a FLOSS application for 1/10,000 of the cost of a similar propriety application if one is prepared to accept the terms of the GPL by licensing existing GPL or GPL compatible code at zero cost. So there is a huge cost advantage for FLOSS which is why a large part FLOSS today is developed by and paid for by for profit corporations. One needs only to compare the relative size of Canonical and Microsoft and do the math.

The propriety software vendor when faced with this brutal development cost difference is left to rely on such things as: inertia, cost of retraining, vendor lockin, monopolistic activities, ignorance in the market place and even software piracy in order to compete with FLOSS.

The 1980's and 1990's were the glory days of propriety software, but the future belongs to FLOSS. As for RMS he is been proven right only a quarter of a century later.

[3Miro]

If Canonical started to charge $10 for ubuntu we would see membership here and usage of Ubuntu drop to next to zero. The same would apply to Fedora, Mint or any of the"free" distributions.

I am not so sure about that. I payed $50 for Civilization and I spend most of my time with the game creating a mod about Medieval Europe. Basically one of the main things that got me was the ability to modify the software. $10 for an OS is nothing.

Usage will drop, but not as drastic as you think. Most people that like Ubuntu already would pay the money. However, people that are unsure about Ubuntu, will not risk $10 for something unfamiliar. Free as in beer helps growth, but it will not kill Ubuntu.

[Dangertux]

Lol funny that you guys mention the box sets of Linux. I was cleaning out my garage and found RedHat 7.2 , red hat 8 and a mandrake 8.2 box set a couple days ago.

I think I wanna install them on something just for giggles lol.

Honestly in reference to paying 30 bucks or whatever for a DVD I would do it. The product is superior. What I won't do is pay licensing fees and have someone watching over my shoulder. I am looking at you MS wga tray.

I actually considered ordering a pack of the premade 10.04 cd's. I am really lazy when it comes to downloading new distros though. I won't really upgrade unless there is a specific feature I want that I can't possibly make work with what I have.

[alaukikyo]

But you know what that means...

You're an enterprise user looking for a robust systems solution to <insert_problem_here> - Sure, you can go to their website and download the source. But then what? Are you going to sit there for 6 months getting it to compile for whatever configuration you're running, implement it across your infrastructure, migrate your data, train your users, and then support the system and make changes to the sourcecode when required?

Nope. You pay someone to do it. Most likely the company who's website you can get the 'free' sourcecode from.

<insert_witty_analogy_with_buying_car_kits_here>

you don't understand the concept of free software .