That was an excellent write up by Krishnan... Bravo, keep it up...
And adding my own 64 bits to eliminate some errors and elaborating a couple of points, read on....
The PC was introduced some time in the early eighties (1982, IIRC).
Apple I, The first PC was launched in 1976 by Apple, it was in a Semi Assembled form. Apple II, The first really usable PC was launched in 1978 again by Apple, this time it had the now legendary trademark of Apple's great aesthetic sense and ease of use, its cool features were: 1. Came in a clear plastic case and looked more like a consumer device 2. Could do colour displays and a bit of graphics 3. Could hook on to TV sets and had some real ground breaking technologies like Sub Pixel font rendering, etc...
Simply put, Apple II was an out of the box computing solution which was very widely accepted by the people, and equally widely copied by the _rest_of_them_ (Even IBM got jealous and started creating the IBM PC)
However, when IBM entered the market with their PC, they made a design decision that would affect the future of computing for all time to come. They opened up the design of their PC to all comers, so much so that the PC reference manuals even published complete cirucitry details amd ROM BIOS source listings.
ROM BIOS details weren't released by IBM, you had to purchase them from IBM. It took the sheer genius of the guys at a fledgling company called "Compaq" to reverse engineer that and then open it up, in fact, I would say Compaq really pioneered Open Source.
This factor, coupled with the CP/M compatible API of PC-DOS (yes, the very same MS-DOS of today), rendered the PC a very attractive backward-compatible development in the microcomputer world as opposed to the closed-box nature of the Apple Macintosh.
The Macintosh was never supposed to be a standard computing device, it was more targeted to be a consumer computing device created for the masses.
Never knew anybody opening up their Washing machines or Televisions...
the PC has always won because of its open architecture and API.
The PC won primarily because it had IBM as its Godfather... When IBM backed it, corporates embraced it, old saying "Nobody ever gets fired for buying an IBM product" When the corporates embraced it, the general public followed...
The open architecture meant that a lot of people could produce competing products to IBM's, thus allowing the
Not just competing products but also products which could supplement it, products like graphic cards, keyboards, displays, etc...
Apple chose to lock up its designs and architecture, and paid the price for it in a meagre market share.
A perfect example of a great product killed by a management full of Jokers... (Steve Jobs was thrown out before that)
Actually IBM had originally sought to use CP/M-86 as the default PC operating system, but difficulties with Gary Kildall, owner of Digital Research, led to their
Gary Kildall wasn't really the undoing, it was rather his wife, who refused to sign the NDA when IBM engineers came knocking and Gary was out somewhere taking a break...
backing Microsoft, who did not even have an OS to offer at that time (when they got the contract, they bought a readymade OS called 86-DOS from a company called Seattle Computer, hired its creator Tim Paterson to code for them, renamed it PC-DOS and sold it to IBM).
The ready made OS wasn't even an OS, it was actually a test program to check motherboards made for the 8080. Tim Paterson called it the QDOS for Quick and Dirty Operating System.
just become a low-level Windows programmer - you'll learn to curse it PDQ!
Why a low level, try becoming a real Windows programmer, try coding using VC++ and you'll get to know all the idiosyncracies hidden by the resource sucker called "Visual Basic"...
Hope that was informative enough...
Warm Regards,
~Mayuresh