From Newsgroup: alt.tv.star-trek.tos
From Address: jsavard@ecn.ab.ca
Subject: Re: William Shatner wants YOU to buy a VIC-20
On Nov 23, 9:49apm, "Steven L." wrote:
> The Mac didn't become available to the public until 1984 (remember the
> famous "1984" commercial?). aIn 1983, Apple was selling the Lisa, the
> immediate predecessor to the Mac. aAnd it was running Apple's
> proprietary apps: aLisaDraw, LisaWrite, etc. aThe Lisa, of course, was a
> total flop.
Yes, but I think that owed more to the price of the Lisa than to the
quality of Apple's applications for it.
If Apple had built a decent 68000-based computer with a reasonable
amount of memory at a price competitive with the IBM PC - and 68000
chips weren't *that* expensive, nor were eight additional traces on a
motherboard - it might well have been a success even without a GUI at
least at first.
> Bill Gates is not in the computer hardware business, and cannot "copy"
> the Mac architecture. aThe PC clone architecture advances by its vast
> vendor base.
Microsoft is in the operating system business, and Microsoft Windows
can certainly copy aspects of the operating system used by Apple on
the Macintosh. As for the hardware architecture of *current* Macintosh
computers, PC clone manufacturers do not need to exert themselves to
copy that, because Apple has done their work for them.
> Microsoft exists today because it has pushed IBM aside to take over
> IBM's niche: aThe premier vendor of product to the Fortune 500. aIBM has
> been reduced to being a systems architect.
If it hadn't been for Microsoft Windows, Linux or DR-DOS or something
else would likely have replaced DOS long ago.
> The Mac was failing badly in 1984-85. aBusinesses were laughing at its
> slow speed and limited memory and connectivity. aSales were poor in the
> business market. aAnd without a big business market, vendors were
> reluctant to spend time and effort to learn the new way of writing apps
> for a GUI type interface.
Yes, these things are true.
> What saved the Mac was an affordably priced laser printer and a
> brilliant marketing strategy: aRebrand WYSIWYG document production on a
> laser printer as "desktop publishing." aDesktop publishing was the
> killer app that saved the Mac.
>
> WYSIWYG desktop publishing was the ONE thing that no IBM PC, no matter
> how much you spent on software and hardware, could yet do back then.
> For a while, Apple looked great.
You could indeed do WYSIWYG desktop publishing on an IBM PC. But there
was a catch - your program could run in graphics mode, and use a
standard video card, but it would be *tied to one particular model of
laser printer*. So the desktop publishing situation on the PC was
inferior to that on the Mac (while the Mac Laserwriter was also *one*
model of laser printer, it was the _standard_ for that platform, and
there _was_ an OS layer and so on).
Apple was pretty much the only GUI game in town - because the Atari ST
and the Amiga were kept firmly in its shadow - except for Windows. If
the choice were between a Macintosh on the one hand, and an IBM PC
running TopView from IBM, or Sidekick from Borland, on the other, I
would expect that the Mac would have made it to success, and
eventually WordPerfect and Lotus 123 would have come out in Macintosh
versions.
Despite there being a degree of Microsoft/Apple symbiosis, on balance
Windows was a competitor that took sales away from Apple. Without
Microsoft, the Macintosh might have taken a bit longer to be usable,
but it would have had the opportunity to become a bigger presence in
the computer field than it actually turned out to be.
John Savard
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