Yah, Billy chomped on IBM - and nearly everyone used IBM equipment.
Apple was the upstart (although vastly better, both design and OS,) and
never really made much impact, and as I said, not much in the way of
ability to provide customer service. No business person worth his salt
wants to be "protected" from his decision making tools.....
Windows is a fairly crude patch job IMHO, and nearly all the other OS's
out there in the early 80's were better than MS-DOS (aka CPM 2.2 tarted
up to run 16 bit rather than 8). Microsoft may employ thousands of
(Indian) programers, but their products are, well, obviously
extensively fiddled by the owner of Microsoft. Innovation and research
aren't part of the culture there, I suppose.
Spreadsheets, incidentally, were developed in the form we know on an
Apple I, back in the late 70's. IBM was playing catchup -- Apple was
making HUGE inroads in business until the PC came out -- I think IT
people were much more comfortable with IBM equipment seeing as it was
from a stable, known quality company instead of from some start-up
outfit with kooky notions about computer use. Business applications
are accounting, word processing, design, drafting, and (now)
presentation, not games and "fun stuff".
Ah well, Apple has survived, unlike some of the others. Imagine,
multi-user multitasking computers in 1978......They were around,
believe it or not. Probably slower than molassas in January, but alive
-- Sinclair for one, don't remember the others.
Peter
