On Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:57:37 -0700, Paul K Brandon wrote: >Mike-- >I wouldn't disagree with your characterization of Jobs -- I was always a Woz >fan.
But only Jobs is now seen as the "Grand Creator". >And I never said that microcomputer systems were not commercially > _available_. >My point is that they were not widely marketed. >The two prices I see in your post are $30,000 and $10,000; quite >a bit more than the Apple ][! These were systems for businesses. Wang might sound unfamiliar now but it was one of the BIG providers of word processing systems to professionals like lawyers, accountants, corporations, etc. back in the day. A law firm would have looked pretty ridiculous with an Apple II on a desk (even if they had the 80 column CP/M card in it). >There was a low price competitor; the Commodore computers >(I had a Commodore 64). There were many other systems available back then -- it's times like this that make me wish I hadn't thrown away by decades of Byte magazine -- but here is a good listing of what was available back then: http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.htm Even the old Timex Sinclair (which I owned) is there! Check it out! >However, it was not nearly as well marketed as the Apple, and >dropped out of the race. >What's missing in your number are sales figures. I don't have the sales figures but by the mid-1980s IBM was crushing the competition with PC/MS-DOS and the PS/1 systems. Macintoshs always ran a distant second because businesses simply didn't buy them (remember that Apple almost died in 1990s until Jobs came back and changed it from a computer company to a consumer electronics and entertainment company). -Mike Palij New York University m...@nyu.edu --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: arch...@jab.org. To unsubscribe click here: http://fsulist.frostburg.edu/u?id=13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df5d5&n=T&l=tips&o=13220 or send a blank email to leave-13220-13090.68da6e6e5325aa33287ff385b70df...@fsulist.frostburg.edu
