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[OM] Re: [OT-ish] PC vs Mac - A SERIOUS discussion

Subject: [OM] Re: [OT-ish] PC vs Mac - A SERIOUS discussion
From: Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 08 Apr 2005 10:29:07 -0400
James said:
I have never used a mac. However, looking at the hardware the two are a
lot closer together than they used to be. In the early days the PC was
qute frankly a joke. right down to being advertised by charlie chaplin!
IBM did not expect them take off and still believed that the sales where
in maintrames. Apples first offering was far in advance of the joke IMB 
XT both in terms of hardware and software. Heck the IBM Pc could hardly 
do sound and the less said about the graphics the beter - I would not 
even call MSdos an operating systwem because it lacks several of the 
features required to classify as a modern operating system like resource
management!
-------------------------------------------------------
I suspect that James is a bit too young to have observed the PC market 
develop in its early days so let me correct the record a bit.  In the 
early days the IBM PC was hardly a joke.  It was actually considered 
rather revolutionary when it was released in 1981.  The PC ran at a 
shade under 5 MHz and its Intel 8088 processor could address up to 1 MB 
of physical memory.  Its competition at the time was not the Apple Mac 
but rather the Apple II, TRS-80 and other similar machines with slower 
processors and all only capable of addressing 64 KB of memory.  The 
machine blew away the competition aided by a higly effective advertising 
campaign... featuring Charlie Chaplin.

I agree that the IBM PC-XT might be a joke compared to the Apple Mac 
with it's GUI interface and Motorola 68000 processor.  However, the Mac 
was far from Apple's first offering.  The XT was introduced in 1982 when 
Apple's only competition was still based on the original 6502 processor 
designs from the late '70's.  The Mac wasn't introduced until 1984 and 
that only after the first attempt in 1983 (the Lisa) proved to be a failure.

 From that point on the Mac's pretty much got it right but only on the 
user interface.  For as to what constitutes a "real" operating system 
let's not confuse the very recent Max OS-X with all that came before.  I 
  quote from a web source on Apple history:  "The "classic" Mac OS is 
characterized by its total lack of a command line; it is a 100% 
graphical operating system. Heralded for its ease of use, it is also 
criticized for its almost total lack of memory management, cooperative 
multitasking, and susceptibility to extension conflicts."

It took Apple until 2001 to get it right with OS-X.  High priced 
hardware is not they only reason they were losing out to Wintel.

Chuck Norcutt
who was implementing virtual memory management and multi-tasking into 
OS/2 for the IBM PS/2 series nearly 20 years ago.  :-)


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