Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/01/18
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]If you are going to blather about the history of the PC industry, at least get the facts straight. My recollection is as follows: About the time I hit Junior High Microsoft started with a product called BASIC, which was a small computer language invented at Dartmouth College as a "friendlier" environment for basic computing than the fortran compilers of the time. This was in the early to mid 70s. Microsoft went on to license BASIC as the primary OS and environment for many of the small microcomptuers (apple, tandy trs-80, commodore) of the time. Microsoft didn't start to gain a power base in the industry until IBM got into the PC business around 1982, and gave MS the contract for the OS to that machine, which MS bought from a small company in Seattle for a few tens of thousands of dollars. They leveraged this, and the commodity nature of future PCs to pretty much own the market for PC operating systems from the late 80s until now. Before this, the dominant OS, if there was one, for Intel type machines (actually Zilog Z80s) was called CP/M, written by a guy in Boston, I think. The story goes that this guy missed a meeting with the big boys from IBM, so they went to talk to Bill instead. After dominating with DOS, MS finally got the industry to switch to Windows after several tries, while Apple frittered away an almost 10 year technological head start and is now at best a bit player (no flames please. i love macs as much as anyone, and used and wrote code for them for a long time, but they are not really a meaningful market player. just go to your local egghead or whatever and see how big the apple software shelf is). Microsoft didn't really have a spreadsheet product worth talking about until they developed Excel for the *Macintosh* and then later on for Windows. Before that the dominant player was Lotus 1-2-3, which took over the market for PCs. Before that, the dominant player was Visicalc, which ran primarily on Apple II computers, and was a large factor in building a user base for the Apple machines, until the IBM machines came around. Anyway, Excel for windows pretty much killed off Lotus, which didn't react fast enough to the market shift (just like Word killed off Wordperfect, for similar reasons). But, the point is that Microsoft's dominance has always a result of the licensing of the operating system to the PC vendors, and not their applications. Pete