Re: Rewriting computing history...

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3E007AE4.4040506@noneofyourbusiness.com>,
Exegete  <millers@noneofyourbusiness.com> wrote:
 
> Paul Schlyter wrote:
>> In article <3DFFFC10.20500@noneofyourbusiness.com>,
>> Exegete  <millers@noneofyourbusiness.com> wrote:
>> 
>>>Byron Q. Desnoyers Winill wrote:
>>>
>>>>>At the bottom of their webpages and announcements they always refer to
>>>>>the II.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>Ah yes, the "Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s
>>>>with the Apple II."  That is rewriting history in its own right.  My
>>>>research suggests that a lot of people were coming up with similar ideas
>>>>at the time.  Apple was simply the darling of the 'revolution' because
>>>>they met with tremendous success.  
>>>
>>>But that's the point. They were successful, and thus, did "ignite" the 
>>>personal computer revolution.
>>  
>> Nah, the company that did "ignite" the personal computer revolution
>> was Intel, who created the very first microprocessor, and then
>> several other microprocessors after that.  Without the
>> microprocessor, there would have been no personal computers at all....
> 
> Well, without the internal combustion engine there would be no 
> automobile industry, but here the makers of the "engine" never
> dreamed of the "car."
 
Don't be so sure about that!  Otto constructed his engine in 1882
(his engine was the basis of the majority of car combustion engines
today), and already 4 years later (in 1886) that engine started to be
used in vehicles.  Of course today's mass car'ism requires more than
just vehicles and engines: it requires roads which just didn't exist
back then.  So the earliest cars could not travel far, and definitely
not fast.  In England there was a law that if you wanted to drive a
car, you had to have a man walking ahead of the car, waving a red
flag as a warning to people around.
 
In a way, early cars which couldn't go far could be compared to early
personal computers, which of course were very slow by today's
standards, but which also ran in isolation; few of them were
networked, and the vast majority of the networked computers were
connected to local networks.  So the global road system of today
could be compared to the global computer networks of today.
 
>>>Sure, there were other machines, and other companies, but it was
>>>Apple's success that convinced IBM that here was a market that
>>>they needed to get into.
>> 
>>  
>> Both Apple's and IBM's computers were too pricey for the average
>> person 
> 
> Depends on what you mean by the "average" person.
 
We could define it as a person with the median income of the
population, and with fairly "normal" interests (i.e. sports and
girls/boys).
 
> The "average" person couldn't make a computer out of a pile of
> chips, resistors, capacitors and boards either.
 
True; likewise the "average" person couldn't make a car out
of sufficient amounts of ore, plastics, glass, rubber, etc either...
 
> Frankly, I coudn't afford the first TRS-80, and, at a later stage,
> I couldnt' afford a Timex-Sinclair 1000. Though, two years later,
> I could afford 6 times the price for a Coleco ADAM.
 
One single person isn't a sample large enough to be statistically
significant... :-)
 
> Roy
>
>> to buy -- those who bought these machines were either
>> enthusiasts or businesses.  Only when the cheap clones later arrived
>> did the perconal comuter become cheap enough for the average person.
-- 
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