Re: The apple 2, the PC, and the clones

[supertimer@aol.com (Supertimer)]

John <tgbpoi29@SDF.LONESTAR.ORG> wrote:

>On 2 Jul 2002, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
>> Ah, but the business community as a whole never considered Apples
>> (of any kind) to be a respectable business machine.  The acknowledged
>> counterculture origins of Apple did not inspire the kind of confidence that
>> IBM did.  When IBM entered the market, the business PC was born.
>> (Remember, in marketing, perception _is_ reality!)
>
>FWIW, in my mind CP/M was the business OS, the Apple 2 was more for home
>and hobby, TRS-80 for home (cheaper and lesser than the Apple 2).
>
>CP/M had Wordstar, Supercalc, dbase, and others.

I do agree that CP/M was widely considered the business OS before
MS-DOS and the PC.

However, there were business software for the Apple II.  SuperCalc 3a
was available for the Apple II as was WordPerfect and others.

After the Apple IIe/IIc and the advent of extended memory (typically
1MB) Apple software far exceeded CP/M software in capabilities.

That said, I still believe that the ultimate success of the PC was in
the home market, not the business market.  There were really in
fact two revolutions.  The first was the PC in business in the 80s.
Then in the late 90's, there was a greater revolution and a much
more significant one.  The great untapped reservoir of potential home
users that Apple could have tapped was finally tapped by the PC.

When you think of the power of the PC what do you think of?  Do
you really think of stuffy corporate America?  Or do you think of
the Athlon XP processor, the Pentium IV processor, the Geforce 4
and Radeon video cards, SoundBlaster Live! audio cards, and
nForce chipsets?  If you think of the later, all these advances
were driven by the home market.  Oh, and let's not forget CD-RW
drives and DVD-ROM and writer drives.