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

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <20020703021704.14645.00001058@mb-de.aol.com>,
Supertimer <supertimer@aol.com> wrote:
>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.

And by them IBM had completely lost control of the PC market.  When
people buy a PC these days, they rarely buy it from IBM ......

As a matter of fact, IBM commited the same mistake in their PS/2
line of computers as Apple did with the Mac: they tried to get
stronger control by closing up the machine -- and they lost major
parts of their markets....

>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.

...and the major players in the home market today are neither Apple
nor IBM .....



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