PC turns 25? Apple may beg to differ

Stan Beer
Sunday, 13 August 2006 13:53

Opinion and Analysis

Today, as everybody kicks up their heels at the offices of PC manufacturers worldwide celebrating the 25th anniversary of the desktop computer known as the IBM PC, one wonders what Steve Jobs and the crew over at Apple Computer must be thinking.

As is recorded in most versions of the history of the personal computer, the Apple II personal computer preceded the IBM PC by more than four years and, in many ways, was a more advanced machine.

I can remember using the Apple Write wordprocessor on a borrowed Apple II at home in the early 1980s and thinking how much more advanced it was than Word Star which was installed on the IBM PC in use at work.

By the time the Macintosh came along in 1984, Apple was so far ahead of the MS-DOS PC in terms of technology that to this day it has been a constant source of wonder how the Mac lost the battle for the dektop to a buggy, user unfriendly operating system sitting on clunky boxes with green screens.

However, as history shows, personal computing was mostly about the operating system, not just the hardware. The Mac operating system was light years ahead of MS-DOS. One could argue that if Jobs had displayed the vision of Bill Gates back in 1984, opened up Apple hardware and freely licensed Apple software to all-comers, including IBM, 90% of desktops today may well have been Mac compatibles. Who knows, Motorola and not Intel chips may have been the building blocks of the hardware platform.

As we all know that didn't happen and today Microsoft rules the roost with Windows. Meanwhile Apple is a minor player staging a spectacular comeback after adopting an Intel strategy that enables the company to finally capture some of the market hijacked by Microsoft back in 1981.

The biggest irony of all, however, is that IBM is no longer a player in the PC market, other than its shareholding of Chinese manufacturer Lenovo. IBM also discovered much to its dismay when it was too late that personal computing was far less about who made the boxes and much more about who made the operating system, as well who supplied the processor chips.

Thus, if anyone should be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the PC it is Microsoft, who provided software, and Intel whose x86 processors were the hardware engines driving the boxes.