How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry

Re:How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry by tsotha on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @06:43PM (#9932846)

That's how I remember it. The Mac came out only four years after the IBM PC and allowed Apple to sew up the GUI market for about five years. They were able to maintain a big quality edge for far longer.

Apple also introduced the first LAN (Apple Talk in 1985) you could set up pretty much by just connecting your Macs with a cable. I recall working at places where the only way you could transfer data between the PCs was by floppy, but people who had managed to convince management they needed a Mac were all wired together. Microsoft didn't introduce Windows for Workgroups for another seven years.

If Apple had tried to evolve the II series they probably wouldn't have survived.

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Re:How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry by analog31 on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @07:26PM (#9933032)

A well kept secret was that Apple sold an AppleTalk card for the IBM PC, which was hands down the easiest way to network PCs. That's how I laser printed my dissertation. ;-)

The Apple II could not evolve. It was locked down by the expectation that new systems would run old software, and the old software made all kinds of nonstandard system calls, e.g., jumping into the middle of system routines to save one or two cycles. In other words, Apple didn't know their own software interface. Even upgrading to the IIe was a heroic undertaking. This experience is why, I believe, the Mac was always a closed system.

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Re:How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry by leoc on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @08:10PM (#9933215)

Well, there was Novell NetWare some time before Windows for Workgroups arrived. Of course the crushing of NetWare was a major campaign in Microsoft's war for dominance over personal computing.

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Re:How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry by tsotha on Wednesday July 22, 2015 @08:41PM (#9933298)

Sure, but NetWare was the industrial strength solution. It was too expensive to set it up at home or at a company with fifty employees.

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Re:How two bored 1970s housewives helped create the PC industry by rasz_pl on Thursday July 23, 2015 @12:37AM (#9934009)

They pioneered cheap network hardware with NE2000.

Who would be crazy enough to network 50 endpoints over slow serial daisy chain? Arcnet was another story, but not significantly cheaper.

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