Before my opinion...

Originally Posted by ismith Apple with Steve Jobs and a group of guys from New York invented the Mouse, and the GUI. W/O Apple, MS would be nowhere ^_^

Actually the mouse and the GUI were both invented by Douglas Engelbart in the 1960's... The Macintosh was however the first consumer computer with a GUI and an earlier Apple machine was the first to bring the mouse to the consumer.

Now my opinion - based on memory and possibly not fact...

Without Microsoft I don't believe the world would be the same as it is today!

Long before Windows - even before what we now know as PC's - everything was about proprietary systems for the home/small business user. If you bought an Apple machine you needed to get an Apple operating system and Apple hardware. There were Sinclair machines, (my first computer was a Sinclair ZX81 with a massive 1k of ram back in 1981), there was Commodore, Acorn, BBC, Dragon and many others but nothing was interchangeable between them. There was a brief try at doing things generically with the MSX systems from various manufacturers such as Toshiba and Panasonic but the market wasn't ready and it failed dismally.

Then came the PC with it's x86 processor and the ability to use ram/cpus/hds/floppies etc from a multitude of manufacturers. This brought prices down and made PCs 'affordable' to small businesses and even some home users. But everything was running in DOS which of course isn't very friendly to your average joe.

Apple brought out their GUI on the Mac, (which was originally going to launch with the Apple Lisa), but their systems were more expensive than PCs so only high-end users could afford them.

When MS Windows was launched the world of computing was opened up to a much wider audience and with the launch of Windows 95 PCs became more popular than ever and the more people that started using them at work the more people wanted one at home.

Without the multitude of home users the Internet wouldn't have developed into the World Wide Web and we wouldn't be sitting here today having this debate.

Sure someone else MAY have come up with a GUI as friendly as Windows and MAY have marketed it as well as Microsoft did - but when - and how far behind would computing progress be today if that had happened?

I'll just quote ismith again here... not picking on you mate...

Originally Posted by ismith ...If you've used Mac OS X for over one month, your opinion would change I'm almost positive. I agree, before that, OS 9 sucked...

Well if that's the case the Mac would never have gained the popularity that the Windows based PC has anyway and we would be a lot further back on the computing progress ladder.

Intel tried to pull back some of their CPU monopoly, what with numerous manufacturers basically copying their designs, when they first named their CPUs 'Pentium' - you can copyright a name but not a number... But fortunately for us that didn't stop companies such as Cyrix and AMD just making their own names and making subtle differences to the processor architecture... If that competition had been killed off then processor speeds probably wouldn't be what they are today.

If Apple was the main contender, producing only in-house hardware we wouldn't have the hard-drive sizes we have today... I remember visiting Seimens around 1991 and being totally amazed that they had their own hard drive that held a whopping 1GB of data... How pathetic does that sound today with 500GB drives coming onto the market.

One more ismith quote, and once again, I'm not picking on you, just that you are the biggest Apple advocate here I believe...

Originally Posted by ismith Apple actually prefers it the way they are, I don't blame them for not wanting many people on their computers, only the targeted audience.

Do you honestly believe that? Running a business is about providing a service or selling a product. Any business that sells product, (with the sole exception of some prestige brands such as Rolls Royce - who got bought out by Ford anyway), wants to shift as many units as possible for the greatest profit margin they can get away with. Apple would love it if they were the dominating force in computing - and they had the opportunity to be back in the day - but that chance is gone.

I think I've rambled on for long enough now