GUI

Henry Spencer henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org
Thu Nov 27 19:12:55 UTC 2003


On Thu, 27 Nov 2003, Lance F. Squire wrote:
> Mac was first, and even they copyed an old Xerox system...
> Digital Reserch's GEM enviroment, Primarily on Atari STs though also 
> available for the PCs, and Commodore's 'Intuition' were fully functional 
> GUI desktops when 'Windows' was little more than a graphical shell for DOS.

And don't forget IBM's OS/2.  Either MacOS or OS/2 could have owned the
desktop market in the same way Windows owns it now, had their parent
companies displayed a modicum of intelligence.  It took Microsoft a long
time to respond adequately to the Mac, and the pent-up demand for a
graphical environment was enormous by the time the first usable Windows
(3.0 or thereabouts) appeared.  The first graphical environment with a
solid set of basic applications running on cheap hardware was going to
take over the market and make somebody a whole lot of money, and either
Apple or IBM could have delivered it well before Microslop.  But Apple was
(and still is) bent on using MacOS to sell overpriced hardware, and IBM
marketing was far gone into senility and couldn't grasp how vital it was
to have a proper applications lineup for OS/2.

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

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