General > General Technical Chat
what if apple had actually went bankruptcy in 1997,what would be different today
tooki:
--- Quote from: peter-h on August 18, 2020, 09:01:14 am ---Computers are just tools for doing work.
If Apple did not exist, or disappeared at some point, nothing much would actually change. Windows works fine but it is just an OS. What matters is the application software. Going back say 15-20 years it was true that most graphics design software was available for Apple only, and this produced a "graphic designer = always Apple" fashion culture, but that changed a long time ago.
The world would carry on just fine without Apple.
The whole Iphone fashion is just a fashion. It doesn't do more than an Android phone. And in the end a smartphone is just a thing for making calls, messaging, and running applications.
--- End quote ---
The thing about Apple is that it established many of the user interface conventions we now take for granted. For example, Apple didn’t invent the mouse or the GUI as such, but the earlier GUIs (like the Xerox Alto and Star) used the mouse in fundamentally different ways than we do now — every GUI on the market now essentially uses the Apple conventions for fundamental interaction. Apple set the standard for mouse GUIs, and then they set the standard for touch GUIs.
I mean, nothing in the original iPhone hardware was custom. It was essentially state of the art, but off the shelf, hardware brought together by radically innovative software. The iPhone’s multitouch interaction model pretty much instantly obsoleted every other touch GUI model.
So while it’s certain that we would have eventually gotten a better smartphone than what existed pre-iPhone, it’s not likely to have resembled what we think of as smartphones today.
Apple has a unique knack for really understanding how to put technology to use. (They cultivate that skill internally, but also readily acquire it when they spot it elsewhere, hence hiring talented designers like Mike Matas, buying up companies with promising hardware, etc.) This is in no way to say that nobody else has any talent in this, that’s absolutely not the case. But Apple does have an unusually high share.
Sal Ammoniac:
--- Quote from: tooki on August 19, 2020, 04:08:26 pm ---Apple didn’t invent the mouse or the GUI as such, but the earlier GUIs (like the Xerox Alto and Star) used the mouse in fundamentally different ways than we do now — every GUI on the market now essentially uses the Apple conventions for fundamental interaction.
--- End quote ---
Some Apple conventions, fortunately, have been tossed on the dustbin of history, such as single button mice.
tooki:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on August 19, 2020, 04:28:05 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on August 19, 2020, 04:08:26 pm ---Apple didn’t invent the mouse or the GUI as such, but the earlier GUIs (like the Xerox Alto and Star) used the mouse in fundamentally different ways than we do now — every GUI on the market now essentially uses the Apple conventions for fundamental interaction.
--- End quote ---
Some Apple conventions, fortunately, have been tossed on the dustbin of history, such as single button mice.
--- End quote ---
Yes and no. There’s a really sound reason behind that*, which is why Apple’s mouse and trackpad buttons still default to single-button, though they can be configured to two button, with full software support.
*to avoid the problem that befell Windows and many *NIXen: many developers putting essential application functionality only within the context menus. By telling devs “go ahead and create context menus, but assume your users may not have access to that, so make sure the commands are all housed properly in the menu bar, too”, they ensured this won’t happen. (But don’t get me started on Apple’s Ive-era descent into command hide-and-seek with so much hidden under hover events and gestures. Completely antithetical to much of their earlier user interface guidelines....)
Sal Ammoniac:
--- Quote from: tooki on August 16, 2020, 09:03:50 pm ---Man, I would have hated having to switch to windows, especially back then. I still prefer Mac, but the windows of today is far more tolerable.
--- End quote ---
Back then MS had Windows NT, which was a much better OS than Mac OS of the time. Remember, OSX didn't come out until several years later and the old Mac OS was a cooperative-multitasking OS with no memory protection or separation where you had to explicitly allocate memory to each application. Reboots were de rigueur several times a day. I remember those days well and I think many remember Mac OS as a better OS than it actually was.
I'll agree that Mac OS was generally better than the consumer versions of Windows (Windows 95, 98, and ME), but it was not as good as NT.
tooki:
--- Quote from: Sal Ammoniac on August 19, 2020, 04:35:46 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on August 16, 2020, 09:03:50 pm ---Man, I would have hated having to switch to windows, especially back then. I still prefer Mac, but the windows of today is far more tolerable.
--- End quote ---
Back then MS had Windows NT, which was a much better OS than Mac OS of the time. Remember, OSX didn't come out until several years later and the old Mac OS was a cooperative-multitasking OS with no memory protection or separation where you had to explicitly allocate memory to each application. Reboots were de rigueur several times a day. I remember those days well and I think many remember Mac OS as a better OS than it actually was.
I'll agree that Mac OS was generally better than the consumer versions of Windows (Windows 95, 98, and ME), but it was not as good as NT.
--- End quote ---
Well there are two layers to the issue, really: the user interface and the software architecture. From a UI standpoint, I’ve always preferred Mac to Windows. NT and the DOS-based Windows shared the same UI I didn’t like. That alone was enough to keep me off Windows.
From an architecture standpoint, there’s absolutely no question that among classic Mac OS, DOS-based Windows, and Windows NT, it was Windows NT that had the best architecture. By a wide margin. Had NT not had to support the myriad hardware configurations possible in the windows world, it would likely have avoided most of the (comparatively few) crashes it did have.
I still remember classic Mac OS fondly, as there are still some aspects of its UI that I consider to be better thought-out than in any OS before or since, including today’s macOS. As for stability... I mean, I was able to get it to work pretty well. But other than in carefully curated server configurations, it was categorically impossible to achieve truly long uptimes with it. Certainly not multiple crashes per day if configured decently, but not the weeks or months of uptime easily achieved with Mac OS X or NT. I routinely kept it up for perhaps a week at a time, using sleep instead of shutdown.
But allocating memory manually, and having to configure system extensions to load in the right order to get them to play nice... that I don’t miss at all!!! (I used to do that for a living, in fact: I worked as an on-site Mac consultant back in 2001-02, and did it a little bit on the side for a few years after that.)
DOS-based Windows was much like classic Mac OS in that a carefully tuned system could work well, but any misbehaving program could freeze it up.
Oh yeah, one thing I can say with confidence after working as a Mac tech during the classic Mac OS era: the choice of hardware made a huge difference in stability. While pretty much everything from the Power Mac G3 (mid 1997) on was stable if configured halfway decently, man were there differences before. Some architectures, like the 75/85/9500 series, were great. Others, like the 52/6200 series, were awful. I was not impressed by the stability of any PPC603/603e system Apple ever made. I suspect part of it may have been that the low end systems in the early-mid 90s used IDE instead of SCSI, and at the time, Apple was far, far more experienced with SCSI at that time. By the late 90s Apple had figured out IDE properly and was able to use it on pro hardware, too.
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