Hiho,
On Thursday 21 January 2010 12:33:41 Kassen wrote:
> Sure it's great if innovations reach the FLOSS communities. The
>
> > danger is though that Apple's model is taken up by all the other
> > megaliths and we end up with a whole bunch of GPLd code and no
> > hardware to run it on. It's the norm with portable music players,
> > it's happening with phones and it can surely happen on the desktop
> > too.
>
> I'd be more worried if they hadn't already tried doing that on the desktop.
> They did, back when we'd have livecoding performances in bedrooms with code
> like;
>
> 10 print "Alex is crazy"
> 20 goto 10
>
> to (admittedly small) shouting audiences.
>
> Back then you had Amiga's, Atari's, Apple's, IBM compatibles and more. IBM
> went open and now only Apple survives of the others and these days Apple is
> basically selling IBM-compatibles as well, proudly advertising that you
> could run Windows if you'd like. Trying to make incompatible desktops
> turned out to be a very bad strategy indeed.
Yes, but now Apple does seem to be a market leader in the phone and music
player business, which they never managed in the personal computer world.
My dad (who's been working with computers since the late '60s) said to me
recently, that probably we would have been much worse off if Apple had had the
largest market share much earlier, worse than we now are with Microsoft
dominating the personal computer market.
And marketing does seem to determine what gets through.. even when other
technology is much more clever (apparently the early Burroughs computers were
way ahead of the competitor's ones from a technical viewpoint, except they
(Burroughs) themselves didn't quite know it and how to market it, if they had,
we'd have had much faster processors by now..... as my Dad explained it, the
design of that Burroughs processor was made by programmers giving the
instructions to the hardware engineers on how it should be constructed, rather
than the other way around where programmers try and figure out how to use a
piece of hardware; this resulted in machine code which wasn't much larger than
the Algol program code...).
Some diversion there, but hopefully interesting to some people here :)
Sincerely,
Marije
Received on Fri Jan 22 2010 - 07:11:47 GMT