Thursday, November 17, 2011

Triumph of the Nerds Part 3 Summary

In 1971 Xerox started a think tank in Palo Alto, Ca. called PARC. The goal of PARC was to think of the future of computing and how to dominate the market. For years they developed and built a computer they called "Alto." It cost them $10,000 to build and was never sold to the public. The Alto computer was unique because it had a graphical user interface or GUI. Unlike the current leader IBM that ran on the disk operating system or DOS Alto had a nice GUI that let the user move around a mouse on a screen and click it to select documents or other items. They could then do whatever they wanted to it like copy it to a floppy disk by dragging the file over to the destination and dropping it in the folder. This went way beyond what anyone at the time was using with the keyboard based typing input of DOS. The Alto computer was also able to connect to other computers via an Ethernet that was also ahead of its time. The Alto had a printer connected to it that was able to print out what the user viewed on screen. This went beyond the normal dot matrix printers of the time.

One of the co-founders of Apple computers Steve Jobs eventually took a tour of PARC and saw the Alto computer. It was after this viewing that he decided that a GUI on a computer was the way to go and the future of the personal computer. He made it his goal to make a computer that used a GUI interface and not the text based interface of DOS. IBM was taking a big chunk of sales away from the Apple II so Apple needed a better competitor. Steve Jobs called the next computer Lisa and wanted it to have a GUI like what he saw on the Xerox ALTO computer. The Lisa eventually came out in the year 1983 and cost a staggering $9,995 dollars. It was not a commercial success because of the high price compared to the IBM computers even with the fancy GUI interface. Jeff Raskin then came up with a lower priced computer for Apple that he called the Macintosh. Raskin's idea was to sell the Macintosh for around $600 dollars closing the gap on the IBM machines. Steve Jobs took over the project and using the ideas from Lisa came up with the machine.

The Macintosh was finally released to much fan fair on January 24 in 1984. It was accompanied with a 15 million dollar advertising campaign that had a Super bowl ad. It was sold at the price of $1,995 half of which was pure profit for Apple. The Macintosh became the first affordable PC with a GUI interface. After an initial surge by last 1984 sales of the Machintosh were slow. It did not have a killer ap for the system and Apple needed to find a way to bring back up sales. They decided to work with Microsoft to come up with a software package to be sold for the Mac. Later they decided to talk with John Warnock who had founded a company called Adobe. Adobe was working on a program that would enable you to print out exactly what you saw on your screen. At the time because of the limits of the software and dot matrix printers this was not possible. Warnock, who was at one time a member of PARC, came up with what he called laser printing. With this new technology it lead to a new business called desktop publishing and led to a big boon for Apple. It was not cheap to buy the laser printers so it never grew into a larger market for Apple. Apple was floundering as a company and needed to turn things around. John Sculley, who was originally hired by Steve Jobs from PepsiCo, came up with new ideas to turn around Apple. Unfortunately for Steve Jobs those ideas did not include him being with the company. The Apple board decided to use Sculley's ideas and Jobs was forced out of the company he had founded.

Another development also doomed Apple. With there partnership with Microsoft Bill Gates saw another opportunity for his company to expand. Gates saw the future of a GUI interface and began work on one. At first they used a GUI on top of there DOS OS that they called Windows. It was very rough and at first did not work very well. Apple saw Windows and tried to sue Microsoft for using an interface that looked like Mac. Eventually Apple lost the suit and Microsoft was able to continue to work on Windows. Six years later in 1990 they released a version of Windows they called Windows 3. This was the first Windows OS that was exactly like Mac. It was an instant hit selling 3 million copies in the first year. Windows 3 led to Microsoft being the computer OS standard. Because of the nice GUI interface and wealth of programs Windows outraced all the competitors. Microsoft became the software company in the world while Apple was left struggling along and trying to find a new vision without Jobs at the helm.

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your volume 1 and 3 article!! The video is quite confusing at times. This is very helpful :)

    ReplyDelete