Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 11th Oct 2005 15:43 UTC, submitted by sean batten
Humor This humorous article depicts the computing world without Microsoft-- Apple has the biggest marketshare (15%), HP bought Commodore, IBM thinks text-based interfaces are the best thing for customers, and hardware-accelerated 3D is a no-go because all the various parties cannot agree on a standard. And Microsoft? Aren't they selling BASIC?
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The joke is a joke ...
by on Tue 11th Oct 2005 20:59 UTC

Member since:

Microsoft did contribute to the computer industry, but it is crazy to assume that there weren't fifty companies waiting to take their place if they had failed.

There was a lot of great stuff back then. Let's assume that Apple and Commodore were fighting for the market: Apple would have been pressured to improve their product's multitasking capabilities. Atari would have been nipping at their heels just on the merits of price. Seeming as all of them used the same processor, Atari may have even provided a software compatibility environment which would have allowed Amiga and Macintosh users to run Atari applications (thus encouraging developers to develop for the Atari instead). And those are just the big names. There were a whole slew of small companies too. Competition would have kept the market alive.

Reply Score: 0

RE: The joke is a joke ...
by Ronald Vos on Tue 11th Oct 2005 21:26 in reply to "The joke is a joke ..."
Ronald Vos Member since:
2005-07-06

Atari wouldn't be here anyway, the were already on the decline as a personal computer company when MS-DOS was on the rise.

Reply Parent Score: 1