MikeB on 10 July 2008
@ jalsonmi
I think you vastly overestimate the impact gaming had in the adoption of PCs over the Amiga. Not to vastly oversimplify, but as far as I understand it, the big thing came down to this: Windows. Apple invented such a thing with the Mac, MS stole it, PCs became a user friendly, every consumer device. Of course, it was he coupled with the fact that since MS was not owned by IBM, the OS wasn't proprietary, and could be put on every "IBM clone" (as I remember they were called) in the world back then.
Windows became really popular after C= was gone out of business.
With regard to Microsoft stealing the GUI basics from Apple, I don't quite agree. The mouse controlled pointer basics originated from the 60s and the Xerox Star desktop hit the market 3 years before Apple released their Apple Lisa.
Here a screenshot from the first GUI OS:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a8/Xerox_star_desktop.jpg
What Microsoft did literally but indirectly steal was stealing CP/M from Digital Research Inc. A programmer copied all the basic ideas from this OS (he even copied parts of the source code) and this handicapped version of the OS called Quick and Dirty Operating System (QDOS) he sold to Microsoft for 25K dollars, which then became MSDOS.
