The big System X *versus* System Y internet debates, 22 - 23 years ago...

[jalsonmi]

MikeB said:

@ 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.

 

The second half is all fair enough and very good points. The first half---I would liek to see some numbers proof to show that Commodore was dominating the computer market to the extant you say it was during the DOS years and into the early Windows years. I'm willing to give you that it was Windows 3.1 that saw an enormous take-off and adoption, but I'm still pretty damn sure IBMs and IBM clones were the predominant computer even in the mid to late 80's. As someone else said, office computers were predominantly DOS based machines and that drove personal computer sales once that became more of a widespread thing. And while I understnad you come from it from a European point of view, I think you need to look at it in terms of the U.S. No offense, and I'm not one to be either overly pro-America or ethnocentric, but espeically in terms of the adoption of PCs, I think what was going on in the U.S. has to be considered more important than what was going on in Europe. If for no other reason than a lack of a need to export for the many many American companies that fueled the shift to PC (whether they be MS, Apple, IBM, Dell, Gateway, Compaq, or anyone else).

This is all besides my original point, which is that gaming had very little to do with the DOS/Windows based computer gaining dominance in the home computer market--or really, the creation of the home computer market as a real thing in the first place. The large majority of people first adopted computers as an improvement on their typewriters, not as a tool to play video games.