ResearchA Brief History of the Desktop Computer
That would be a *very* brief history. This will be the Cliff's notes.
The average Joe on the street would probably think that Microsoft gave us the desktop personal computer, or maybe if they knew a little more, the MacIntosh. In actuality, the personal computer as you and I know it was invented by Xerox Parc. The "minicomputer" (as it was first called) Xerox Alto, introduced in 1973, was a landmark step in the development of personal computers. It was the first to have a graphical user interface, bit-mapped high resolution screen, large internal and external memory storage, a mouse, and special software. The minicomputer era was an intermediary step from mainframes to personal computer usage.
The Alto was never sold as itself. Xerox, in what will surely go down in history as the biggest blunder in computer history, ignored the computer market completely to pour resources into the copier line. Eventually, they began retailing the Alto as the brand "Star" (bleah!) in 1981 for the absolutely staggering sum of $16,595. Of course, it was a small wonder that they didn't sell many of them, since in that time 16 thousand was a decent price for a car. Computers were to quickly get more powerful and cheaper.
Steve Wozniac and Steve Jobs, two ex-video game programmers, came on the scene about that time with the Apple MacIntosh. Wozniac zeroed right in on what made the Xerox Star great and bought much of this technology from Xerox, which seemed absolutely desperate to drop this goldmine as cheaply as possible. The Apple MacIntosh hit the market in 1984, at the time competing with about 30 major brands of home computer and console systems, including machines by Amiga (formerly Commodore), Texas Instruments (they went back to calculators), Tandy (known today only as the Radio Shack store chain), Wang (who thought that computers were just like electric typewriters) and IBM-compatible PCs. The Macs made everything else look primitive.
Two things happened next to spoil Apple's party. Steve Wozniac walked away from Apple to go develop a new system, which would become the NeXt Cube. The NeXt Cube fared about as well as the Xerox Alto, with the sole distinction of becoming the world's first web server, used by Tim Berners-Lee (the official "father" of the World-Wide Web we use today) to post the first web page. To boot, the NeXt Cube machine he used to perform this feat can still run today! Like the Xerox Alto, the NeXt Cube was light-years ahead of its time and too pricey for the average consumer.
At the same time, IBM, the technology leader in mainframe computers for decades, was panicking at the realization that it was losing its grip on the home PC market. So they got together with a software company which was then making only the BASIC programming language and who had just licensed a copy of the DOS operating system. They made a deal to jointly develop a desktop operating system which would run on the PC compatibles, and that system would be called OS/2.
The name of the software company IBM contracted with? Micro-soft! They dropped the hyphen later. About the time of the OS/2 system releasing, Microsoft released it's first Windows operating system. There was still heavy competition such as the European-based BeOS computers, Amigas, and Sun Microsystem's SPARC workstations, to say nothing of industrial use (where NeXt Cubes were already finding fierce affection in engineer's cubicles). But basically this is the story of the home desktop market, and that's where we can pick up the rest of the story. As we know, today's home computer is mostly IBM systems, where every operating system ever invented can run, and MacIntoshes, existing primarily to spite Microsoft. However, even if the combined forces of IBM (still sore at what Windows did to OS/2), Sun (now the biggest open source contributor), and the varying flavors of Unix (including Linux, BSD, Open Solaris, and GNU HURD) manage to drive Microsoft out of the market, the computer landscape for the home user
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l still remain largely Macs and PCs.You may not have heard it here first, but you heard it here briefest.