History: Did Apple invent the PC?

http://www.islandnet.com/~KPOLSSON/comphist/

Neither Apple nor IBM were first with a PC.

Windows was available before OS X

High time your son had a serious man-to-man chat with you about Google! 😉

Kieran N wrote:
Of the two, IBM and Apple, who had their PC first?

Apple had the Apple ][ (2) out long before IBM had their PC. Please remember that others had them out even earlier.

Kieran N wrote:
The Powerbook came before the ThinkPad, right?

Apple had laptops out before the "PowerBook" line. I assume IBM had laptops before the "ThinkPad" as well. This is kind of like asking "Which was the first sports car, the Trans Am or the Corvette?" Well there were "sports cars" before either of them and when the first one was depends on how you define it.

Hello Kieran N,

This link might help you and your son:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_computer

littleshoulders 🙂

Hi again Kieran N,

With all the links above you should be able to arm yourself with enough that your son will think you know everything there is to know about computers....

Thanks for taking the time to mark posts helpful and solved as it is not mandatory but is always appreciated and helps the forums function better when others search for information that is most pertinent to particular problems.

good luck and I bet your son will be the next Bill Gates....ooops....I mean Steve Jobs....))))

littleshoulders 🙂

Windows may have been available before OS X as it currently is seen as a GUI. But OS X has some elements that have been around since 1970! Yes, If you look at some of the man pages of the Terminal commands, Mac OS X has some AT&T Unix elements in addition to its Berkeley Unix background. Apple's first computer in 1977 predates the Windows PC by 5 years, and it rightfully can be called the first PC, as before then all computers were mainframes and miniframes. There were hobby kits that could have been considered computers by some before Apple's first machine, but none had the ability to do word processing, business applications and games all in one machine as Apple's machines were all capable of doing. The first spreadsheet, Visicalc came to being on an Apple ][. I used it when I was 10 in 1981, though it was created in 1979. In 1982 Apple created what essentially was the first Mac OS in the Lisa operating system.

Public television had a wonderful series "The Machine that changed the world" that discussed how the personal computer came to being.

Calling the Macintosh Portable a laptop is a bit of a stretch, but it did come before the PowerBook 100, released in 1991.

Less of a stretch strangely enough was the Apple IIc, though since LCD TVs weren't that commonplace back then, the Apple IIc was only portable in that you could move it from TV screen to TV screen without breaking your back.

Message was edited by: a brody

Hate to admit it, but I was around working on computers with the original Bell Labs Unix, System V, and all of that. And as I said in the post, both the Apple and the IBM PC were predated by other computers. (Had a C/PM Kaypro). You are leaving out the earlier kit computers which some had very rudimentary software and homebuilt machines.

Never heard the term "miniframe", but did use minicomputers, including the IBM Series I. Also used Altos machines which used Xenix, Microsofts version on Berkeley Shell Unix. I also used Visicalc on an Apple II, but I must confess I was older than 10. We also had a couple of Osbornes (sp?) at the office.

I also have several books on the early days, including "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", which I guess I should have cited in my post. Could also go into some history on DEC machines, but I'm not sure the statute of limitations is up on all the escapades.

I thought EVERYONE knew that Al Gore invented the personal computer




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No, No! It was the internet!






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No, I'm sure Al Gore invented EVERYTHING involving computers and the Internet; after all, he got a Nobel Prize! (or maybe it was an IgNobel prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IgNobelPrize - something like that)


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