Just happened to stumble upon an interview by Tim O’Reilly (if you don’t know who he is, maybe this is not for you). In that interview he speaks of Apple as an innovator in the computing industry.

One of the comments in the article are what made me want to write a few things about it. One of the readers mentioned how much more exciting, enthousiastic and meaningful the computing industry was in the 1980s. And yeah, he did mention Atari, Commodore Amiga and one could also add Spectrum, Archimedes and of course NeXT, on whose Operating System, MacOS X is largely based. Think about it for a second: What MORE have people added in the 90s desktop and overall computing experience? Multitasking was there; GUIs were there (ok ok, much simpler, but still the concept was there); audio and multimedia was there (at least in the most advanced computers of the time — clearly not talking about your average DOS box).

The only difference I see is that computers do not cost €2500, but €800 and that more or less the same software in terms of features requires ten times the memory, processing power and storage. Even though I agree with Tim when he states that Bill Gates is largely responsible for the “ubiquity of personal computing”, I believe he is also responsible for killing the enthousiasm and passion behind the most challenging and interesting industry the world has seen.
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