When the Mac first came out I implemented an automated sample handling system for making radioactive pharmaceuticals. I used HyperCard years before the PC crowd knew the meaning of the word interactive.

I did a bunch of programming in Hypercard back in the day. Loved it. Can't bear to throw the files away despite being unable to run them for what, 20 years?

 

LOL I've probably got an old Fortran deck of punchcards with the printout wrapped around them here somewhere.

 

Intel was CISC at the time, Motorola was RISC. Different architectures for different reasons. Both worked well, and paged memory has been done on both architectures heavily in the beginning. As for why many makers preferred Motorola- it isn't what you think. They chose Motorola because RISC architectures have many, many more registers- made programming far easier.

It is widely know that concept of the windowed GUI was developed originally by Xerox. Not disputing that. I was speaking specifically about where Bill gates acquired knowledge about how the mouse worked. Jobs didn't copy what Xerox did, he took it much, much farther. Nor did Jobs copy the mouse form Xerox (which they didn't come up with, they borrowed the idea from Douglas Englebart)- what they had was clumsy & fragile- Apple came up with the first real mouse.

If you want to know the truth--- look here:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/16/creation-myth#:~:text=Not quite, because Xerox never,side of the university campus.

Well I don't really dispute what you're saying, but I think all of these firms copied and stole from others, I don't see Microsoft as the bad guy in the room, that's too simplistic.

Microsoft did not innovate much during their earlier years either, I readily admit that. But I've never agreed when some (I'm not saying you) imply that Apple were like the freedom fighters, the ones that would lead us into a brave new world.

I wanted to buy a Mac too back then but they were insanely expensive (for a young guy just starting his first job) - $ 2,500 in 1984.

This is around $ 6,500 in todays dollars, insane. By this time clone companies had helped ensure that PC prices were much more competitive.

Apple also at that time could not decide if they were a hardware or software company. Very sensibly Gates made it clear they were in the software business not hardware.

Apple seemed to dither and failed to capitalize by licensing their hardware or software, no sir, if you wanted an Apple it had to run their OS if you wanted to run their OS, their code, it had to be on an Apple, no freedom there, no choice there.

As you'll recall too the board of Apple fired Jobs, that's how bad the firm was doing in the marketplace.

Over the years I formed the opinion that Apple - like Jobs - was pretentious, elitist, I can't pay for and run Mac OS on a machine of my choosing, it must be run on their expensive pretentious machines.

Things Apple did not/do not do that surprise me:

1. License their OS so it can run on other hardware and thus seriously threaten Microsoft's desktop monopoly.
2. Develop an Apple games console, I guess that ship has now long sailed.
3. Get into the home HiFi, music market, it took until 2017 for "Homepod" to emerge, late and lacklustre.

The first of these - license their OS - is frankly staggering, nothing would have terrified Bill Gates more than Apple making their OS available on PC clone hardware, where their loyal fan base would have grown hugely and be the only real competitor to Microsoft in the desktop OS market, just incredible this was never done.

Of course - like IBM before them - they competed with themselves, their software business could not grow if it threatened their hardware sales and their hardware business could not grow if it threatened their software sales - Gates avoided that problem altogether by focusing wholly on software.

I also never figured out why the "Mac" is still - some 40 years later - called a "Mac" it was a product name and seems they never ever got around to making another computer product like a Mac 2 or some other name.