[ale] meeting

[F. Grant Robertson]

Obviously, things happen as they happen, and no one can really know what
might or might not have been had some detail gone one way or the other years
ago.

For the record, Apple was officially founded by S. Wozniack and S. Jobs on
April 1, 1977 (April Fools Day.. how neat!)

Microsoft (Originally Micro-Soft), was founded by Gates and Allen in 1975.

The "Apple Basic" you loved was a derivative work of Gates and Allen's
Micro-Soft basic, licensed and debugged by a few programmers at Apple.
(Depending on when you used it, it may have been nothing more than
Micro-Soft basic re-labeled and sold by apple) Unless you learned to code
with "Integer Basic" (sometimes referred to as "Game Basic", Apple's
original basic interpreter, you too fed the beast much earlier than you
realize. :)

Without Apple it is very unlikely that "the evil empire" would have survived
the late 70's. At the time, they only licensed user of MS's 6502 floating
point basic was Commodore, and the contract stipulated that Microsoft would
only be paid once the PET was in production. PET had a much narrower market
penetration than Apple gained, and therefore would not have been anywhere
near as profitable for MS. Atari went their own way, if Apple had as well
this could be a completely different story.

-G

-----Original Message-----
Subject: Re: [ale] meeting


On Mon, Aug 11, 2003 at 04:12:10PM -0400, Geoffrey wrote:
> Apple, would not have existed?

Wasn't Apple around before Microsoft?  I know I learned BASIC on an
Apple (something... ][g maybe?) before IBM came out with the PC.

Regardless, the PC landscape would be vastly different today.  Without
the evil empire, would the Open Source movement have been embraced so
enthusiastically?

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