Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…It didn't in that era for sure. In that era, yeah. The way to scale is Make the software that is going to get distributed on the most PCs, and then that is the most interesting to software developers. It is the most interesting to consumers who want the software and IT buyers who want to buy the standard thing. Apple's strategy versus Microsoft strategy in this era, Apple was always going to be a bit player rather than the scale winner. The trade off is lots of PCs had blue screens of death, Apple never had blue screens of death. Where do blue screens come from? It's driver problems. It's that the printer is not speaking the same language as your particular computer and what the operating system knows about your computer, and are the device drivers right for your particular version of whatever's on your motherboard? Apple never had those issues, but they also had very few units shipped and much more expensive product. Sidebar. That Alan Kay quote about if you really care about software, you do your own hardware, makes so much more sense to me now having done this episode, because he's coming from having made the Alto and the graphical interface there. The only way that he could have made the GUI on the Alto was basically building a mini computer.…

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