Wanglicious posted...
As much as I rag on Jobs/Apple I'd be hard pressed to find a person more critical for the transition from mainframe and hobbyist computing to personal computing.
...bill gates.
you know, a guy who spun the world on its head. that was the entire point of windows 95 and continued through in 98, failed with ME, succeeded again in 2000, and blew everything wide open with XP. macs were strictly the former until around the time OSX happened, which times pretty well with the period XP landed and took off 90% of the advantages macs had (remaining 10% being security basically). macs didn't do anything in this regard that wasn't already happening and being done. their hits are mostly with portable devices but even then they aren't the critical component despite how much they like to claim it - google/android murders everyone else in the field of smartphones (tablets meanwhile existed beforehand and advancements in this field are also being done by android, but apple does get the prize to say that was a profitable business too, just nothing for anything after that).
Well, I expected to get at least one person to ignore the "the next 20-odd years were a wash" part of my comment.
Bill Gates had, in my opinion, a great knowledge of markets (and ways to make trollingly hilarious agreements), but he could not be credited with the transition. He broke no new ground. His success mainly stemmed from the fact that he understood if he could get a large lead in the corporate sector, everything would follow because of interoperability. He understood that it didn't matter what the academics used (as I noted, we can EASILY learn something else), but if you wanted to work on stuff at the office and then bring it home... you needed the same system because interoperability was a big issue back then.
By the time Windows 95 came around, PCs were pretty much undisputably proven viable for "normal people". (I would go so far as to say around the time 3 or 3.1 came out, it was pretty solidly decided already)
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