Triumph of the Nerds

Triumph of the Nerds B A Thomas

The presenter

Robert X Cringely

The story of the PC …

The MITS Altair 8800

In the early 1970s most computers were mainframes

Bill Gates in 1977

Bill Gates and Paul Allen in the late 1970s

Paper tape was used to input programs

Jobs and Woz about 1976

The Apple 1 mother board sold for $666.They sold about 50 to hobbyists.

One of the first Apple 1s

The Apple 2 in 1977.A modern looking computer.

Visicalc – the first Spreadsheet and first useful program on a PC

Big Blue – the major mainframe manufacturer

Riding the Bear

Open Architecture

Microsoft did Languages not Operating Systems

Bill Gates Garry Kildall

Tim Patterson wrote an OS based on CPM

CPM

MS DOS

Advert for the IBM PC 1981

Lotus 123 – The Killer Application for the IBM PC

A BIOS window

Compaq portableThe first clone/IBM compatible

Amstrad

Apricot

Dell

PC Clones

IBM’s doomed Operating SystemWas meant to replace MS-DOS.

OS/2

A quote from Pablo Picasso

Great Artists Steal – Part 3(Good artists copy)

California

Silicon Valley

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley

Windows 95 launch1st really usable version

Xerox – “copier heads”

The first computer mouse

The Apple Lisa = failure

And so was the Mac …….

Until it got its killer application!

The Future?

Google and Apple?Web based OS &

applications?Thin client networks?

Netbooks?

Netbooks

Google OS might look something like this