Successful
Computers We all know what a computer is, don't we? Chances are that you're using one right now to read this article...
Most of us can even name a few types: Windows, Mac, Linux - and if I say
you're using Windows now, I'm most likely correct. Why can I say that? Windows is one of the most popular Operating Systems in use, and
the most popular on desktop
computers. It was thoughts like these that mande me wonder - what makes some computers successful, while other computers fail? A plethora of computers Computers in the home is not an old phenomena, it started for real in the eighties with computers like ZX80, ZX81 and Spectrum, Vic20, C64, Oric and whatever. What they had in common, was that they were incompatible. With mostly proprietary design, there were not many clones to see but there were some tries: The MSX computers were a co-operation between many companies to make one standard platform, but it was not the big success they hoped... It was too late at this moment for the 8-bit computers they were, as the new 16-bit computers were beginning to arrive; Atari ST, Amiga, Archimedes, Apple Macintosh and more. All of them very good computers with impressive specifications and easy to use - but still incompatible with each other, and they got into their different niches; Atari in music, Amiga in film and video, the Macintosh with graphics and DTP, but none of them conquered the business market. A standard emerges Along all of this, IBM produced and sold their own computer, the IBM PC, and a small company called Microsoft did strike a lucky deal to produce the operating system for it. IBM had a good reputation, and it was even possible to make clones of their computer. At least partly, which is why you could see in adverts things like "90% IBM-
compatible." With many producers of computers that after some time got 100% compatible, the benefits were great: If you made a program for one PC, it would work on all the others too, and this was a benefit for programmers. In turn, this benefit made many people make programs for the PC, which in turn sold more units because there were so many programs for them - a good circle for all involved. The little company Microsoft were in a particulary good position, as they had made a deal with IBM to make their OS - everyone needed an OS, and MS-DOS became one of the most popular (even if there were other compatible ones) and with the introduction of Windows 3.0
the most popular. I won't speculate in
how MS-DOS and later Windows came to be the de-facto standard OS for what we today usually call PCs, just state that it did. And for each upgrade of Windows it became more popular too. I won't claim the success is based solely on the OS, as the hardware evolved and got better all the time, but all this meant that it was very tempting to develop for Windows, especially when Windows 95 appeared with it's (relative) ease of use. Other OSes existed for the same hardware, but those users became a small minority. However, how did the PC compare to the other platforms?