Happy 20th Mac

Posted on January 24, 2004
Filed Under Computing |

On this day, 20 year ago, during the Superbowl a revolutionary aired. It introduced the World to the Apple Macintosh (see the press release), the day that Apple truly began its life as a software company, and why “1984 won’t be like ‘1984′” (too bad American law is creeping towards it in 2004).

Unfortunately, Apple was too early to market (as it has many times since, wireless net, pda, …), the computer market was still too fragmented. And because it was still years away from open hardware specs, and because Apple took several bad business decisions after Jobs and Woz left.

It is good to see that Apple has started to realise that they are in fact a software company, since (1) the margins on hardware are minute, and (2) there software works, and works well, so people will be willing to pay good money for this (just look at how much they spend on mediocre software). The introduction of iPod and iTunes for Windoze, and solid X11 support is a good start.

Can you imagine the world with the beautiful Aqua, and awesome Apple apps (the application of Software Engineering prinicipals is evident from the HCI to information hiding of the development tools, Xcode / Project Builder), on your PC, on top of BSD or Linux. I would love to replace my current X11/Gnome desktop with Aqua, if anyone has seen my desktop you know I’ve tried. And although I appreciate getting good software for free (beer and speach), I would not hesitate to pay for a proprietary Aqua on my Linux laptop. (But only for a year or two, when free/libre and open source software is the only viable development model).

So Happy Birthday Macintosh, you feel old yet? I know I do. Good luck to Apple and getting into the entertainment industry, more good things are sure to come. And when the G5 goes into the PowerBook, I’ll be first in line!

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