[Sussex] NOW: So, who are the all-time greats? WAS Hello all

[Geoff Teale]

On Wed, 2003-02-12 at 00:13, Neil Ford wrote:
> On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at 11:32  pm, Geoff Teale wrote:
> 
> >> - Mitch Kapor - Wasn't he on Baywatch?
> >
> > Founded Lotus, wrote 1,2,3 ... sold to IBM, retired rich.  REally not a
> > great contribution.
> >
> Helped found the EFF, is involved in (founder of?) the Open Source 
> Applications Foundation (http://http://www.osafoundation.org/index.htm) 
> who are developing Chandler.

Ahh, you live and learn.  I think I read something about that and
ignored it completely :)

> 123 was the killer app for the IBM PC. Without it I don't believe the 
> PC would have broken into business the way it did and the world might 
> be a very different place (we'd all be using Macs).

Yeah.  He was important becuase his product help shape the early
adoption of business computing on the desktop - but he didn't come up
with the idea - here is merely the one who profited from it.

I'm not sure we'd be using Macs.  I figure business would of carried on
down the route they were following - Terminals connected to
mini-computers.  Probably the UNIX vendors would have fought it out with
IBM by now.  CPM and Apple II would have dominated the home market
before being superceded by Amiga and ST - microsoft would either have
slowly faded away trying to convince the world to buy ports of their
crappy BASIC or have moved into development on Apple or Amiga who would
between them have any desktop applications sewn up.  Apple, without the
pressure of the PC and Mirosoft would have kept the Scully management of
the mid 80's and become lazy.  The emergence of more powerful Amiga
models in the mid 1990's that could run a _real_ UNIX OS would finally
force them to pull their heads out of their bottoms and start to move
forward again (NOTE: Amiga were really going to do this around 1995 -
the 68040 based Amiga 4000 had a brother called the Amiga 4000UX which
was planned to run a version of UNIX that featured Amiga Workbench as
was compatible with most non-games software for the Amiga... sadly I
think Commodore went capput around this time..).

And who knows.. Be Inc might have taken the world by storm!

-- 
Geoff Teale <tealeg at member.fsf.org>
Free Software Foundation