Uncensored2008
Libertarian Radical
There is a *HUGE* difference between the personal computing market if '82 and the personal computing market of '92. What Apple had ini '82 is a good chunk of a miniscule market. What they had in '92 was a company on the verge of bankruptcy playing a pathetic 2nd to a vritual monopoly in Microsoft. You had the same thing in '02 only worse, but the personal computing space had grown by leaps an bounds.
I agree 100%
My only point is that the original Apple opened the path for the personal computer. It was the success of Apple that got IBM to invest in the PC.
In '92 we were still trying to put a computer on every desk and practically nobody had ever touched a "laptop computer".
Shoot, Compaq got it's name from the fact that it built a "luggable" in 1983. Little 5" screen. By 90, I had a laptop with VGA display and a 80486.
You and I both know about Apple's recent success, but considering Apple to be anything dominant in the actual personal computing revolution is a weird joke. Microsoft did that.
IBM did that, and probably not on purpose. IBM used off the shelf parts to get to market quickly. By doing so, they created open architecture.
ISA, industry standard architecture made all the parts play together. DOS ran on any ISA computer, any program written for DOS ran on any ISA based computer. Then there was LIM, Lotus, Intel, Microsoft, which defined standards for memory access. MAC now obeys LIM standards.
So, the Internet would certainly have existed without Ethernet and I don't think that Ethernet per se really contributed much to the Internet explosion of, say, '04-05.
Every node of the internet runs Ethernet. No other networking protocol is sufficient to handle to routable traffic demands. TCP/IP was developed with the assumption that it would ride on Ethernet.
Netscape did.
?????
Netscape is important to the Web, but irrelevant to the internet. The internet was around several decades before the Web showed up. Just like Windows is to OS2, or Gnome is to Linux, the Web is an interface. Without the Web, the internet would remain the domain of geeks. It was Andreessen who made the internet accessible to the masses, but the internet was thriving long before him.
Microsoft Internet Explorer did. Dirt cheap USR modems did. Ethernet - not so much. I don't really think that I saw Ethernet as being a superior technology until maybe '97, '98 when the low-cost 100M switches started emerging. By then we all already had bought a book on amazon.com.
You don't seem to grasp that the internet is based on Ethernet. Every TCP/IP packet that travels is an Ethernet packet.
Even to the point that those things were important to society and computing, I don't see that they really changed the way people think - except maybe the Internet Browser - that maybe did.
What is it in the C language that you believe altered the thinking of the average person?
I find procedural languages operate the way most people already think. In reality, they are instruction lists. Do this, then do that, in sequence. Start at the top, go to the bottom, do everything on the list. There is no change in the way people think, which is why C is a fairly easy language for people to learn.
OOP languages foray into new concepts. Triggers, Timers, PEM's, focus, all of these are far outside of a list based thought process.