Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley

Robert S. Thau (rst@ai.mit.edu)
Tue, 22 Jun 1999 18:30:10 -0400 (EDT)


Ian Andrew Bell writes:
> The movie skipped over the (probably boring)
> pre-GUI middle history of PCs and Apples when text ruled the world.
> Funny that Commodore wasn't even mentioned though at one time they
> were killing Apple and IBM in the home market.

Two points:

1) The story of how Microsoft wound up being the OS supplier for the
PC is not boring. I've heard various accounts of how interesting
it is (depending on whether you choose to believe the people whose
friends-of-a-friend supposedly found CP/M copyright notices in
QDOS, the Quick and Dirty OS which Bill bought and then resold to
IBM), but it is *definitely* not boring.

2) If it really starts out that late, why does Woz have much of a
part? I thought he wasn't a really major player in Apple at that
point.

rst