Very few subjects make me want to post a rant, but articles such as this do. I must admit shaking my head (as well getting a bit of a chuckle out of his incredibly distorted, on-the-edge-of-delusional railings) to realize there are still folks rabidly foaming at the mouth because their pet computer platform didn't make the grade 20 or 25 years ago.
He calls IBM's PC "overpriced and undepowered", but an Apple II Plus and an IBM 5150 were very closely priced when both were outfitted with 48K of RAM and a floppy drive. The IBM however, had lots of untapped potential with its open architecture and all the third party peripherals to come, along with ten times as much memory space.
Ironically in the 1980's, it was Apple (who previously had touted how open their systems were) that adopted a hostile and closed system with the Apple IIc and the Macs; while IBM broke with long standing tradition to open their architecture and give the consumer a flexibility unknown.
Apple hoped that by doing this, they would force consumers to buy only Apple accessories. (Indeed, there was a time in Apple's history when it seemed nothing from any one model Apple computer would work on any other model.) Having already lost the business world to the IBM PC and the 'killer app' Lotus 1-2-3, they became greedy and short-sighted with what they had left.
We all well know of Microsoft and its dishonest, criminal business practices. I have as strong a distaste and comtempt for them as most of us on this website. But Apple did much of what happened to them to themselves, and I don't see Steve Jobs as being a much better czar of computerdom if indeed, he had come out on top and not Gates and "Evilsoft".
What would I say to the author of the article? It's so distorted and biased that it cannot be taken with any degree of seriousness, but I would say to author Dilger: "Drink your wormwood, Daniel. Drink it down, every drop. Perhaps it will wash those sour grapes out of your throat that have been stuck there for 25 years".
How's that for a rant?
