No Microsoft

the_lyniezian

Banned
Somehow assume that prior to the formation of Microsoft Bill Gates dies/gets wrongly accused of a crime and ends up in prison for 30 years/decides not to bother and hence, no Microsoft. How does the computer industry develop?
 

Dean_the_Young

Dathi THorfinnsson said:
Much better? With software that actually works, more or less?
Click to expand...
Or worse? Because there wouldn't be an equivalent unifying force that brings together all the various parts of the computers into a single process, and providing a unified avenue for computer inter-relation because everyone is using different OS?

There are benefits for everyone using the same system, you know. And it does work well enough for most people who use it; I've never had a real problem with it.
 

Arachnid

I have thought about this and am a bit torn, on one hand Vista along with most Microsoft Software is rubbish, on the other hand Microsoft's establishment of common standards for basically the entire computer industry has been incredibly helpful.

For example the PC Game's industry, now atm almost all development is for the PC and few of the best games are rewritten to work on Mac. Now if there are three or four OS's all with significant market share a lot more would have to be spent on making sure that any game could run on a least two or three of them, which in turn would mean a lot less money to be spent on other things.
 

DuQuense

There are common Standards for most things that computors do. Text, email, phone, web ect.
The fact that M$ rarely adheres to the standards, is a different problem.
[plus the fast that M$ doesn't even follow it's own standards, for more than 2~3 Years]

At the time that M$ stole the 3.1 GUI from GEM, there were close to a dozen different GUI's being developed.
2 years later M$ had killed them all.
 

danielb1

No major changes in the world until 1975. But then.... without Gates, no Microsoft, and Paul Allen either never writes Altair BASIC or does it without Gates as his sales/strategic-vision guy.

Even before MS-DOS, Microsoft provided programming software for many computers, including Apple ("Applesoft BASIC" was made by Microsoft), and Radio Shack ("Color BASIC" for TRS-80 Color Computers) as well as the Softcard (allowed Apple II users to use the CP/M operating system, MS-DOS's ancestor and cousin) and XENIX (Microsoft's first OS - a UNIX-based system first released in 1980).

This doesn't mean every last bit of the computer industry is changed at first; Apple IIs initially used Wozniak's Integer BASIC, and Commodores used their own BASIC as well. However, even before IBM steps in, there are going to be significant differences from OTL...

Assuming there is even still an IBM PC, and one similar to OTL, the chief Operating System is going to be either CP/M-86 (port of CP/M) or the UCSD p-System (OS based on the Pascal programming language also used on IBM DisplayWriters). The PC won't be using Microsoft BASIC (in either ROM BASIC, BASICA, or GW-BASIC form) either, but something else, either home-grown or from another company.

From that point onwards, its hard to predict. An easier POD would have been "WI Bill Gates never buys Seattle Computer's QDOS" or "WI Bill Gates killed in a car accident in 1979"... because Microsoft, believe it or not, was a fairly important player in the early computer field - albeit one in a particular area (programming tools, mostly BASIC interpreters). With a different BASIC instead of Allen's, or no BASIC, Altairs might not sell quite as well, or be sold to different people... there might not even BE an Apple Computer (founded almost a year after Microsoft), let alone a Macintosh.
 
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