back to article Imagine a world where Apple shacked up with Xerox in the '80s: How might it look today?

Today our columnist Mark Pesce considers what would have happened had Apple and Xerox partnered in the 1980s. Is this how the history of the microcomputer revolution would have panned out? We present the following fiction. Looking back over the last 40 years of computing, it's hard to imagine how things could have been …

  1. elwe

    It was believable until the point where Steve Jobs doesn't try to own that network, but released the enabling bits of software free of charge. Steve took tech from the rest of the world and fought to try to stop the rest of the world using it. He never gave anything out for free.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Also, it there is something very different from the elegance of a object-oriented system and applications it's the web pile of technologies badly designed since inception and then bent to do something different "because the marketing department needs that".

    2. Dave 126 Silver badge

      And similarly, the idea of a Jobs-lead NeXt not researching mobile devices doesn't ring true: there's a 1983 audio recording of Jobs describing his vision for an always-connected book-shaped device (not unlike the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and that everything Apple does will be just stepping stones towards that eventual goal.

  2. The Central Scrutinizer

    Tens of millions of NeXT devices and Apple buying Xerox. Good one!

    1. anthonylambert

      100 Million NeXT based iPhone 12s sold in the last year......

      The iPhone is a development of the NeXT system. Mach Kernel, BSD unix, NeXT underlying code, new interface. XCode is the Next development env just a few generations on.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Facepalm

    The other alternative history...

    Is the one where Gary Kildall does meet with IBM, does license them CP/M and Microsoft never exists. As a result Apple never exists.

    And the Internet is Token Ring - ah, shit, I knew there had to be a downside.

    1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

      Re: The other alternative history...

      Or the one where the British Government doesn't decide to keep Colossus secret, stifling the British computer revolution and ICL rules the roost, Tim Berners Lee invents the internet and all, and Lord Clive Sinclair is a billionaire off the back of his ZX Spectrum Gen 9 after moving to the ARM powered RISC chipset and the world is driving around in frighteningly dangerous electric single seater tricycle like buggies with optional 6 foot tall warning flags.

    2. jake Silver badge

      Re: The other alternative history...

      "The Internet" (whatever that is) doesn't give a rat's ass what the wire is. We were running TCP/IP over Token Ring very early on in development, long(ish) before Gary's non-meeting with IBM.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: The other alternative history...

        Yeah. 10Base2, 10Base5, 10BaseT, Token Ring, Token Bus, dialup (SLIP and then PPP), ISDN, Frame Relay, ATM, SONET, powerline, WiFi, GPRS, microwave, Infrared, pigeon... IP has run over an awful lot of stuff. (Hell, I've run it over most of the ones I just listed.) If the physical link can carry bits, it can carry IP, and at some point someone's probably done it even if it was just for the hack.

        Communities like Hackaday and Poc||GTFO are full of people who do "will it IP?" for breakfast.

  4. elsergiovolador Silver badge

    Big credit

    I am not sure why we are giving so much credit for "inventions" that would be pretty much obvious for almost anyone having funds and interest in a given space.

    For example, the mouse pointer. Okay you have information on the screen and you want to tell the program which part of the information you are interested in. So naturally you would point a finger at it. How would you tell computer that you pointed a finger at this particular area? Okay, one could create sensors on the screens like transparent buttons that user presses, but that would be expensive then. How about we could move a cursor and use it as a virtual finger? Great! So we need a way to manipulate X and Y and go from there...

    Or the windows. You see those pages I have on my desk. I would like to have something like this but on the computer screen. Such a genius idea!

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Re: Big credit

      It may be obvious now, but in 1968, I'm guessing it was much less obvious.

      Especially since computers were the size of rooms at the time.

      Of course, hindsight is 20/20, as they say.

      1. Stumpy

        Re: Big credit

        Absolutely. Although Doug Engelbart seemed to have a pretty good handle on it back in '68:

        The Mother of all Demos (Douglas Engelbart) - YouTube link

      2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

        Re: Big credit

        Especially since lightpens and touch screens existed by then too.

        Before I ever heard of a computer mouse, a book of home brew add-ons in about 1980/81 showed how to build a basic touch screen using infrared LEDS and sensors to form a course grid in front of the screen. I never actually built that one, but it worked in exactly the same way as a TRS-80 row/column keyboard address matrix so would have been dead simple to program for. In fact with LDOS and it's device driver architecture, you could easily just write a new keyboard driver and load that for a kiosk-like terminal and not even have to bang the hardware.

        1. coconuthead

          Re: Big credit

          It's actually a big intellectual leap from a light pen, where you draw directly on the screen, to a mouse, where you move something around to draw on the desk with it appearing on your screen. It's not even obvious the average person would be able to do that: they would have needed to build one first and try it out to know.

          The actual hardware construction was probably the lesser part of this invention.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            Yes, that's the point I was trying to make. Three very different technologies to do the same thing. Lightpen and touch screen are very different and the mouse, as you say, is whole different leap in another direction.

            Which one would become the standard was very much up in the air at the time. Not mention dead mice aka trackballs and joysticks. Anyone here remember a CAD package on the BBC micro controlled by a non-self-centring 3 axis analogue joystick? (The knob rotated for zoom, and also was a mean controller for playing Elite, the knob did the ship rotation making docking without an expensive docking computer a doddle.)

            1. Martin an gof Silver badge

              Re: Big credit

              It was called the Bit Stik and was attached to the Acorn's analogue port, which had four analogue channels as well as switches and a lightpen input. The lightpen was a detector which sent a pulse into the port when the CRT scanline passed underneath it, comparing the timing of that pulse with the known timing of screen draw could tell software pretty much exactly where the user was pointing.

              M.

          2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            It's not a big leap from the joystick, which had already been used with computing at least a year before Englebart's demo.

          3. Martin an gof Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            Is it though? Didn't they have digitising arms (hinged) and digitising tables (either x/y developed from plotters and old-fashioned drawing tables, or puck-based with coils) back in the 1960s? I would have thought someone looking at an x/y table and a puck digitiser could make a fairly easy jump to x/y roller-mouse. Maybe I got the timings wrong?

            The key intellectual leap - in my opinion - is realising that you can programme a system to allow control by "pointing" at all.

            M.

      3. Jamie Jones Silver badge

        Re: Big credit

        2020 vision is so last year.

      4. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Big credit

        In 1968, the light pen had been around for over a decade, and was common on IBM terminals. Research on touchscreens had been out for a few years (Johnson 1965).

        Going from those direct-interaction-with-screen technologies to indirect interaction may have been a significant leap, but note that Baer is credited with adapting the joystick (already long in use in aeronautics and for several years with powered wheelchairs) to computers in 1967.

        Englebart's demo is famous for good reason – it was a terrific piece of showmanship that bundled up a number of fairly radical ideas for how people would interact with computers. But I think Pesce greatly overstates the importance of PARC and the WIMP UI approach.

        The fact is, when Apple popularized WIMP with the Macintosh (and Xerox utterly failed to1), many non-technical people were already using personal computers. Apple itself were partly responsible for a lot of that, because of VisiCalc's role as the first "killer app". (VisiCalc was a VisiCorp product, but it was most commonly used on Apple ][s.) IBM PCs had flooded the desks of middle management and replaced secretarial pools with word-processing packages, and Lotus 123 was doing there what VisiCalc had done for small businesses a few years before. Micros were popping up in schools and homes. Video game consoles were making non-techies comfortable with the idea of computer technology and serving as a gateway.

        Frankly, the big lie of 1984 was that the Macintosh was some sort of liberating revolution. It was a closed, expensive box of eye-candy for people who wanted a PC that was also a Veblen good. It was no more "a computer for everyone" than the IBM PC was, and less of one than the Commodore 64 or the Sinclair.

        And I'd claim that the WIMP interface has cost us more than it's benefited. There were studies suggesting that way back in the late '80s, observational and contextual-inquiry user studies that showed WIMP GUIs encouraged users to fiddle with irrelevant details and perform repetitive tasks that should have been automated. To this day, I see people use GUIs robotically rather than employ other interfaces that would be faster, safer, and repeatable.

        1Smith and Alexander's Fumbling the Future is a much more interesting account of this, in my opinion.

        1. AlbertCory

          Re: Big credit

          Disclaimer: I was part of the Xerox Star. I have a book out now, "Inventing the Future" which takes a novelistic approach to it: fictional characters but rigorously true facts. Almost all the people still alive helped me with it.

          "Fumbling the Future" reads like a HBS case study. A much more readable book is "Dealers of Lightning." My book gives you a different view onto it: the view of someone who's actually part of it and doesn't know how it will turn out.

          "XeroxPARC" is not one word. It was not PARC that was in charge of making it a product - it was SDD and Xerox proper. Obviously they didn't do a good job of it.

          Jobs' visit to PARC was in Dec. 1979, and he saw Smalltalk, which was intellectually important but not a part of the Star. They were already working on the Lisa at that point.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            "Inventing the Future"?

            Isn't that a book by Srnicek and Williams, turned into a hideously boring docu-drama? Or was it a mindless podcast hosted by Julian Alvarez? Or perhaps a useless course offered at Stanford? Or ...

            It would seem the future is being over-invented ...

    2. Plest Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Big credit

      Not so much obvious as a) necessary, "You're happy starting programs by typing the name? So stop complaining!" and b) enough power to run a WIMP.

      Even in the early 1980s the money was to be made with computers that anyone could afford, £99 for a Spectrum but to get that price they had to be shaved down to the bone in terms of power and features.

      The micro computer the Amstrad CPC did actually have a mouse available and very basic WIMP system you could start up but it was very slow and more of a novelty.

      We had GEM which made it into Amstrad's early PC range and Atari rom'd it on the ST but again it was basic and still needed enough CPU and graphics. Once a program needs to run AND have the GUI running, that's a lot of horsepower and without multi-threaded CPU tech it's a lot of slicing in the operations to make it usable.

      So while some of it was "Why would anyone not want a GUI?" a lot is simply that machines at the time were made to be cheap and only as we needed more horsepower for the GUI did we get more memory, CPU and graphics chips.

      Blame MS for WIndows, it made us buy bigger and faster and Windows 11 is not stopping that trend!

      1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

        Re: Big credit

        In the early 1980s the money was to be made by flogging renting big iron. Nothing much has changed except for the nature of the iron.

      2. Barry Rueger
        Coat

        Re: Big credit

        "Why would anyone not want a GUI?"

        For a very long time offices -at least the women who actually produced documents - ran exclusively on WordPerfect 5.1. On MS-DOS. It was a glorious chunk of software that arguably is more productive and powerful than the GUI products that replaced it.

        Thise of us who actually began computing before Windows and Apple arrived are probably better able to talk about the relative merits of command-line and windowed OSs. I'm still not convinced that a plethora of features, bells and whistles necessarily makes software better.

        * Mine's the one with a big fat copy of Acerson in the picket.

        1. Stork Silver badge

          Re: Big credit

          I did my thesis on WP5.1. I do not remember it ever crashing. Yes, I did backup to my floppies.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Big credit

          Sure. That was the "electronic typewriter" office - where the PC, still mostly not networked, replaced the typewriter and dedicated WP systems. Working on a single document at a time. Just to produce the same paper output.

          Still, those using Lotus 1-2-3 (and its ancestors) were doing things that weren't possible previously. And a GUI spreadsheet works better than a plain text one. Then came the databases also - where multiple windows over different datasets help also. Then came graphics processing...

          1. billat29

            Re: Big credit

            Yes but no. When your secretary (we had them in those days) typed up your memo on her mechanical typewriter and presented it to you for signing, you always found mistakes.Especially if you were one to select her on her decorative nature rather than her typing ability/ Some of these errors could be dealt with with correction fluid / paper but others required re-typing. And that's where even a non-networked PC could help.

            Of course the Xerox stuff was all networked.....

          2. jake Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            An aging Aunt & Uncle of mine found it faster and easier to use Netware, MS-DOS 3.3 with WordStar, dBase III+ and Lotus on an airgapped 25 year old network than it was to use the latest offerings from Redmond. I finally converted them over to a Slackware based solution about six years ago[0] ... Their final year of using the legacy system brought them a tick over 1.5 million in sales, in 2015 dollars. Not too bad for a small mom&pop family business!

            [0] It was becoming quite spendy to get parts ...

          3. jake Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            "And a GUI spreadsheet works better than a plain text one."

            For the vast majority of spreadsheets, I completely disagree. Most have absolutely no need for all the meaningless glitter and overhead of a GUI.

            1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

              Re: Big credit

              Every single time I have to open the shambling horror that is Excel I desperately miss Lotus 123. I'd say about 80% of Excel is misfeatures and design flaws.

      3. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Big credit

        We had GEM which made it into Amstrad's early PC range and Atari rom'd it on the ST but again it was basic and still needed enough CPU and graphics. Once a program needs to run AND have the GUI running, that's a lot of horsepower and without multi-threaded CPU tech it's a lot of slicing in the operations to make it usable.

        Depends on the OS. The Amiga which launched at the same time had a slower CPU than the ST and managed preemptive multitasking and a multithreaded GUI which didn't lock up when a program's event loop did. Ok, so the OS was a bit wobbly until 1.3.

        1. J. Cook Silver badge

          Re: Big credit

          The Amigas had custom silicon to handle things like the GUI. (the Denise and AGA chips specifically.)

          You also had the Angus (and fat/fatter angus) which was essentially the main memory and bus controller, and Paula, which handled the audio (4 channel 8 bit PCM, which was quite good at the time!) amongst other things.

          emulators still have problems emulating those chips even now.

          1. Dan 55 Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            But not much of those chips are necessary to make a multitasking OS. DMA for floppy disks, multiple screens for Workbench, and neither are essential.

          2. John Brown (no body) Silver badge
            Joke

            Re: Big credit

            "You also had the Angus (and fat/fatter angus) "

            Agnus got a sex change?

            1. jake Silver badge

              Re: Big credit

              More likely Mr/s Cook was thinking about supper.

    3. Dagg Silver badge

      Re: Big credit

      Doh! way, way before the mouse was the trackball invented in the UK and patented in 1947 and before the trackball was the joystick.

      1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Big credit

        Yeah, the trackball was available two decades before the mouse, and used for a similar purpose.

        The joystick dates back a couple of decades before that (Wikipedia lists the first one as 1926), but the earliest reference I could find to its use as a computing pointing device was 1967.

        I'm not impressed by the invention of the mouse, a device generally inferior to its predecessors. For one thing, it requires more desk space.

        1. AlbertCory

          Re: Big credit

          "Inferior" to you, maybe, but not to the vast numbers of ordinary users who embraced the mouse and scorned the trackball and joystick (which continue to be available).

          It's a funny thing about consumers: they make their own choices.

          I look down and realize I'm writing this on a laptop which lacks a mouse. I've gotten used to the trackpad, because it's built in, and I'm not sitting at a desk. I COULD attach a mouse, and I've done so, but the trackpad works well enough. I wouldn't want a joystick or trackball, either, at this point.

          1. jake Silver badge

            Re: Big credit

            I've been using trackpads on laptops for so long that I don't even realize I'm using one anymore. Works better than a mouse, at least I don't have to take my fingers off the keybr0ad. I honestly don't understand why people bitch about them ... at least when it comes to general purpose computing. Specialty computing requires specialty input devices.

    4. AlbertCory

      Re: Big credit

      What a silly comment. Everything is obvious in hindsight. Patent law has been wrestling with the definition of "obviousness" for 150 years.

      Let's get in our time machine, jump ahead 50 years, look at their inventions, and make fun of you for not inventing them, because they were "obvious."

    5. Forest Racer

      Re: Big credit

      Before we had mice as pointers we had the light pen. On the IBM 370-158 Model 3 I learned to operate in 1977, we could select items from menus that controlled the machine. I believe light pens could be attached to any 3270 device if you paid a lot of money. So, yes the idea of the mouse is not that revolutionary, in fact it is simply an evolution of the light pen. Going from a physical tool that you point at the screen (like the finger in your example) and click the button (actually pressing the light pen against the screen was the button press) to a logical pointer on the screen is not a great leap.

      All the hype about great "inventors" like Jobs and Gates is in my opinion wrong. They were brilliant marketers of other peoples ideas. I mean I had a smart phone long before there were iPhones but sadly it ran a crappy version of windoze and would lose its mind if the battery ever went flat.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    One problem with this article..its total bollocks..

    What is this rambling train-wreck of an article even about?

    The author seems completely unfamiliar with the history of Xerox, its catastrophic history of diversification during the 1960's and 1970's of which its stumbling into computers was just one of the smaller less expensive examples. To those of us who were there in the mid 70's to mid 80's there are so many factual errors, mostly by omission, in this piece where does one start.

    Little more than pseudo intellectual verbiage masquerading as profundity. The actual story of the why and what of what happened back then is far more interesting, far more nuanced, and often far more banal. But it sure was a hell of a lot of fun. Still have my Macintosh Development Team T Shirt from 1984...

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      You're not very familiar with the concept of "alternative history", are you ?

      1. DJV Silver badge

        Yes he is...

        ...but only on an alternative timeline.*

        (* See other timeline**)

        (** Time machine required)

      2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        In fairness, AC seems to be complaining mostly about Pesce disregarding what Xerox was doing prior to Jobs' visit to PARC. The "alternative history" stuff starts after that.

        But, yeah, complaining about accuracy in a piece that announces itself as fiction...

        Personally, I take issue with the assumptions in the piece, like the value of the WIMP paradigm and the idea that it was a major contributor to the popularization of computing. But whatevs.

        1. AlbertCory

          I first thought "AC" was me. Now I realize it's "Anonymous Coward"!

          This is a good time to mention that, throughout the 80's, Xerox DID try to get with it and adapt to the PC revolution. I wasn't there anymore by then.

          By that time, though, it didn't matter. The world had moved on.

    2. diodesign (Written by Reg staff) Silver badge

      'What is this rambling train-wreck of an article even about?'

      It's a fictional history, a what-if piece. As in, what if history went another way in the 1980s.

      C.

  6. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    The simpler alternative would have been for Xerox to realise that if they took the ideas they had in the Star, reimplemented the hardware using the new-fangled microprocessors and, by that means, brought the price down they could have owned the business market for years if not decades. Unfortunately that was never the Xerox way.

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "to ink" is not a verb

    And a quantum leap is very, very, very small.

    1. Hero Protagonist
      Joke

      Re: a quantum leap is very, very, very small

      Not to an electron

    2. Strahd Ivarius Silver badge
      Headmaster

      Re: Colin Wilson 2 - Apple have got this right!

      Some people would disagree with you, especially in the printing industry...

    3. Irony Deficient

      Re: “to ink” is not a verb

      Yes, it is — the first reference to the verb “ink” in the OED dates back to 1562. Later references include Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language and Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby.

    4. jake Silver badge

      Re: "to ink" is not a verb

      I ink lead type fairly often.

  8. MarkET

    Xerox

    I worked for Rank Xerox in the early '80s. Don't forget they also made Sigma mainframes and the first dual 8/16 bit processor CP/M based machines for the office (820-II I think).

    I remember debugging an 860 word processor for an errant interrupt handler in a smoke filled office on the Euston Road next to Capital Radio and Thames TV. They owned a hotel behind the office which provided welcome refreshments on an afternoon.

    1. Sparkus

      Re: Xerox

      I attended and taught any number of courses at the old RX White House HQ buildings and was around long enough for the move out to High Wycombe.

      Still miss that Nepalese place and the pub right across Euston Road **and** the (rabbit) Warren Bar underneath the Grafton Hotel.......

      1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
        Devil

        Re: Xerox

        Where's the misty-eyed nostalgia for High Wycombe?

        1. billat29
          Headmaster

          Re: Xerox

          Alternate histories.

          Xerox bought Scientific Data Systems who had developed the Sigma. After failing to do much with it, they sold the rights to Honeywell who continued to build them - particularly for one large bureau customer. The rump of the SDS people wound up in Printing Systems.

          High Wycombe? Marlow, Shurely.

          And if the hardware orientated, high margin, copier top management would, in this history, have been competent to buy and run Apple and Adobe, then Jobs wouldn't have been allowed to see the "Star" in the first place and the Interpress people in Xerox wouldn't have felt the need to go off and form Adobe and develop PostScript. So I call BS

          1. AlbertCory

            Re: Xerox

            Most of this is accurate. Many of the XDS people did not end up in Printing but on the Star, but you're right, a lot of them dd go to Printing. The managers on Star in El Segundo were initially XDS people, mainly.

            Jobs did NOT see the Star. As I said on Computer America (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtseluid8Ng), he came in Dec. 1979. Star was not released until May 1981. It was nowhere close to demo-able when he came.

            Jobs saw the Alto and Smalltalk.

      2. MarkET

        Re: Xerox

        Do you remember Bernie at the "Goat 'n' Boots"?

        Used to host lock-ins for the Thames TV folk.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Xerox

      The first computer that I ever typed to was a Xerox Sigma at school.

      They let us order any manuals we wanted from the bookstore, so of course we sent for all of the internals/admin manuals. Loved that privilege bit and the :SYS account.

      It was also the first graphics that I ever wrote, using APL talking to a Tektronix 4013.

      In this alternative history, Xerox would have never sold off the Sigma line to Honeywell.

    3. The Central Scrutinizer

      Re: Xerox

      I worked for Rank and then Fuji Xerox in the 80s and 90s. 9700s, 9790s and 4135s were my thing then. Fun times, especially at 3am on a Saturday when a laser shit itself.

  9. AMBxx Silver badge
    Happy

    Lots of fun!

    In my alternative history, Lotus buy Wordperfect and produce the perfect office suite. Better still, PowerPoint does not exist!

    1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
      Stop

      Re: Lots of fun!

      And everybody in the world uses Lotus Notes...

      Mwahahahahahahahaha!

      1. J. Cook Silver badge
        Devil

        Re: Lots of fun!

        [gif of a freshly ensconsed Lord Vader destroying the room and shouting NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!]

      2. jake Silver badge

        Re: Lots of fun!

        Eww!

        That's not funny, that's sick.

      3. Dagg Silver badge

        Re: Lots of fun!

        And everybody in the world uses Lotus Notes...

        The interesting thing is I now use Slack, Jira, Confluence and outlook just to get the same level of functionality that I used to get with Lotus Notes.

        3 disparate packages just to get the same sh*t I had in the 90's

  10. Howard Sway Silver badge

    Alternative histories

    Very interesting, but what about the one where Jobs employs tech titan Lord Clive Sinclair instead of Jonny Ive, and walks out onto a stage in 2010 to reveal the device that will change the way we live forever - an electric bicycle with a calculator on it.

  11. Sparkus

    I refer all of you to this book...

    re: Xerox and their failures in the face of almost-assured success....

    https://www.amazon.com/Fumbling-Future-Invented-Personal-Computer-ebook/dp/B0791LWDG3/ref=sr_1_3

    1. DJV Silver badge

      Re: I refer all of you to this book...

      Yes, absolutely! I only finished reading it a couple of weeks ago.

    2. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: I refer all of you to this book...

      Heh. Just cited that in a reply to an earlier message. I bought Fumbling not that long after it came out, and I've reread it a time or two since. I consider it one of the better entries in the genre, like Soul of a New Machine or The Cuckoo's Egg.

      (Conversely, I thought Levy's Hackers is wildly overrated and a chore to read, mostly tiresome hagiography with no significant reflection or insight. YMMV.)

  12. trevorde Silver badge

    Alternate, alternate history

    * Intel sticks to making calculators which eventually consume more power than a kettle

    * Bill Gates stays at Harvard, graduates magna cum lauda in maths and ends up writing Excel for Intel's calculators. The Intel Pentium floating point bug causes the global financial crisis of 2008. Gates is sued and goes bankrupt. He never writes software again.

    * IBM buys CP/M from Gary Kildall but cannot market it successfully. It finds a niche in ATMs (automatic teller machines).

    * GNU Hurd releases a kernel which works surprisingly well

    * everyone ignores Linux, favouring GNU Hurd (inspite of RMS's weirdness)

    * Linus Torvalds ports Linux to calculators for Intel

    * Larry Ellison releases Oracle as open source, so super yachts never become a thing. He ends up living on the streets of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs ignores him.

    * Jobs doesn't screw over Wozniak and the two still exchange Xmas cards right up until Jobs' death

    * Jobs acknowledges paternity of his daughter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs)

    OK - the last two are a bit of a stretch

    1. Sparkus

      Re: Alternate, alternate history

      Gates is found guilty of his multiple DUI offenses (it really happened) in New Mexico in 1977. To cover his lawyers, court, and prison costs, he sells MSFT 50/50 to Kildall and IBM. Gates disappears into the US prison system until he surfaces living in a trailer in Los Alamos promoting UFO conspiracy theories.......

      Paul Allen goes on to become CEO of IBM refocusing them on small distributed systems and databases.

      1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
        Happy

        Re: Alternate, alternate history

        With all the carnage in the computer industry - Alan Sugar is amazed to see his computer company taking over the world - and becomes super-rich. Copying an idea from a little known American he creates 'The Apprentice Worldwide'. He surfs this success into standing for election in all democracies - wins - creates a single world government and finds the alien stardrive in Area 51. Makes cheap knock-off copies of same, and goes on to create the United Federation of Planets.

        Starfleet standing orders now demand that all Federation Starship Captains must declare, "You're fired!" immediately after desroying alien planets. This to be carried out on their ships ten year missions to discover new life, and new civilisations in order to sell them hi-fi equipment.

        [perhaps you shouldn't have had those mushrooms for lunch - Ed]

    2. FozzyBear
      Alien

      Re: Alternate, alternate history

      And Macfee the stone cold sober vegan eating Anti virus mogul enters politics and becomes president

    3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Alternate, alternate history

      In this world, are HP calculators driven out of the market by these Intel calculators? That doesn't bear thinking about.

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    NeXT was never going to be a success with Jobs in charge. Things like the insistence on cases being perfect cubes, which means it's incredibly difficult to get them out of the moulds - the factory was littered with broken cases. The machines also required things like disk capacities that weren't achievable in any economic way. The OS concept was great, and kudos to Jobs for recruiting the people who envisaged that and giving them free rein to implement it, but the cost was utterly prohibitive. Even the later "slab" machines were eye wateringly expensive, not helped by Jobs insisting on only selling them as a "complete package" with things like a high end laser printer.

  14. DJV Silver badge

    My go at this fantasy...

    Commodore buy the Amiga and DON'T fuck it (and the marketing) up...

    1. Dan 55 Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: My go at this fantasy...

      And management don't stamp on every new idea the engineers have, or take two years to launch it, or waste time on hugely expensive money pits like the CDTV.

  15. DS999 Silver badge

    If Xerox had never sold their Apple stock

    I wonder how many billions it would be worth now? Funny how that one transaction would have resulted in more profit than all their years of operating as a business!

    1. druck Silver badge
      Unhappy

      Re: If Xerox had never sold their Apple stock

      They would end up being shutdown to liberate the shares. The same thing happened to Acorn, who created ARM and retained a large share holding, which became worth more than the parent company. They ended up being taken over by a consortium of banks, various divisions were sold off for nominal sums, and company closed down so the shares could be sold without incurring as much tax.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Xerox Alto

    There's a YouTube channel called "Curious Marc" where they actually demonstrate the Xerox Alto. Although it has a mouse and other bits, it's a lot more crude than people would have you believe. I can easily believe that a lot of people saw it and thought nothing of the GUI...

    1. billat29

      Re: Xerox Alto

      it's very crude... but about 10 years ahead of everything else that was around at the time.

      1. AlbertCory

        Re: Xerox Alto

        There's a guy in Seattle (I'll leave his name out of this) who resurrects old hardware, including two Altos. I photographed a guy playing MazeWar (the real game) on the real hardware, in November 2020. A stylized version of that photo is on the cover of my book, "Inventing the Future."

  17. Snowy Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Why jobs...

    Yes Jobs sold things very well but without Steve Woznick he would have had nothing to sell.

    1. druck Silver badge

      Re: Why jobs...

      He would have found something to sell, even if it was iPhone cases at the mall.

  18. Brian Miller

    Ethernet on 6502? Apple and Xerox?

    Ah, I don't think so. Really, I don't think so. I doubt the author spent "quality" time with a 1MHz 6502 processor, even if it was at the whopping max of 64K. The network card would have to be a whole 'nother computer, and probably more expensive than the Apple II. This was the heady days of audio tape for files, and 5-1/4" floppy drives that whirred and clicked. For through-hole circuits, the network card would be sitting in its own case.

    Yeah, I remember my first 300-baud modem. And when I was in high school we used a real Teletype with acoustic couplers.

    No, the alternate reality that should have happened was when Apple did team up with DEC. For us, nobody in those companies thought anything of that alliance. But if both companies had the right management, it would have worked.

    1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

      Re: Ethernet on 6502? Apple and Xerox?

      AppleNet ran on the Apple ][ (for most of 1983, until it was canceled in October).

      The 6502-based Commodore PET and CBM could be networked using their IEEE-488 interface, and supported simple storage and printer sharing.

      Apparently the Atari 800 (also 6502-based) could be networked using Atari Communicator and later the third-party Corvus system.

      TRS-80s could be networked; I used a TRS-80 Model 3 network in school. The '80 was a Z80-based system, not 6502-based, but they're both 8-bitters.

      DIX or 802.3 Ethernet would have required add-on hardware, true, and supporting CSMA/CD at 10mb/s with the hardware available at the time wouldn't have been cheap. But there were SCSI-to-Ethernet adapters for the Mac not that many years later, and there the adapter, not the host CPU, handled the networking chores.

      1. Dan 55 Silver badge

        Re: Ethernet on 6502? Apple and Xerox?

        Adding:

        The ZX Interface 1, which was only there because the on-board ROM lacked the space for the bit-banging code and the port was missing on the Spectrum.

        Acorn's Econet, which was cheap (just cables between BBC computers) and in its latest version could also run TCP/IP.

        1. jake Silver badge

          Re: Ethernet on 6502? Apple and Xerox?

          "Acorn's Econet, which was cheap (just cables between BBC computers) and in its latest version could also run TCP/IP."

          Not surprising. TCP/IP is (supposed to be) implemented totally in software, and shouldn't care what the wire is.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ethernet on 6502? Apple and Xerox?

      There are entire projects implementing TCP/IP stacks on C64s and other fun stuff. The MTU is only 1.5kb and even a 1Mhz computer can process a 10Mbps Ethernet feed with a small amount of buffering hardware...

      In practice a 6502 would have been pretty powerful processor in the very early days of the Internet.

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