Bill Gates being interviewed with the release of Windows 95

[SpyderTracks]

This is quite interesting to watch, remember, 95 was really Microsofts first hit OS, before then it was primarily a work based machine as Apple really dominated until Windows 3.0 was released. But Windows 1.0 was the initial graphical user interface on Windows in around 1985, previous to that it was purely command line in DOS (which they bought from some small company and licensed to IBM, they didn't make it at all).

Bill Gates stole the initial windows graphical user interface off Apple in '85 when Jobs was sacked from the board and then many years later in 1997 when Steve Jobs new company NeXT was bought out by Apple and he was brought back into the Apple board, as some kind of gesture towards repairing the past, Microsoft actually became a major shareholder ($150 Million for 18.1 Million shares) in Apple which was paramount to Jobs managing to bring it out of what would have been unavoidable bankruptcy.

As part of that deal, Apple agreed that Microsoft could license Office on the Mac.

Microsoft actually sold those shares back in 2003 which netted them $550 Million. Had they held onto them, they would be worth around $130 Billion today

 

[SpyderTracks]

But if you go through the history, Apple and Microsoft are 2 very different companies with hugely different attitudes.

Apple was Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and a couple of other guys building PC's in their parents garage in high school, and then creating improvements from then. They fully developed the Lisa graphical OS (which was the first mainstream graphical interface, but the cost associated and the strictness of Steve Jobs attitude on that project is what got him kicked out of the board.

Microsoft was Bill Gates and Steve Bulmer and a couple of others, they bought DOS off a guy called Gary Kildall (it was actually called CPM Control Program for Microcomputers) and that very same day licensed it to IBM. They never gave Gary any recognition or reasonable royalties for his intellectual property.

They then stole Windows 1.0 GUI from Apple.

The first version of Microsoft Word which was called Word Multitool was built by Xerox developers that Microsoft stole away from Xerox.

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Don't get me wrong, both Gates and Jobs were savages when it came to getting their own way, they would walk over anyone if it got them ahead.

But Apple were the true innovators of the Home PC environment.

Microsoft essentially stole their way into profitability.

 

[SpyderTracks]

There's a really interesting early interview with Steve Jobs here in 1981 at 25 just as he was taking Apple public

The interview doesn't start until 1:34

 

[Scott]

I was always under the impression that it was Excel that kicked everything off for M$. Don't get me wrong, I was also under the impression that it was effectively stolen/bought out for a pittance, but that it was that piece of software that really put them on the map.

 

[Scott]

Somethings also just popped in my head. Was the Amiga not there or there about with a GUI as well? For me it was the Spectrum that kicked off the home PC then Amstrad/Amiga.

In my head home PCs definitely weren't big until after Win95. Most of them were work related. I don't think it was down to the OS though, I think it was down to the Voodoo II, 3DFx and the ability to game on the things properly that really kicked things off

 

[SpyderTracks]

I was always under the impression that it was Excel that kicked everything off for M$. Don't get me wrong, I was also under the impression that it was effectively stolen/bought out for a pittance, but that it was that piece of software that really put them on the map.

Ironically Excel was actually first released on MacOS in 1985 and wasn't available on windows until it hit version 2.2 on the Mac later in 1997. Word was first released in '83

Somethings also just popped in my head. Was the Amiga not there or there about with a GUI as well? For me it was the Spectrum that kicked off the home PC then Amstrad/Amiga.

Yeah, this is totally true, I'm purely going by Apple vs Microsoft, but the Amiga / Amstrad units were arguably more at the forefront at the time. The Amiga was 1985 when it came out with it's GUI based OS, whereas the Apple Lisa was 1983, but the Lisa was so niche due to it's price, that it certainly wasn't as mainstream as the Amiga.

The Lisa was $10,000 on release, which is roughly $31,000 today! Whereas the Amiga was $700 for the base model or $2400 for the huge 1Mb RAM model which included the monitor.

Those guys didn't see it through really past the 90's, but I do wonder how much of their IP was actually bought out by Microsoft / Apple to integrate into their own ecosystem.

A lot of the major advancements were purely made on one of the bigger companies buying out a smaller one and getting control of their IP's. A lot of these companies success was purely down to which companies they could afford to absorb rather than coming up with anything themselves.