ZDNet commentator wonders if Wintel has finally caught up to Macintosh after 20 years

“Twenty years ago this week, during the year of Big Brother, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak introduced the Apple Macintosh. Although the seminal advert (which you can view on Apple’s Website here) sticks in everyone’s minds, it’s easy to forget just how revolutionary that little beige, boxy, Mac was,” Matt Loney writes for ZDNet UK.

“At the time, Windows version 1 was still a year away, and overlapping windows and icons on the PC would not appear for another three years, in the form of Windows 2–later to be renamed Windows 286. And of course all those early versions of Windows ran on top of the DOS command-line operating system,”Loney writes.

“It was not just the graphical user interface that set the Apple Mac apart from the competition: it was the whole ease-of-use thing. While PC owners were getting tied up with conflicting IRQs and DMAs every time they tried to plug or unplug something, on the Mac everything just, well, worked. That PCs did not work was not necessarily Microsoft’s fault, and nor was it necessarily IBM’s fault. It was simply a symptom of multiple companies, industry groups and interests haggling over every layer of the PC’s architecture, from the system bus to the operating system,” Loney writes.

“Apple never had that to cope with. By refusing to let its products become a commodity, Apple ensured they would become an icon of cohesive design, produced by a company that controlled almost every aspect of the operating system and the hardware, and so could ensure that the two worked together in relative harmony,” Loney writes. “…Twenty years on then, it looks as though the PC has finally grown up: the Mac was simply born mature.”

Full article here.