The following is a follow up on a previous post from well over a year ago.
It's easy to sit in front of our multiple processor, multiple gigabyte of RAM equipped lightweight laptops surfing the web wirelessly at Starbuck's while sipping our latte's, chuckling at boasts of "128K RAM!" and exciting, new and radical concepts like "drop down menus", "icons" and using a "mouse", but try to set that aside for the moment. I think this marketing video does a great job of capturing something intangible, visionary and historic about the people who helped pioneer the personal computing revolution. There's even a cameo of sorts at the 6' 26" mark from another brilliant but then anonymous technologist who saw the future back at the Renaissance of the early 80's: Bill Gates, who licensed software to be sold with one of the only successful personal computer manufacturers at the time -- Apple Computer. Shortly after the success of the first Mac other manufacturers came on the scene to stake their claim of the exploding PC market, Gates was there to license and sell his "Windows" operating system which looked and felt very (some would say "very, VERY") similar to the Macintosh operating system that had the ability to run on these new IBM, Fujutsu and Sharp machines. It was that point and click look and feel that allowed the average Joe to use a computer, and what changed our world forever.
So there I was: a long haired kid BMX'ing around my midwestern hometown, listening to Ozzy Ozbourne and ditching classes at Jefferson Junior High in the early 80's - and unbeknown to me (and most of the world at the time) the Mac team was boldly swimming upstream against some very powerful currents: imposing Big Blue business machines and their ilk designed for Big Corporations and the Big Brother of government -- anyone but the individual -- since after all, hardly anyone would want a computer in their home or on their desk at work. The Mac team (inspired by the Xerox team at PARC a few years before) knew...JUST KNEW that small, nimble desktop machines could enrich our lives with art, music, writing, even games - not number crunching millions of complex scientific equations and plotting wartime ICBM scenarios to win the Cold War.
It came down to this:
Vs this:
...and the vast dichotomy proved revolutionary. The People had spoken. I don't think anyone can disagree that those interviewed on this video and on the Xerox team were true visionaries that made a big dent in the universe.