In 1988, I was wandering the floor of Comdex, the computer industry’s enormous annual trade show and could feel a palpable sense of anxiety among the throngs of participants. Since the birth of the IBM PC six years earlier, Microsoft’s DOS operating system had been the de facto standard of the industry, and the stability it had provided had led to explosive growth for the entire industry. But by 1988, DOS was beginning to show its age, and the big buzz on the floor of the show was “Are Microsoft’s days numbered?”
Apple, then at the peak of its powers, had one of the largest, fanciest booths at the conference. Its dazzling graphical operating system made DOS look like an antique. Aggressive Sun Microsystems had teamed up with AT&T and Xerox to combat Microsoft with a graphical version of Unix called OpenLook. Across the hall, another powerful group of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Digital Equipment Corporation, Apollo, and Siemens Nixdorf had combined forces in a consortium called the Open Systems Foundation, which was pushing its version of Unix, also with a slick graphical user interface. Meanwhile, IBM was determined not to let Microsoft advance on it again. The highlight of its booth was OS/2, a product in which it had invested heavily, and which it claimed combined DOS... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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