who started first. apple or msft?

I think I might be one of those kids. I just got into computers at a very young age.

 

Theres talk of Windows 9 to be here sometime in september.. didnt catch a date

 

I believe Xbox has been a very successful product for them.

But if we're really going to call a spade a spade, apple doesn't really 'invent' all that much either. Rather, apple's strength has really become to let other companies invent new product lines, look at what they're doing wrong and figure out how to do it right. For instance, apple didn't invent the mp3 player, there were lots of products in that market before the ipod existed. But none of them worked like the ipod did. Apple was the first to do mp3 players the way they needed to be done. Same with smart phones, lots of them existed before the iphone saw the light of day, but none of them at that time got it right. Apple's strong suit isn't doing things first, its doing things right and then acting as though they did it first. And those who choose to drink the cool aid just lap it up and buy the 'we did it first' crap hook line and sinker.

 

It is their WORST selling OS. Even Vista sold better. Windows 7 is still the hands down winner. People are buying 8.1 Pro and using the license to downgrade to 7 Pro. Windows 8 cost Steve Ballmer his job. Even Microsoft agrees it's crap; they will be releasing Windows 9 next spring. The running joke is that Windows versions are like the old Star Trek movies; every other one is crap. Windows 8 is a solution in search of a problem.

Unless you mean "their best selling OS" due to the fact that it's the only OS they are currently selling.

 

Oh, printers were nothing. Everything ran in either Epson mode (dot matrix) or HP-PCL (laser) mode. A few high end lasers ran Postscript. As for rodents, they plugged into the serial port. Later, they had their own dedicated connection (PS/2, originally from IBM). Some early mice used their own controller card (often on the graphics card), but they faded away quickly.

The problem was when you got a new graphics card. There were no "drivers" to be found; if your program didn't support your specific card, then you were stuck using an IBM-PC mode; usually VGA at 640x480x256. ATI, which at that time was its own company in Canada, was pretty well supported. If you wanted to play one of the few games that used texture mapping, you installed a 3dfx card. Audio was one of the Soundblaster modes, or the Roland MT-32 if you could afford it.

That all changed when Microsoft dropped its DOS-based Windows, and forced everyone onto its NT-kernel-based Windows XP. My ears are still ringing from the screams of protest... Under the NT model, the device manufacturer provides a driver to the OS, and any program written for that OS will use the device. So now, all we need to do is install one file for any new device, and we're good.

Apple is in the parade using a few well-trained dogs that they've raised from birth. Microsoft is trying to herd a bunch of stray cats that they've managed to pick up along the way... and are doing an amazingly good job at it.

 

Apple was a marketing company that specialized in its own house brand. Jobs was a great marketer with a good sense of style. He positioned Apple products as premium products and charged a premium price, even though electrically they weren't really any better than what other companies were producing.

 

People were screaming in protest from the switch to NT based? I might have already been using windows 2k workstation as an OS at that point. (I was a kid I didn't care piracy laws at that time.)

I had the worst luck with controller cards on my 486. I think I went though 3 of them in 2 months. Then again one was used.

 

Could not agree more. Apple does a lot of things well. But they don't anything as well as they do marketing.

 

Microsofts start date: April 4, 1975

Founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak created Apple Computer on April 1, 1976,[SUP][1][/SUP] and incorporated the company on January 3, 1977,

So the answer is Microsoft, Bill Gates was a programer at IBM and wrote the orginal verision of DOS before ms-dos.