From the contemp arch point of view, there are some interesting things
about Apple. e.g. that in the days of the Home Brew computing club, Jobs
and Wozniak set themselves up as the opponents of corporate power, in
the shape of Big Blue, and yet in the end their company has become just
as bad and monopolistic as IBM were in the 70s-80s. At the same time
their policy has illustrated an interesting principle in the diffusion
of technologies - i.e. that by keeping all their hardware proprietory,
they handicapped themselves, whereas the PC, which IBM allowed to be
gemeric, now occupies c.a. 90% of the computer market. The same thing
happened with the internet - if the inventors of Gopher hadn't charged
for licencing, we might all now be gophering rather than surfing the
web, whereas Berners-Lee got the agreement of CERN early on that HTML
etc, would be free.
P G-B
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