In computer news this week, 01/23/2002

Hypocrisy; thy name is the PC industry. AOL sues Microsoft.

The pc industry was based on hypocrisy from the beginning. One of the technical innovations which launched the industry was the development of the BASIC programming language by Dartmouth university in the 1960's, which was then released into the public domain.

History of BASIC: http://www.digitalcentury.com/encyclo/update/BASIC.html

Bill Gates and Paul Allen, took this free public domain language and modified it to run on the world's first microcomputer - the Altair, which was released in kit form in 1975. Supposedly they used government computers to do this modification - the computers at the colleges they attended, Harvard and Washington State University. Their version of BASIC worked on the Altair, making it usable, and they immediately became kings of the new pc industry together, forming the company originally known as Micro Soft.

No, they didn't invent the BASIC language, and they supposedly used government funded computers to create it with. Hypocrisy?

Many things in the PC industry followed this pattern. The XEROX Corporation had a Palo Alto Research Center - which invented many of the key technologies of the pc industry. This included the concept of laser printing, fonts, pc networking, and most of all a graphical user interface and the mouse. Apple made a stock deal with Xerox to let the two Apple Steves - Jobs & Wozniak - visit this laboratory, and they were amazed by 2 things. 1 - what they saw. 2 - that they knew Xerox didn't have a clue what to do with it all. Supposedly within a year Apple had hired most of the scientists away from the Xerox PARC, and surprise - within a couple of years Apple introduced the Lisa computer - a graphical user interface mouse-based pc. Hypocrisy?

When the internet began to blossom in the early 90's, the first popular graphical web browser was developed by students at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications, and was named Mosaic. One of these students - Marc Andreesen - left college and founded Netscape in 1993 , and the Mosaic browser developed at the NCSA was rewritten and became Netscape Navigator. Hypocrisy?

Mosiac http://hyperserver.engrg.uwo.ca/es250b/Lectures/Internet/tsld011.htm

Netscape quickly became the #1 web browser software, and you had to buy it. But then Microsoft noticed that the Internet was happening, and developed their own web browser, Internet Explorer, which they bundled into their operating system and gave away supposedly free- you just had to buy a computer along with it. Hypocrisy?

AOL, which is referred to as the Cockroach of the PC industry, for many years has used a modified version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer as the AOL browser. The unknowing 33 million AOL users think it's an AOL browser, but it's actually Microsofts. This was a joint marketing agreement between the two companies. Hypocrisy?

But as AOL has taken over Time Warner and a lot of the corporate world and become a fabulously rich corporation - supposedly - they ended up buying Netscape, which had fallen on very hard times, and was being bundled in software suites such as Corel office.

So AOL is now suing Microsoft to stop bundling Internet Explorer in Windows, so that AOL can sell you their Netscape browser.

Hypocrisy; thy name is the PC industry.

For Raw Bytes, This is Frank Delaney

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