This popped up in one of my tech feeds and is a cool (but time buster) animation of various operating systems since before DOS to today showing their respective trajectories of adoption over time.
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Thanks for sharing this. Fascinating presentation, and a great reminder why Gates and Ballmer were happy staying focused on PCs.
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Somebody really put some work into it - fascinating to see the relative adoption of the different OS’ over time, especially how long DOS and Windows XP stayed on top once they took the lead…
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I question the accuracy. I seriously doubt that CP/M and its successors were completely gone by 1985 when the timeline starts. And Windows ME never shows up!
Nitpicking aside, it’s a fascinating and nostalgic overview of the history of personal computers. So many “what if” moments. Like what if Digital Research hadn’t had the negotiations go sour the day IBM came to license CP/M? What if Osborne hadn’t blabbed about the Osborne 2’s upcoming release, killing all sales for the first one, killing the company, and getting a historical footnote for the “Osborne Effect”?
And so on. Fascinating times to live through for a tech geek.
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I think CP/M did die off in the mid-80’s. In 1980 or 81 our law firm bought a CPT 8000, a CP/M based word processor:
It cost nearly $20000 with two 8" floppies, daisywheel printer and printer hood (made the 50 cal machine gun sound of the daisywheel more like an automatic pistol).
For the record, that would be $71,088 today!
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Yes entertaining if a bit thin especially in the area of IBM deciding NOT to actively go after companies like Compaq for infringement which ultimate gave birth to the whole clone market which ultimately led IBM to exit the market, while OTOH benefiting MS immeasurably .
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Wonder what it would look like if iOS and Android was included?