[Imal]

I'll take a not-so-wild guess that the top finalists also have ponytails, too. May as well flesh out the stereotype.

A palpable irony of the Marxist Mac culture is that the Mac remains a minor contender due to its strict proprietary nature, jealously guarded with phalanxes of attorneys, while the PC became popular because IBM released its design to the masses for free.

[SunkenCiv]

Speaking of losing grip on reality -- the Mac remains a minor contender due to its strict proprietary nature, jealously guarded with phalanxes of attorneys, while the PC became popular because IBM released its design to the masses for free. Rubbish. IBM lost control of the OS after a long fight over the control of its proprietary hardware design. Bill Gates -- who has never innovated or invented anything -- made sure "his" OS (began as a rip-off of CP/M) was available on lots of "compatibles" and IBM could do nothing about it.

[Prodigal Son]

I'll take a not-so-wild guess that the top finalists also have ponytails, too. May as well flesh out the stereotype.

Aye, you'd be right. I saw an MPEG today of the number two contestant on Scarborough Country and it blew my mind. Old, long hair and a weird hat.

[Swordmaker]

PC became popular because IBM released its design to the masses for free.

That's funny. IBM fought tooth and nail to prevent the reverse engineering of the BIOS that was the heart of the PC. They lost. There was nothing "free" about it.

The originators of the PC in IBM were FIRED because they broke the primary at IBM: everything MUST be invented here. The Boca Raton group (The typewriter group) used off the shelf hardware and bought a 3rd party OS to install in their PC... and those were cardinal sins at IBM.

It was these "sins" that made the PC easy to clone... and courts ruled that if someone reverse engineered the BIOS, that was OK, so long as the code was not identical.

Apple did not make these mistakes. And mistakes they were... where is IBM's ranking among PC makers today?

[antiRepublicrat]

while the PC became popular because IBM released its design to the masses for free

Not quite. We have Bill Gates to thank for just licensing MS-DOS to IBM instead of selling it, allowing him to later license it to other manufacturers that would come. Second we thank Compaq, which reverse-engineered IBM's BIOS which was of a "strict proprietary nature," and clean-room wrote its own to avoid IBM's "phalanxes of attorneys," thus beginning the clone revolution.