24fps....

[Oliver Xymoron]

On Tue, 29 Aug 1995, Aaron Yeater wrote:

> > There's an interesting historical argument (aired recently in the NY Review 
> > of Books) that IBM let Gates have the market for operating systems for 
> > personal computers because they could not conceive of selling more than a 
> > couple of thousand PCs a year until around the middle of the 21st Century, 
> > (and these would be merely standalone toys for boys).
> 
> interestingly, after the initial pc boom, sales dimmed, giving 
> credence to IBMs sense that this was going nowhere.  then two things 
> happened.  one was the Mac interface, whose "wysiwyg" design 
> philosophy can arguably be said to have popularized computer 
> interface; the other was the network; not the internet, necessarily, 
> but more the interoffice network, which makes many discrete machines 
> behave as if one machine, certainly part of one system.  draw your 
> own conclusions...

Interesting analysis, but it doesn't work for me. As someone who had a PC 
very early on (my first PC came with DOS 1.1, but all my software didn't 
use DOS), I wouldn't describe initial PC sales as booming. The PC picked 
up steam with the advent of clones and the accompanying price/performance 
war. Mac's impact on the PC market can be measured by sales of early  
PC-based GUIs, such as Digital Research's GEM and Windows 1.0, namely 
zilch. Although the term user-friendly had been floating around since the 
mid seventies and was generally considered a good thing, it didn't really 
hit critical mass until the 90's, when the Mac II made the Apple platform 
somewhat viable again and Windows 3.0 came out. 

As for the person who said hardly anybody listening to the heirs of 24fps,
the underground media of today, all I can say is you must not be tuned in.
The number of activists who've discovered the net is amazing.  A
locally-oriented animal rights group has a web page here on WASTE, and
they've had literally thousands of visitors, not to mention a great deal of
email.

As for the cult mystique of Big Brother's mainframes and supercomputers, PC
technology has probably brought an end to this. Big iron machines are still
cool of course, the Convex C120 vector supercomputer in my dining room gets
many oohs and aahs, but even geeks are more likely to bow down and worship
the speakers in the living room.



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