Tech support week one notes.

Course outline is available here.

Note: Please do take the time to follow the links contained on this page. Linked-to pages contain material that may be the subject of a quiz or test.

History

The history of microcomputers, and the people who created the personal computer industry, can be broken down into three basic types:

• Artist / Mystic (e.g. Steve Jobs)
• Businessman (e.g. Bill Gates)
• Geek / Hacker (e.g. Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds)

As we will see during the upcoming weeks, these four people have shaped our professional lives by choosing the path taken by the personal computer industry.

They also continue to mould the experience of computer users worldwide by having very different points of view and radically different perspectives on how to do business, why to do business, and what computers are for in the most basic way.

IBM as Big Brother

See: 1984 (13.1Mb, Requires QuickTime)

Altair The Altair computer kit was the spark that started the personal computer industry. Built by Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) it was featured in Popular Electronics magazine, and inspried Bill Gates and Paul Allen to leave Harvard University and travel to New Mexico where they founded Microsoft on the basis of selling their Altair Basic language as the Altair's operating system.

See: Altair entry on the Wikipedia

Apple Computer

See: The Founding of Apple entry on the Wikipedia

Xerox: Palo Alto Research Center

Most famously, the graphic user interface was fully operational at PARC while it was still under development at Apple. Steve Jobs and his team actually visited the PARC and saw what a finished GUI would look like before it was implemented in the Apple LISA.

See: The Xerox PARC entry on the Wikipedia

Unix, the network operating system

Before the large scale deployment of networked computers, the telephone companies were the owners of the largest networks of the time and required technology to be able to effectively control their networks from central operations stations. Therefore Unix's capabilities were well ahead of its time in many respects and in that sense was about thirty years ahead of the GUI operatings systems such as Windows and the Mac OS.

In this sense both Microsoft and Apple have had to play a great game of catch up to deal with a world that changed very quickly, after the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee and his team at CERN, from a workstation-using environment where computers were standalone machines very much like typewriters were, to a networked environment where all computers are essentially interconnected.

From a user's point of view, the quick disintegration of the "workstation" model of computer has caused many operating system-related problems that have become commonplace.

Since Windows was developed to be the answer to Apple's Mac OS, (whereas DOS was licensed to IBM in order to take away the personal computer marketshare stranglehold that the Apple II had) Windows was not developed with a strong built-in security and permissions system similar to the multiuser environment found in Unix.

It was, and at certain parts of its core still continues to be, a workstation operating system. This implies that the software still contains holes and programming issues that can be taken advantage of by hackers and crackers. So, Microsoft contnues to post patch after patch of security updates, service packs and bug fixes all the while promising that the next version of Windows (Vista; aka "Longhorn")will deliver enhanced security and reliability.

Apple, on the other hand, proceeded with a much more drastic approach to solve the issue of workstation vs network at the same as time as they fully updated their OS to rival with the features found in Unix and Windows NT. (Windows NT was already an incredibly different creature from Windows 3.1, 95 or 98.)

Apple, who had fired Steve Jobs after a power struggle with former Pepsico executive John Scully in 1985, rehired Jobs and acquired his NeXT software company in 1996. If for nothing else, NeXT will be remembered for its innovation of object-oriented programming as well as the machine upon which the World Wide Web was developed.

The acquisition of NeXT let Apple have access to the NeXTStep / OpenSTEP operating system which it used as the basis of Mac OSX along with substantial parts of BSD Unix. The merging of these proven technologies with Apple's trademark ease of use resulted in a network operating system combining the best of all computer systems: Microsoft's standard Office suite, Adobe's and Macromedia's design applications, Unix's security, commandline interface and networking capabilities and Linux's open source. Upon its release, Apple's new OS was hailed as the first "Unix for the masses". And it still is.

Linux, the free alternative

• Either disagreed with the imposition of the limiting features of a graphic user interface (as opposed to the sheer power of the commandline interface), without an alternative. (DOS does not compare to the power of the BASH shell for example.)
• Considered commercial software buggy or inferior
• Hated the creeping featurism(Microsoft is often criticized for this)
• Or fundamentally disagreed with the concept that software could be commercialized as a commodity.

See: Torvald's original newgroup post.

Richard Stallman started the GNU Project which when combined with the kernel developed originally by Linus Torvalds and the open source developers of the Linux community became what is often referred to as the "Linux operating system" although the more appropriate term would be "GNU/Linux" since most of the software used in "Linux" actually comes from the GNU project.

Open vs Closed Platforms

One of the issues that comes up when comparing platforms such as the Apple Macintosh vs Microsoft Windows, is the concept of open or closed platforms.

The Apple business model is that of the closed platform. In other words, there is one company, one set of engineers who define what a Mac is and how it works, and therefore no communication problems with other companies. The specifications come from Apple and stay at Apple. They get any suppliers to build components to Apple's specifications and there are no compatibility issues to worry about.

The Microsoft business model is that of the open platform. An open platform means that any person or comapny who is willing to pay the appropriate license fee can become a developer of products for the platform.

The advantages of an open platform are lower initial investment cost due to the greater amount of supply - since so many companies can make compatible hardware or software products. Remember that Microsoft is still making money when they license their operating system to companies like Dell, Sony, HP and all the others.

The disadvantage of the open platform is the sheer number of products and technologies and the possibility of incompatibilities when installed in almost unpredictable combinations. Imagine for example, a motherboard manufactured by Asus, a CPU from Intel, a graphics card from Matrox, RAM from Kingston, a USB card from Keyspan, a keyboard from Microsoft and a mouse from Logitech. All of the drivers for these products must be compatible with the version of Windows they are running on. They also must not conflict with each other. This is obviously a harder task than just getting all the same items from one company.

Please remember to bring in your $20 lab fee for next week.

Also, please try to rent the Pirates of Silicon Valley movie. It is a hard movie to find, and I have not been able to obtain a copy for PDHT yet. I know the Blockbuster Video store on St-Charles has a copy. It is recommended to call ahead and reserve it if possible. See the Wikipedia article about the movie here.