Cortex Matures Faster In Youth With Highest IQ

Cortex Matures Faster In Youth With Highest IQ

Youth with superior IQ are distinguished by how fast the thinking part of their brains thickens and thins as they grow up, researchers at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans showed that their brain's outer mantle, or cortex, thickens more rapidly during childhood, reaching its peak later than in their peers — perhaps reflecting a longer developmental window for high-level thinking circuitry. It also thins faster during the late teens, likely due to the withering of unused neural connections as the brain streamlines its operations. Drs. Philip Shaw, Judith Rapoport, Jay Giedd and colleagues at NIMH and McGill University report on their findings in the March 30, 2006 issue of Nature.

The developmental trajectory of waxing and waning in cortex thickness differs as the brain matures in different IQ groups. Thickness of the area at the top/front/center, highlighted in MRI brain maps at left, peaks relatively late, at age 12 (blue arrow), in youth with superior intelligence, perhaps reflecting an extended critical period for development of high-level cognitive circuits. (Source: NIMH Child Psychiatry Branch)

"Studies of brains have taught us that people with higher IQs do not have larger brains. Thanks to brain imaging technology, we can now see that the difference may be in the way the brain develops," said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D.

While most previous MRI studies of brain development compared data from different children at different ages, the NIMH study sought to control for individual variation in brain structure by following the same 307 children and teens, ages 5-19, as they grew up. Most were scanned two or more times, at two-year intervals. The resulting scans were divided into three equal groups and analyzed based on IQ test scores: superior (121-145), high (109-120), and average (83-108).

The researchers found that the relationship between cortex thickness and IQ varied with age, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, seat of abstract reasoning, planning, and other "executive" functions. The smartest 7-year-olds tended to start out with a relatively thinner cortex that thickened rapidly, peaking by age 11 or 12 before thinning. In their peers with average IQ, an initially thicker cortex peaked by age 8, with gradual thinning thereafter. Those in the high range showed an intermediate trajectory (see below). While the cortex was thinning in all groups by the teen years, the superior group showed the highest rates of change.

"Brainy children are not cleverer solely by virtue of having more or less gray matter at any one age," explained Rapoport. "Rather, IQ is related to the dynamics of cortex maturation."

The observed differences are consistent with findings from functional magnetic resonance imaging, showing that levels of activation in prefrontal areas correlates with IQ, note the researchers. They suggest that the prolonged thickening of prefrontal cortex in children with superior IQs might reflect an "extended critical period for development of high-level cognitive circuits." Although it's not known for certain what underlies the thinning phase, evidence suggests it likely reflects "use-it-or-lose-it" pruning of brain cells, neurons, and their connections as the brain matures and becomes more efficient during the teen years.

"People with very agile minds tend to have a very agile cortex," said Shaw. The NIMH researchers are following-up with a search for gene variants that might be linked to the newly discovered trajectories. However, Shaw notes mounting evidence suggesting that the effects of genes often depends on interactions with environmental events, so the determinants of intelligence will likely prove to be a very complex mix of nature and nurture.

Also participating in the study were Drs. Dede Greenstein, Liv Clasen, Rhoshel Lenroot, and Nitin Gogtay, Child Psychiatry Branch, NIMH; and Drs. Jason Lerch and Alan Evans, Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University.

ASEAN "Association of Southeast Asian Nations"

ASEAN

Logo ASEAN

ASEAN, merupakan singkatan bagi "Association of Southeast Asian Nations" atau Persatuan Negara-Negara Asia Tenggara. ASEAN ditubuhkan pada 8 Ogos 1967 di Bangkok dengan tujuan untuk mengukuhkan kerjasama serantau. Negara anggota mengadakan mesyuarat pada setiap November.

Prinsip Utama ASEAN
Prinsip prinsip utama ASEAN digariskan seperti berikut:

* Hormat terhadap kemerdekaan, ketuanan, kesamaan, integriti jajahan dan identiti nasional semua negara
* Hak untuk setiap negara untuk memimpin kehadiran nasional bebas daripada campur tangan luar, subversif atau koersion (coerion)
* Penyelesaian perbezaan atau perdebatan dengan aman
* Menolak penggunaan ketenteraan
* Kerjasama effektif antara anggota

Ahli ASEAN
Kini ASEAN dianggotai oleh hampir semua negara di Asia tenggara kecuali Timor Timur dan Papua New Guinea. Negara negara anggota adalah seperti berikut:

* Brunei Darussalam
* Filipina
* Indonesia
* Kemboja
* Laos
* Malaysia
* Myanmar
* Singapura
* Thailand
* Vietnam

Sejarah
Untuk rencana lanjutan, lihat Sejarah ASEAN
ASEAN ditubuhkan oleh lima negara pengasas; Indonesia, Malaysia, Filipina, Singapura dan Thailand di Bangkok semasa proses penandatanganan satu perjanjian yang dikenali sebagai Deklarasi Bangkok. Menteri luar ketika itu ialah Adam Malik (Indonesia), Narciso R. Ramos (Filipina), Tun Abdul Razak (Malaysia), S. Rajaratnam (Singapura), dan Thanat Khoman (Thailand).

Brunei menganggotai ASEAN pada 8 Januari 1984 iaitu seminggu selepas mencapai kemerdekan. Hanya selepas 11 tahun kemudiannya ASEAN menerima ahli baru. Vietnam menjadi anggota yang ketujuh pada 28 Julai 1995, Laos dan Myanmar menjadi ahli dua tahun kemudianya, iaitu pada 23 Julai 1997. Walaupun Kemboja sudah menyertai ASEAN bersama sama Myanmar dan Laos, Kemboja terpaksa menarik diri disebabkan masalah politik dalam negara tersebut. Namun, dua tahun kemudiannya Kemboja menyertai semula ASEAN pada 30 April 1999.

Timor Timur
Negara baru Timor Timur, dahulunya dalam Indonesia, terpaksa berhempas pulas untuk mendapat status pemerhati dalam ASEAN. Namun, banyak negara dalam ASEAN tidak menyokong penglibatan Timor Timur pada akhir 1990an atas rasa hormat kepada Indonesia. Myanmar, terutamanya, menentang pemberian status pemerhati kepada Timor Timur kerana sokongan Timor Timur terhadap perjuangan Aung San Su Kyi.
Sejak kemerdekaan Timor Timur pada Mei 2002, ASEAN telah banyak membantu negara baru ini. Timor Timur telah dijemput untuk hadir dalam beberapa mesyuarat ASEAN. Walaubagaimanapun, Timor Timur masih dilantik sebagai negara pemerhati.
ASEAN dianggar merangkumi 500 juta orang dan merangkumi kawasan seluas 4.5 juta kilometer per segi.

Life as a Linux/Unix admin in a Windows world - PT1 The experience

Disclaimer
This article is not meant, in any way, shape, or form, to put down Windows Admins. Every group has bad eggs, and this is just me writing my experience with the "bad eggs." Please keep in mind, Part 2 of this article will go through my experiences with good Windows Admins, as well as bad. Not all Windows admins are morons, just like not all Linux/Unix admins are the l337.

Introduction
I have been a professional Linux/Unix Admin for about 7 years now. I actually started off as a Junior Admin at a Linux company. The experience there, taught me a lot, but also got me spoiled. You were made fun of if you used Windows.

At that company, every desktop in the building was running some distro of Linux. Except for one Exchange Server the Development Team used when writing an email client for Linux, and Solaris that would communicate 100% to exchange (yes before evolution did it, and before exchange 2000).

So basically I never had to argue about Linux/Unix stability, ease of use, etc.

I left the Jr. Admin Job to be a full-time Admin at a web development company. The company was awesome, everyone was super nice and to this day I say it was the best job; however it did have its rough areas.

Most of our projects were PHP, Java or ASP, so we ran apps like Tomcat, Websphere and Oracle Application Server (basically a souped up apache with Java built in).

I got hired to take care of all Unix/Linux machines, but little did I know that I was the only Linux/Unix Admin among 5 Windows admins...yes count em 5!

My First Incident with a Windows admin
Our windows admin always gave me a hard time about Linux. He always told me it was less stable, and much harder to work with.

To prove my point, I challenged him to an up-time contest. So he set up his own DNS Server to be a slave to the Master DNS I had just set up using Linux.

After about 120 days I get a call from our Windows admin bragging that my Linux DNS server went down. I was in shock. How the heck did this server go down? I had to have a look.

I went to the KVM switch to bring up my server. When the screen came up, there was a Windows log in prompt.

I was in disbelief. I actually checked all the connections to make sure they were correct.

Come to find out, my clearly labeled LNXDNS-server01, was the victim of a Win2k Server install by the same Admin I had challenged in the up-time contest.
He felt really bad when I asked if that was his way of trying to beat me in the uptime contest.

If your curious, the contest was a blow out. The Windows machine got a virus and failed around day 140. My Linux server went more than 400 days before I had to disconnect it when the company moved to a new location.

Actually, the first incident wasn't to bad. It was actually funny, more than anything.

More Issues
[before I begin this section, I'd like to stress that my jobs has always been great because of the people I work with]

One of the on-going issues was working with the 7 people in charge of the technical team. All of them were cool in there own way, but only one understood Unix/Linux. It was actually a little worse with him because he knew the basics because he, had been a Unix administrator many years ago.

Lets go into some of those issues:

Support

Now, this exact item can be a pain in the ass if your not running a commercial Unix or Linux. I am a firm believer in FreeBSD and some of the free Linux's. However, they do not have commercial support, this caused a lot of unneeded panic. This is how I handled the situation:

Boss: Do our CVS, FTP, PHP/Apache servers have support?
Me: No, they are running a very stable OS called FreeBSD, and they are backed up on a daily basis using a custom perl script I wrote that sends the backups to our fileserver via FTP.
Boss: Thats good, but why don't we have support contracts on these?
Me: Uh, not to sound harsh; but my job is to support these machines correct?
Boss: Yes, but still
Me: Well heres the thing, FreeBSD doesn't have official commercial support. You can hire someone to do this, but your basically going to get someone like me (with more or less knowledge) and pay a lot more money.
Boss: O.k, I see now. I am sorry about the misunderstanding, I am so used to having support on our Windows machines that it seemed odd.

Now this boss was very cool, and very open minded. The great thing is this made him think. Now we had 5 Windows admins, and we payed for every OS ($1000+) and also paid for the top level support contracts with Microsoft.


Now think about that. What the hell is the point of a Windows Admin with all that support? You would think that we could hire a person with basic Windows knowledge to take care of these machines and call support when needed. Or we could have the guys we already have, and not pay for the support. The Windows world is a very confusing place. I know my boss was thinking hard about these things after that conversation.

Virus Scanners

I have had this conversation with every boss except the ex-Unix Admin boss. The conversation usually went like this:
Boss: Windows Admin-A tells me we don't have a virus scanner running on any of our Linux or Unix machines. I need you to find how much this will cost us, and give us a estimate on the time it will take.
Me: There is a reason why we don't run a Virus scanner; because its not needed.
Boss: Why is that? (Keep in mind the Windows Admin did this knowing we didn't need it, think he thought it was funny)
Me: Well none of the Linux machines are fileservers or Email Servers
Boss: So? They are still exposed to the outside world, we have Windows machines that aren't Email or Fileservers and they need and have virus scanners.
Me: Thats true, but Apache, Oracle, Websphere etc are not easily exploited as IIS or any other Windows service. Virus's, just don't exist in the Unix/Linux world like they do in Windows. When a Linux/Unix machine is exposed to the world, I do my job by locking it down and turning off easily exploited services like telnet, talkd, ftp , dns etc. The only thing we have to worry about are rootkits, and I have plenty of measures to stop them and to alert me if we catch one.
Boss: How much did that cost us, and what is the software called.
Me: All of the software was free. I use chkrootkit and Tripwire.
Boss Uh, O.k. Sounds good (has a confused look on his face)

Thes situations were not to bad, but it becomes annoying. It really makes you want to beat your head against the wall when your boss who happens to run the technical side of the company ask questions like this. Man I need to get into management somehow.

Getting Excluded because your a threat
The incident I'm about to write about could of been avoided if I had been involved at the start. Anyway this is a combination of issues with other admins, and power.

It all started when we got a new client, and I mean a big client. The client was to buy all the hardware, software and support as suggested by us. Now, the project is 100% Linux, so you would think they would bring in the Linux Admin to help make the decision right? Well, they didn't. The current "manager" I had, was put in charge of the group. Sort of the head administrator.


Anyway the sales guys brought him in, (they didn't know the difference between OS's and admins) and asked him to help. Usually when this happens we will all have a meeting a discuss it, not this time.

The first thing that went wrong was the sales people brought in Experts, who brought in there own experts. The project was a Oracle/Oracle application design. We needed a production environment, patch, dev, test, standby and failover! IBM came in and brought their friends VMWare along. In the end, my manager came out with 3 machines, 3 copies of VMWare ESX, and 5 copies of Redhat AS 2.0.

Had I been consulted, the company could have saved about $15,000 (yes thats right) and ended up with the correct hardware/software combinations of 3 machines, 1 copy of VMWare, and 3 copies of Redhat AS 2.0.


So I can let that slide as not my problem. However it was a problem when the manager laid out what we are going to do:

Machine one (PROD): Install VMWare ESX and install 1 virtual OS. (yeah, I know whats the point of running vmware with only one OS)
Machine two: Install VMWare ESX and install 4 OS's (patch, dev, test and failover) - Not to bad, but don't like failover setup this way
Machine three: Install VMWare ESX and install 1 OS (again, the point of VMWare is?)

I questioned this, and he basically gave me a hard time. Saying it was the best way and that I had no clue what I was talking about because I have never used VMWare ESX. O.K whatever, I went around him. His Boss pretty much ignored me too.

Now the kicker, Production is running one virtual OS, and needs the Oracle database, and Oracle application running on it at once. According to my boss, the best way to do this is to cripple the OS by putting it on the second layer (layer one is VMWare, layer two is OS). Then, lets install 6Gigs of ram, but only allow the OS to access 3.5Gigs.


Now, you newbies out there may not know this but X86 hardware has limits, and Vmware has them to, so each process is limited to 3.5Gigs of ram (VMWare treats each OS as a process), thus we get limited use of the ram.


As you can guess, when we went live we saw a huge performance problem. We ended up installing another OS and Split the DB and Application. This helped out a lot, but could of been avoided from the start if we just didn't run VMware on it.


We could of had one machine running both apps and db, taking full advantage of 6Gigs of ram and be running at full speed un-virtualized. But, we were stuck with the setup. We couldn't destroy VMWare, and just go full Redhat because uptime for this client was important. Luckily the split was easy to do with VMWare.

The fact that we bought 4 licenses of Redhat for 1 machine is pathetic. Think about this, when you buy Redhat your paying for a license for one machine. So 1 license should work. Oh well, again not my problem.

In the end, the client turned out to be OK and the boss, manager and I ended up leaving. My boss, never saw me as a threat he was just doing the wrong job. He should of been managing another team. My manager, however, was very threatened by me. He would get new projects and never let me in on any of it. He would exclude me from meetings and all kinds of stuff.


So watch your back. If your company runs both Windows and Linux/Unix, and you know your way around both, be prepared for people to dislike you.

Oh no, I now have to take care of Windows too!
Just like every company back in those days, we had layoffs.


Everyone knew that I was a Unix/Linux Admin, but people later found out that I was capable of PHP coding and even Windows administration.


As we lost our PHP developers, and our ASP deployment Admins, I got stuck with the ASP Deployment. Nothing to complicated handling this stuff. However, 1 year later they laid off all admins and decided that since I could administrate both Windows and Linux that I will do both.

Being in charge of all machines has it perks and downsides. A big perk was that I had full control, and with this we (meaning me) decided it would be best to replace all Windows servers that could be replaced with Linux or FreeBSD.


I started small by moving our FTP servers over to BSD. Later, I converted all of our SourceSafe Servers over to CVS. The developers loved me after converting to CVS! Our firewall was nothing complicated, so I moved this over to. Man everything was Linux/Unix except our email. And there was no way I would get around this.

With all the perks mentioned above I must mention the downside... That Exchange 5.5 server was hell.


I knew nothing about it. Adding new accounts at first was a total pain in the butt. On top of that the storage area was running out of space, and people refused to delete email (small company, so they got away with it).


So, I did some searching one day and found that there was a exchange Log directory with over 15 gigs of used space! OMG, wtf. These logs were old, I mean like 3+ years old.


So, like any Unix Admin I did some cleanup. I deleted half of the logs and thought everything was cool. 20 minutes later email is down, WTF. Apparently the logs, were not just logs but journaled data or something odd like that. Now that is weird.


Microsoft needs to learn to name things differently. Logs should be logs, and should be there just for history. 25 hours later (yes I worked 25 hours straight), after talking to MS morons for 7+ hours (keep in mind they charge for this) I got email back up with almost nothing lost. This was a huge nightmare.


First off, we had no backup server. We were running so low on money that we couldn't afford to fix the backups. Second, this email was important, we are talking 5 years of email for every employee. After this, I made sure to read up on any changes. I won't even go into the nightmare of me converting from Exchange 5.5 to 2000. Granted the machine after that is more stable, but it was hell converting.

People who get that you know your stuff
This can be good and bad. As a Unix/Linux Admin, people know that I am capable and will take advantage, especially the Windows admins.

Now, we had a situation where a file needed to be transfered via FTP from a Windows box to a Linux box. Well apparently the Windows Admin thought it would be better if a script was written on the Linux machine. So I had to write a script to go and get files, rename them etc. I also had to do the opposite, no big deal but as you can see the Windows Admin sort of proved me right by basically saying its easier to do this stuff on Unix/Linux machine than it is on Windows . In fact you can see the simple script I wrote in our forums.

I had this kind of stuff happen all the time, and I gladly did them. Why? Because it shows my co-workers that Unix/Linux are better, and that I am capable. So its a win/win situation. It may suck to do the work, but you know what that's my job even if the other guy is lazy. I have been at my company for 5+ years now and lived through close to 5 rounds of layoffs; wonder why I am still here while all the other admins got laid off?

The a$$hole Winblows admins
I've only worked with one really bad Windows Admin, but most of them have done stupid shit that just pissed me off.


As a Linux/Unix Admin you will be told frequently how the system you work with is old and outdated, complicated, and just plain stupid when compared to the great thing they call Windows. I have learned that you just have to nod, and not argue with them because its pointless. For every proof you show them, they will come back with some BS MS FUD. You could be mean, and say the system is easy, it's just that your so stupid you need to click shit to make a server run...but that wouldn't be good So do like me, and just not fight it. I have tried to fight it in the past and it was just pointless and got no where. Don't fight win fan-boys of any kind. And for the record, Linux fan-boys are just as bad as Windows fan-boys.

The Dumb-asses
OK, so a good Linux/Unix Admin will be jack of all trades when it comes to the computer world. Most will have some basic knowledge of just about everything. I want to explain a situation I ran into a few years back that made my jaw drop and got me so freaking frustrated.

We lost power, and I came in along with our Windows Admin at the time to check in on a 2 servers that didn't come up automatically. One Windows and one FreeBSD.


Windows Admin goes to his and to his surprise the Windows machine is going in reboot loop. BIOS, OS start, reboot, BIOS, OS start reboot etc, basically a file system error occurred that was fixed by booting into safe mode and running scan disk I believe.


So we go to my machine and its hung at the BIOS level. I turn it off and turn it back on, same thing. Right after the memory count, and before the SCSI initialization it hard locks. Hrmm, that's weird. I show Windows Admin who laughs at me. This is how the conversation went:

Win Admin: Damn unstable Linux, if that thing was running Windows you would of been able to easily fix it.
Me: Huh (keep in mind, this guy has A+ certification so he should know how a computer works)
Win Admin: System won't even start to boot, Linux really bit the dust that time ha ha.
Me: Hey smart guy, you are aware that it hasn't even tried to touch the Master Boot Sector?
Win Admin: Like I know that Linux crap, you don't have to worry about that crap in Windows.
Me: OMG (I start laughing).
Win Admin: Whats so funny?
Me: Let me get this straight, your A+ certified correct?
I then go on to explain that the issue is not a OS, but at the hardware level. And I also taught him what the master boot record was.

Now all Windows admins are not this way, but in my experience most of them don't know half about OS's or Hardware then your average Unix/Linux user. So keep this in mind. We are a rare breed, in a dumbed down world. Don't blame the Win Admins, blame MS for making crappy and un-open software so they can make money off of businesses (anyone and their dog could get MS certified).

Behind the magic curtain

Next week Steve Jobs of Apple will grab media attention with another simple-looking stage show. Mike Evangelist tells the insider secrets of his gruelling preparation

Thursday January 5, 2006
The Guardian

If the chief executive of Cadbury-Schweppes speaks at a conference, or Nike's boss introduces a new kind of trainer, you might expect to see it covered in specialist magazines, then quickly forgotten. But on Tuesday a chief executive will stand up and announce something, and within minutes it will be scrutinised across the web and on stockbrokers' computers. It will be in newspapers. They'll talk about it for months.

That chief executive is Steve Jobs, and I know why that speech makes an impact. To a casual observer it is just a guy in a black shirt and jeans talking about some new technology products. But it is in fact an incredibly complex and sophisticated blend of sales pitch, product demonstration and corporate cheerleading, with a dash of religious revival thrown in for good measure. It represents weeks of work, precise orchestration and intense pressure for the scores of people who collectively make up the "man behind the curtain". I know, because I've been there, first as part of the preparation team and later on stage with Steve.

Objectively, Apple Computer is a mid-sized company with a tiny share of its primary market. Apple Macintoshes are only rarely seen in corporate environments, and most software companies don't even offer Apple-compatible versions of their products. To put it another way, Apple is just bit larger than Cadbury-Schweppes and about the same size as Nike or Marks and Spencer in terms of annual sales.

Such comparisons come up short in trying to describe Apple's place in the world of business, because they leave out a key factor: Steve Jobs. That's something only one other company - the filmmaker Pixar - can claim. He's the closest thing to a rock star you will find in the world of business.

When Apple announces something new, people pay attention. This is due, in large measure, to Steve and the way he delivers Apple's messages. His preferred method of making major product announcements is at one of his public presentations, or "keynotes" as they are called inside the company.

Steve starts his preparation for a keynote weeks in advance, reviewing all the products and technologies he might include. Although development and release schedules are set far in advance, he still has to satisfy himself that the chosen products are keynote-ready. For software, this can be hard to decide: the engineering work is usually still underway, so he will make a preliminary determination based on seeing unfinished software. More than once this has caused some tense moments in rehearsal when programs haven't behaved.

Baptism of fire

My first experience of this preparation came in the runup to the Macworld Expo keynote of January 2001, which was to include new Macs able to burn DVDs - then an amazing capability. Steve wanted to show off the new software, iDVD, that could do it. As I was the product manager for Apple's DVD software, I had to organise everything that Steve would need.

The team and I spent hundreds of hours preparing for a segment that lasted about five minutes. Several weeks earlier Steve summoned me to demo the software, and highlight what I thought were its most interesting aspects. Of course he already knew most of this, but the process was still useful. He used the key points from these demos to mould his overall presentation and decide how much time each product would get.

Next, my team was given the task of locating movies, photos and music to be used when he created his sample DVD on stage. Most companies would just choose some clip art, or hire a video producer to make some simulated "home movies". Steve wanted material that looked great, yet was possible for an average person to achieve. So we called on everyone we knew at Apple to submit their best home movies and snapshots. Before long we had an amazing collection of fun, cool and heartwarming videos and photos. My team picked the best and confidently presented them to Steve. True to his reputation as a perfectionist, he hated most of them. We repeated that process several times. At the time I thought he was being unreasonable; but I had to admit that the material we ended up with was much better than what we had begun with.

Then came the process of the demo itself: what precise steps Steve should follow, whether the program should already be running on the computer, what sample movies to play, everything.

With the demo set, my role was to stand by in case of technical problems with the software, or if Steve wanted to change anything. This gave me the opportunity to observe what was going on around me. The big keynotes require a very large crew with separate teams for each major task. One prepares the room to seat several thousand people. Another group builds the stage with its motorised pedestals, risers, trap doors, and so forth. A third manages the stage lighting, audio and effects.

Yet another sets up and calibrates the state-of-the-art projection systems (complete with redundant backup systems), and a huge remote video truck parked outside has its own crew handling video feeds for the webcasts and playback of any video needed during the show. Then there are the people who set up all the computers used in the keynote, each with at least one backup that can be instantly brought online with the flick of a switch.

And of course there's the secrecy. The impact of Steve's presentations depends on surprise; so once the rehearsals begin, security people help keep the curious out and the secrets secret. It was fascinating to watch. No detail was overlooked: for example, while rehearsing the iDVD demo, Steve found that the DVD player's remote control didn't work from where he wanted to stand on the stage. The crew had to make a special repeater system to make it work.

So when Steve steps out on that stage, with its stark black-on-black colour scheme, and does his apparently simple demos, he brings the combined energy and talent of all those people and many more back in Cupertino, California, and channels it to the audience. It makes me think of a magnifying glass used to focus the power of the sun on one small spot until it bursts into flames.

Fast forward a year; much to my surprise I was asked to do a demo in the keynote. And then I really learned about demos. In mid-2001 I had been promoted to manage both the DVD products and Apple's professional video-editing software, Final Cut Pro, a new version of which was to be released in early 2002.

But Steve never does the demos of the pro software; he always relies on someone on the product team more familiar with its features and operation. The job fell to me. It turned out to be my lowest and highest point at Apple.

Steve usually rehearses on the two days before a keynote. On the first day he works on the segments he feels need the most attention. The product managers and engineering managers for each new product are in the room, waiting for their turn. This group also forms Steve's impromptu test audience: he'll often ask for their feedback. He spends a lot of time on his slides, personally writing and designing much of the content, with a little help from Apple's design team.

As each segment of the show is refined, Steve and his producer edit the slides live on a PowerBook so the revised slides can be used immediately. That day Steve was very methodical, going through every aspect of the show. He would test variations of content and flow, looking for the combinations with the most impact. When introducing a major new product, he also liked to show the TV commercial Apple would be using to promote it. Often these had been finished just minutes before rehearsals; Steve would sometimes preview alternate versions to gauge the team's reaction before deciding which to use.

Crunch time

On the day before showtime, things get much more structured, with at least one and sometimes two complete dress rehearsals. Any non-Apple presenters in the keynote take part on the second day (although they cannot be in the room while the secret parts - the unveiling of hot ticket hardware such as a new iPod or laptop - are being rehearsed.) Throughout it all Steve is extremely focused. While we were in that room, all his energy was directed at making this keynote the perfect embodiment of Apple's messages. Steve doesn't give up much of his personality even in rehearsals. He is strictly business, most of the time.

I had worked on my five-minute Final Cut Pro demo for weeks, selecting just the right sample material and honing (I thought) my delivery to a fine edge. My boss and his boss were there for moral support. Steve, as was his custom, sat in the audience. I was very nervous, and having Steve's laser-like attention concentrated on me didn't help. About a minute into the demo, Steve stopped me, saying impatiently, "you gotta get this together or we're going to have to pull this demo from the keynote."

I was devastated. I didn't even know how to respond, or if I should respond. Mercifully my boss and Phil Schiller (Apple's head of marketing, and a frequent keynote presenter) came to my rescue. Over the next few hours they worked with me to polish my demo. More importantly, Phil gave me some great advice: "Those 6,000 Mac fans out there in the hall aren't against you, they're the best friends you can have." The next day at final rehearsal, Steve watched me again. This time he gave it his nod of approval. It felt great; but the real work was yet to be done.

Next morning, as I sat in the front row waiting for my turn on the stage, the full weight of the event hit me. There were several thousand people in the room, and approximately 50,000 watching the webcast. It was the very definition of pressure. Steve started the segment that preceded mine, and my heart started pounding. I felt those hundred thousand eyes all about to be focused on me and feared I would crumble. I had done a bit of public speaking before, but nothing like this.

The assistant producer came over to me to guide me to the stairs at the side of the stage. I stood in the dark, watching Steve put up the slide that introduced me. Just then a wonderful thought hit me; in five minutes the whole thing would be over. If I could only keep going for five minutes I would be fine. I bounced up the stairs and on to the stage, and everything was suddenly OK. The demo worked perfectly, the audience seemed to love the product, and their applause was an incredible adrenaline rush.

When it was over I received many compliments on how well it went, including the one I prize the most, from Steve himself.

In the following months I was on stage for two more keynotes, and each time was incredibly grateful for the apparently harsh treatment Steve had dished out the first time. He forced me to work harder, and in the end I did a much better job than I would have otherwise. I believe it is one of the most important aspects of Steve Jobs's impact on Apple: he has little or no patience for anything but excellence from himself or others.

· Mike Evangelist left Apple in 2002 and is writing a book about his time there, provisionally called Jobs I've Known, live on his site, www.writersblocklive.com

A Naive User's Guide to Running Windows More Securely

Like a lot of people who have worked in the business, I find myself in conversations about computer security with people who are having problems or know people who have problems. I wrote this to save me from explaining the same thing over and over again to different people, and to save them the trouble of having to make notes as we talked. It was meant to be something you could give to a 'naive user' and have them be able to read and follow it more or less unaided, and while not being a complete guide, at least be something that made them more secure than before they got it.

What is the danger?

That a machine will have 'malware' loaded onto it. This will then allow criminals to use it to send spam (often promoting pornography), hack other computers, make it dial up premium rate numbers, or steal information from it, including bank account numbers and passwords. In bad cases bank accounts can be stolen, in extreme cases identity theft is possible. The risks are mainly financial, but if a machine is captured by pornographers, they may also be legal. In the UK, for example, the existence of some kinds of material on a computer is going to be a strict liability offence. The onus is going to be on the holder to prove he/she was not the agent/owner, and it may not be easy.

How bad is it?

Bad and worsening. Here is one example. USA Today, in November 2004, set up 6 machines on the net and observed the results. In two weeks they attracted 306,000 attacks, and an XP SP1 machine was broken into in four minutes. The Denver Post did the same thing in February 2005, and attracted 45,000 attacks in a week. This is the risk from simply being connected. To it, you have to add user actions - unwittingly visiting fraudulent and malicious sites, receiving malicious emails or attachments. There have been 100,000+ Windows viruses, 2,500 Windows spyware releases, and some studies show 80% of home PCs may be infected with spyware broadly defined. The latest thing is Windows rootkits - essentially undetectable infections.

Who is at risk, and from who?

Anyone connecting to the net with Windows 95, 98, ME, or XP with Service Pack 1 or lower. Broadband makes the risk much greater. Fully up to date versions of XP SP2 are much less at risk. People running Unix based systems (including MacOS and Linux flavours) are much less at risk. People running firewalls are also much less at risk.

Basically, connect Windows XP SP1, 98 or 95 to the net without a firewall, and the evidence is, you'll likely be hacked within an hour. You are almost certain to get infected if you (or your children) use music sharing software, or if you agree to download and install software as a condition for free access to some kinds of services. Downloading ring tones for mobiles is a common source of infection. Downloading bootleg software (so called warez) is another.

You can find out how secure your machine is to some kinds of attacks by going to Steve Gibson's Shields Up site: https://www.grc.com (go to the Shields Up section) to test the vulnerability of your firewall and system. Recommended. This tells you about liability to incoming attacks. Leak Test, from the same site, will tell you whether your firewall protects from outbound leakage.

The perpetrators are mostly criminals in it for profit. The days of the amateur teenage hacker in a suburban bedroom are over.

If I follow these recommendations am I safe?

No. You are safer. You are still running an Operating System with a proven record of security faults in a network environment. And this guide is not a complete account of the subject.

Are there alternatives to these recommendations?

Yes. Plan B is: go to a Unix based Operating System, like Linux or MacOS or one of the BSDs. Here are some thoughts on this one.

It helps because there's been far less malware. Probably under 50 real viruses for both MacOS and Linux, even less for Commercial Unix. Spyware is so far unknown (according to Webroot).

Linux or BSD will run on your existing machine side by side with Windows. It is also free, so this is the cheapest of the Plans B. However, don't try moving to Linux or a BSD without help. Your helper should agree to be available for support for six months after the installation. MacOS, which is similarly or maybe more secure, and also Unix based, one probably can do unaided. But you need a whole new computer for it, and new versions of your applications, so it gets expensive. The Mac Mini is worth considering if you are tempted.

The best bet in Linux/Unix for the end user is probably PCLinux, available free for download over the net as a single CD iso. Mepis is also very good. Either will come, free, with all the applications you are likely to need, including Office packages. Maybe fewer games than you would like. In BSDs, PCBSD and DesktopBSD are end-user oriented distributions. They are so far a lot less popular than the Linuxes.

How to safeguard Windows? Four rules go a long way.

Rule 1. Use a limited user account for normal work, and for connection to the net. Never connect from an account with administration privileges.

How to do this. Use the Users and Passwords control panel to create a new Administrator account. Reset your current account to limited user. Then only use the Administrator account to manage the system, install software etc, and then sign off. Never connect to the net when signed on as Administrator, except to do Windows Update. Enable privacy between user accounts, and have separate user accounts for everyone who uses the computer. Make a separate dedicated limited user account for shopping & banking.

Why this helps. Any attacks made on you while on the net will have the same privileges as the account you signed on with. (There have been some exceptions, but this is mostly true for up to date systems). Administrator accounts can do anything at all to the system. Limited user accounts can do relatively little. Signing on as a limited user restricts the attacker's options. Microsoft's default on this is for you to sign on as administrator. It is as if, in an hotel, every guest key opened all guest rooms and the main safe, kitchen and boiler room as well. Change it.

Note1: Windows 9x has only one account, so this won't work with 95 or 98 or ME. Either upgrade to XP, but its not simple, or consider buying Anti-Executable from www.faronics.com. Learn to use it to lock down your machine. Note that I have not used this package - the recommendation comes from the product specification, user guide, and testimonials. Also use ZoneAlarm (below) to disconnect from Broadband when not actively using it.

Note2: Some older software, and all CD burning software, will have problems running as a limited user. Use the 'run as' function (right click on the program icon) to run them as Administrator.

Rule 2. Connect to Broadband via an ADSL Router, never just an ADSL modem.

How to do this. Either ask your provider to supply Broadband with an ADSL Router, or buy a combined modem/router yourself (cheapest by mail order). Make sure you have the right PC ports to connect it up and that you get cables. If you have a choice, use an Ethernet connection, in preference to USB. Find out how to address the hardware firewall it will have in it, and set it to high protection if it isn't already.

Why this helps. If you just connect via a modem, your machine will be visible to hackers worldwide. If you use a Router, it will use a private address for your machine, and the only thing visible on the net will be the Router (a much harder target). If you set the hardware firewall to high, the router also will be invisible.

Rule 3: Only use secure software.

This falls into three parts.

First, don't use the chronically insecure Microsoft Explorer and Outlook; get (free) Mozilla Firefox (Web) and Mozilla Thunderbird (Email). Also get the Firefox Spoofstick plugin and Adblock to guard against phishing. One or two UK banks require Explorer, and firewalls off. Avoid them. Use Mailwasher to screen and delete unwanted mail on the server.

Second, get the following:

ZoneAlarm is a free software firewall. You do need this as well as the router hardware firewall. Replace the weak XP built in firewall with it. Use it to disconnect from the net when inactive, and to control outbound traffic from applications.

AVG is a free anti virus package (Kapersky and McAfee are also very good, paid packages). Update at every connection.

AdAware & Spybot Search and Destroy are free anti-spyware packages. Get both, and update at least weekly. Microsoft's own anti-spyware package is free and highly rated. Webroot's Spysweeper is a paid, well regarded package, as is Pestpatrol. One anti spyware package is definitely not enough. Find all these by using Google, or on Tucows. Also, install SpywareBlaster for real time protection, but still sweep with the others weekly.

If using Anti-Executable, I wouldn't rely solely on these scans, to clean up the system first, but would do a clean Windows reinstall as explained later.

WinPatrol is also highly rated, and protects against some system parameter changes.

Third, keep Windows up to date using the Windows Update control. You'll have to sign on with an account with admin privileges. Check out Sans Institute Internet Storm Center, 'Windows XP, Surviving the First Day', for instructions on doing this safely - find it using Google. This helps because security updates for Windows come out often - as more holes are discovered and exploited. The quicker you get them in, the shorter the time you are at risk.

One should also disable insecure Windows services, as Greene's book (below) explains. And never install anything when prompted to do so by a web site or email.

Rule 4: Keep as much personal information as possible off the machine, on paper.

Never have your browser remember passwords or logon information. Never keep NIS numbers, passport numbers, drivers license numbers, bank account numbers or branch addresses on disk. Never use Quicken or MS Money to connect to your bank to download data. Never dispose of a PC with a hard drive in it: take out the drive first, and destroy hard drives before disposal.

If you have children, have a dedicated machine for gaming, music downloads, chat etc, keep no personal data whatever on it, and if you allow it to share the Broadband connection, firewall it off totally from the other machines. Consider using Anti-Executable or even DeepFreeze (also Faronics) on it. All this will be fairly technical, and will probably require professional help. It will be worth it.

Microsoft has just published the 'Shared Computer Toolkit' for making a machine safe for multiple users in a walkup environment. Professional help will probably be needed to install and use this, and it may be overkill for home users.

Reading.

Thomas Greene's book 'Internet Security for the Home and Small Office', is essential reading if you ever use Windows on the net, dialup or broadband, to bank or shop. Get it (from Amazon). Clear, detailed (lots of screen shots) how-to on hardening Windows. It explains how to disable insecure Windows services, which is a must, but which is too big a topic for these pages. Steve Gibson's site, see previous page, is worth a visit. Secunia and SecurityFocus are very good but technical. Wilders.org has lots of good links and clear explanations.

How to know if your machine is infected, and what to do.

You'll know because of slowdowns, crashes or unpredictable behaviour, especially of Explorer or Outlook, or because scans with anti-virus or anti spyware software tell you of infections. You may find lots of popups appearing, you may find yourself on sites which you have not clicked on. Your internet connection may be very active when you are not doing anything. Your ISP or other people may tell you your machine is sending spam. Trying to find out what is going on by Crtl-Alt-Delete may not permit you to examine running processes.

Take this very seriously and do not bank or shop online until fixed.

What to do? It used to be a very simple matter, get and run anti-virus software and keep it up to date. No more. In the last year, it has become decreasingly possible to be sure of having cleaned a badly infected Windows OS that one has booted from. The only method reasonably certain to succeed nowadays is, back up your work files to removable storage, then format and partition the affected hard drives and reinstall Windows, harden it, and then copy back the work files and reinstall software. I would personally do this by buying a new hard drive (Seagate Barracuda) with an OEM copy of XP, and starting from scratch. I would do the data backup by booting from Knoppix or similar Linux live CD.

Advice. Find a professional and say this is what you want done. If he tells you it is not necessary, and that simply running AdAware etc is enough, well, it may be. But there again, it may not be. The question is, how much do you want to bet?

I would demand (and pay for) a clean install...

Appendix: where does this problem come from?

If you are just trying to keep systems secure, this may seem a bit academic. But people do ask, so here is a very short account. First, to avoid being forced by anti-trust actions to give equal treatment to all browsers, Microsoft, during the 'browser wars', made Explorer part of the Operating System, and also linked Outlook to Explorer. This means it really cannot be removed. But it also means any vulnerability of Explorer or Outlook is a vulnerability of Windows. Second, it's the social culture of Windows use - in particular, the universal practice of signing on with Administrator privileges. This means any infection is automatically a system wide infection. Third, its to do with myriad vulnerabilities in the way Windows handles services. As an example, the recent wmf flaw enables graphics, regardless of browser, to carry malicious code. This is because of flaws in the way thumbnails and graphics rendering is done in Windows. RPC (Remote Procedure Calls) is another example.

Bottom line: it is not going to go away any time soon.

Caveat

I've taken care over this, but its a very brief guide to a very complicated and rapidly changing subject. I can't be responsible for any inaccuracies or any consequences of following these recommendations. Do not follow them blindly. Verify first, and then use them only as the basis for formulating your own security policy, and arriving at your own list of dos and don'ts.

--Alcibiades

100 things we didn't know this time last year

Each week the Magazine picks out snippets from the news, and compiles them into 10 Things We Didn't Know This Time Last Week. Here's an end of year almanac.

1. The UK's first mobile phone call was made 20 years ago this year, when Ernie Wise rang the Vodafone head office, which was then above a curry shop in Newbury.

2. Mohammed is now one of the 20 most popular names for boys born in England and Wales.

3. While it's an offence to drop litter on the pavement, it's not an offence to throw it over someone's garden wall.

4. An average record shop needs to sell at least two copies of a CD per year to make it worth stocking, according to Wired magazine.

5. Nicole Kidman is scared of butterflies. "I jump out of planes, I could be covered in cockroaches, I do all sorts of things, but I just don't like the feel of butterflies' bodies," she says.

6. WD-40 dissolves cocaine - it has been used by a pub landlord to prevent drug-taking in his pub's toilets.

7. Baboons can tell the difference between English and French. Zoo keepers at Port Lympne wild animal park in Kent are having to learn French to communicate with the baboons which had been transferred from Paris zoo.

8. Devout Orthodox Jews are three times as likely to jaywalk as other people, according to an Israeli survey reported in the New Scientist. The researchers say it's possibly because religious people have less fear of death.

9. The energy used to build an average Victorian terrace house would be enough to send a car round the Earth five times, says English Heritage.

10. Humans can be born suffering from a rare condition known as "sirenomelia" or "mermaid syndrome", in which the legs are fused together to resemble the tail of a fish.

11. One in 10 Europeans is allegedly conceived in an Ikea bed.

12. Until the 1940s rhubarb was considered a vegetable. It became a fruit when US customs officials, baffled by the foreign food, decided it should be classified according to the way it was eaten.

13. Prince Charles broke with an 80-year tradition by giving Camilla Parker Bowles a wedding ring fashioned from Cornish gold, instead of the nugget of Welsh gold that has provided rings for all royal brides and grooms since 1923.

14. It's possible for a human to blow up balloons via the ear. A 55-year-old factory worker from China reportedly discovered 20 years ago that air leaked from his ears, and he can now inflate balloons and blow out candles.

15. Lionesses like their males to be deep brunettes.

16. The London borough of Westminster has an average of 20 pieces of chewing gum for every square metre of pavement.

17. Bosses at Madame Tussauds spent £10,000 separating the models of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston when they separated. It was the first time the museum had two people's waxworks joined together.

18. If all the Smarties eaten in one year were laid end to end it would equal almost 63,380 miles, more than two-and-a-half times around the Earth's equator.

19. The = sign was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing "is equal to" in his equations. He chose the two lines because "noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle".

20. The Queen has never been on a computer, she told Bill Gates as she awarded him an honorary knighthood.

21. One person in four has had their identity stolen or knows someone who has.

22. The length of a man's fingers can reveal how physically aggressive he is, scientists say.

23. In America it's possible to subpoena a dog.

24. The 71m packets of biscuits sold annually by United Biscuits, owner of McVitie's, generate 127.8 tonnes of crumbs.

25. Nelson probably had a broad Norfolk accent.

26. One in four people does not know 192, the old number for directory inquiries in the UK, has been abolished.

27. Only in France and California are under 18s banned from using sunbeds.

28. The British buy the most compact discs in the world - an average of 3.2 per year, compared to 2.8 in the US and 2.1 in France.

29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.

30. There are an estimated 1,000 people in the UK in a persistent vegetative state.

31. Train passengers in the UK waited a total of 11.5m minutes in 2004 for delayed services.

32. "Restaurant" is the most mis-spelled word in search engines.

33. Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho has only been in an English pub once, to buy his wife cigarettes.

34. The Little Britain wheelchair sketch with Lou and Andy was inspired by Lou Reed and Andy Warhol.

35. The name Lego came from two Danish words "leg godt", meaning "play well". It also means "I put together" in Latin.

36. The average employee spends 14 working days a year on personal e-mails, phone calls and web browsing, outside official breaks, according to employment analysts Captor.

37. Cyclist Lance Armstrong's heart is almost a third larger than the average man's.

38. Nasa boss Michael Griffin has seven university degrees: a bachelor's degree, a PhD, and five masters degrees.

39. Australians host barbecues at polling stations on general election days.
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40. An average Briton will spend £1,537,380 during his or her lifetime, a survey from insurer Prudential suggests.
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41. Tactically, the best Monopoly properties to buy are the orange ones: Vine Street, Marlborough Street and Bow Street.
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42. Britain's smallest church , near Malmesbury, Wiltshire, opens just once a year. It measures 4m by 3.6m and has one pew.
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43. The spiciness of sauces is measured in Scoville Units.
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44. Rubber gloves could save you from lightning.
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45. C3PO and R2D2 do not speak to each other off-camera because the actors don't get on.

46. Driving at 159mph - reached by the police driver cleared of speeding - it would take nearly a third of a mile to stop.
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47. Liverpool has 42 cranes redeveloping the city centre.

48. A quarter of the world's clematis come from one Guernsey nursery, where production will top 4.5m plants this year alone.

49. Tim Henman has a tennis court at his new home in Oxfordshire which he has never used.

50. Only 36% of the world's newspapers are tabloid.

51. Parking wardens walk about 15 miles a day.
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52. You're 10 times more likely to be bitten by a human than a rat.
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53. It takes 75kg of raw materials to make a mobile phone.
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54. Deep Throat is reportedly the most profitable film ever. It was made for $25,000 (£13,700) and has grossed more than $600m.

55. Antony Worrall-Thompson swam the English Channel in his youth.

56. The Pyruvate Scale measures pungency in onions and garlic. It's named after the acid in onions which makes cooks cry when cutting them.

57. The man who was the voice of one of the original Daleks, Roy Skelton, also did the voices for George and Zippy in Rainbow.

58. The average guest at a Buckingham Palace garden party scoffs 14 cakes, sandwiches, scones and ice-cream, according to royal accounts.

59. Oliver Twist is very popular in China, where its title is translated as Foggy City Orphan.

60. Newborn dolphins and killer whales don't sleep for a month, according to research carried out by University of California.

61. You can bet on your own death.
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62. MPs use communal hairbrushes in the washrooms of the Houses of Parliament.

63. It takes less energy to import a tomato from Spain than to grow them in this country because of the artificial heat needed, according to Defra.

64. New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's home number is listed by directory inquiries.

65. Actor James Doohan , who played Scotty, had a hand in creating the Klingon language that was used in the movies, and which Shakespeare plays were subsequently translated into.

66. The hotter it is, the more difficult it is for aeroplanes to take off. Air passengers in Nevada, where temperatures have reached 120F, have been told they can't fly.

67. Giant squid eat each other - especially during sex.

68. The Very Hungry Caterpillar has sold one copy every minute since its 1969 publication.
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69. First-born children are less creative but more stable, while last-born are more promiscuous, says US research.

70. Reebok, which is being bought by Adidas, traces its history back more than 100 years to Bolton.

71. Jimi Hendrix pretended to be gay to be discharged from the US Army.

72. A towel doesn't legally reserve a sun lounger - and there is nothing in German or Spanish law to stop other holidaymakers removing those left on vacant seats.

73. One in six children think that broccoli is a baby tree.

74. It takes a gallon of oil to make three fake fur coats.

75. Each successive monarch faces in a different direction on British coins.

76. The day when most suicides occurred in the UK between 1993 and 2002 was 1 January, 2000.

77. The only day in that time when no-one killed themselves was 16 March, 2001, the day Comic Relief viewers saw Jack Dee win Celebrity Big Brother.

78. One in 18 people has a third nipple.

79. The section of coast around Cleethorpes has the highest concentration of caravans in Europe.

80. Fifty-seven Bic Biros are sold every second - amounting to 100bn since 1950.

81. George Bernard Shaw named his shed after the UK capital so that when visitors called they could be told he was away in London.

82. Former Labour MP Oona King's aunt is agony aunt Miriam Stoppard.

83. Britain produces 700 regional cheeses, more even than France.

84. The actor who plays Mike Tucker in BBC Radio 4's The Archers is the father of the actor who plays Will Grundy.

85. Japanese knotweed can grow from a piece of root the size of pea. And it can flourish anew if disturbed after lying dormant for more than 20 years.

86. Hecklers are so-called because of militant textile workers in Dundee.

87. Pulling your foot out of quicksand takes a force equivalent to that needed to lift a medium-sized car.

88. A single "mother" spud from southern Peru gave rise to all the varieties of potato eaten today, scientists have learned.

89. Spanish Flu, the epidemic that killed 50 million people in 1918/9, was known as French Flu in Spain.

90. Ordinary - not avian - flu kills about 12,000 people in the UK every winter.

91. Croydon has more CCTV cameras than New York.

92. You are 176 times more likely to be murdered than to win the National Lottery.

93. Koalas have fingerprints exactly like humans (although obviously smaller).

94. Bill Gates does not have an iPod.

95. The first traffic cones were used in building Preston bypass in the late 1950s, replacing red lantern paraffin burners.

96. Britons buy about one million pumpkins for Halloween, 99% of which are used for lanterns rather than for eating.

97. The mother of stocky cricketer - and this year's Strictly Come Dancing champion - Darren Gough was a ballet dancer. She helped him with his pivots.

98. Nettles growing on land where bodies are buried will reach a foot higher than those growing elsewhere.

99. The Japanese word "chokuegambo" describes the wish that there were more designer-brand shops on a given street.

100. Musical instrument shops must pay an annual royalty to cover shoppers who perform a recognisable riff before they buy, thereby making a "public performance".

Published: 2005/12/30 10:43:56 GMT

Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures

Introduction

Electronic digital computers moved out of science fiction and into reality during World War II. Less powerful than a modern pocket calculator, the first real job for these massive machines was to speed up the calculation of artillery firing tables.

Thirty years later, computers had firmly cemented themselves in the public imagination. They were huge boxes, covered with blinking lights and whirring reels of tape. Banks and big corporations all had computer rooms, closely guarded by a priesthood of programmers and administrators. Science fiction novels and movies imagined impossibly brilliant supercomputers that guided spaceships and controlled societies, yet they were still room-sized behemoths. The idea of a personal computer, something small and light enough for someone to pick up and carry around, wasn't even on the radar.

Even the major computer companies at the time didn't see the point of small machines. The mainframe industry was dominated by IBM, who was the Snow White to the Seven Dwarves of Burroughs, CDC, GE, Honeywell, NCR, RCA and Univac. Mainframes took up entire floors and cost millions of dollars. There was also a market for slightly smaller and less expensive minicomputers, machines the size of a few refrigerators that sold for under a hundred thousand dollars. This industry was dominated by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), with strong competitors such as Data General, Hewlett-Packard and Honeywell-Bull. None of these companies considered the personal computer to be an idea worth pursuing.

ENIAC, the second electronic digital computer, circa 1943

It wasn't that the technology wasn't ready. Intel, at the time primarily a manufacturer of memory chips, had invented the first microprocessor (the 4-bit 4004) in 1971. This was followed up with the 8-bit 8008 in 1972 and the more-capable 8080 chip in 1974. However, Intel didn't see the potential of its own product, considering it to be useful mainly for calculators, traffic lights, and other embedded applications. Intel had built a reference design with a microprocessor and some memory that could be programmed using a terminal, but it was used for testing purposes only. An Intel engineer approached chairman Gordon Moore with the idea for turning it into a consumer product, but Moore, with a rare lack of insight, couldn't see any practical purpose for such a device and decided not to go ahead with the project.

The task of inventing the personal computer, and with it the personal computer industry, was left instead to the manager of a small, little-known calculator company in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His name was Ed Roberts.

The Altair (1975-77)

Ed Roberts always dreamed of becoming a doctor, but instead he wound up starting his own private electronics company. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS) started out selling model rocket telemetry kits and subsequently recently branched out into selling pocket calculators. By 1973, the company had a couple of dozen employees, and was doing fairly well. Then electronics giants that manufactured their own CPUs and other chips, like Texas Instruments, began a calculator price war that nearly drove MITS into bankruptcy.

With his company over US$300,000 in debt, Roberts took a fateful trip to the bank, to discuss whether or not he would have to shut down the company. He told the bank manager about his plans to sell a kit computer to electronics hobbyists. The manager wanted to know how many Roberts expected to sell each month, and he guessed that they might sell as many as a hundred. This was enough to stave off the company's execution.

In the mean time, Les Solomon, the technical editor of Popular Electronics magazine, was looking for a cover story to compete with Radio Electronics' article on how to assemble a machine called the "Mark 8" from a collection of bare parts including an Intel 8008 CPU. The Mark 8 was merely a list of parts, but Solomon wanted a story about a fully-fledged personal computer that you could go out and buy, if not in fully assembled form, at least in an easy-to-build kit. He contacted Ed Roberts who told him about his plans, and a mockup of Robert's design made it on the cover of Popular Electronics' January 1975 issue.

The machine needed a name. Les Solomon asked his young daughter what the computer on Star Trek was called, and she replied "Computer." Telling her that was less than helpful, she retorted that they should call it the "Altair," as that was where the Enterprise was headed that week. The name stuck.

The Altair looked in some respects like a modern desktop computer (at least in the days when desktops actually sat on your desk). It was encased in a metal and plastic rectangular box that opened up to allow the user to connect add-on boards. However, there was no keyboard or display offered with the system initially. The machine was programmed by flicking a series of toggle switches on the front panel, and the results of the program could be viewed on a long string of LEDs. Roberts admitted that the design for the front panel was significantly inspired by the panel of Data General's popular Nova minicomputer.

The original Altair computer, with its top off

Ed Roberts had worked out a deal with Intel to purchase 8080 CPUs. Normally, these CPUs sold for US$300 in small quantities, but Roberts was able to purchase a batch with cosmetic defects for only US$75 each. This enabled him to set the price of the Altair kit at US$399. He calculated that he would need to sell 200 units over the product's lifetime to reach the break-even point. After a week of being available on the market, MITS had orders for over 2,000 machines.

Basically, the hobby electronics community went nuts. The pent-up demand for a personal computer was so great that MITS had far more orders than it could possibly ship. People were willing to wait for months for the company to work its way through the backlog, just so they could get a machine of their own. Some people even set up camp outside MITS headquarters.

The success of the new machine spawned a collection add-on hardware products and imitators. Other companies cloned the Altair's 100-pin 8-bit bus, and called it the "S-100" bus, infuriating Roberts. Boards that interfaced with teletypes and CRT terminals made the Altair resemble a modern computer. A young HP employee named Steve Wozniak saw the Altair at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting and decided that he could make something like it himself, which ended up becoming the Apple I. And an unknown college dropout named Bill Gates, together with his partner Paul Allen, wrote a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair, forming a company called Micro-Soft in the process. He would later drop the hyphen and the capital S, and make billions of dollars.

MITS struggled to keep up with demand, not only for the Altair, but for the 4k memory cards that were required to run BASIC. Competition from other add-on companies and new computer companies hurt MITS, and Roberts eventually sold the company to the hard disk manufacturer Pertec in May 1977. Pertec management failed to move the company forward and it went bankrupt a few years later.

The Altair ultimately failed in the marketplace, but it sold thousands of units and jump-started the entire personal computer industry. The concept and form factor of desktop computers, with add-on boards that plugged into a standardized bus, the concept of third-party software, and the idea of retail computer dealers and dealer expositions were all pioneered by MITS. Ed Roberts took the millions from the sale of his company and reinvested them in himself. He completed his medical training and achieved his life-long dream of becoming a doctor. He still keeps an Altair in his office.

Ed Roberts, with his creation

The first trinity: the Commodore PET, the Radio-Shack TRS-80, and the Apple ][ (1977-1980)

Despite the success of the Altair, the big computer companies still considered these small machines to be the domain of a few slightly screwy enthusiasts, and not a product for the mass market. This didn't stop many of these same enthusiasts from starting their own computer companies, almost all of which no longer exist today.

There was Processor Technology's Sol, designed by Lee Felsenstein who went on to design the first "portable" computer, the Osborne 1. There was Cromemco, which was started by two Stanford students, and made add-on boards for the Altair before designing their own computer products. Vector Graphic also started making S-100 memory boards before introducing their own computer system. A company called IMSAI built an Altair clone and had the distinction of having the first personal computer ever to be featured in a movie, Wargames, before imploding due to overexpansion and forced est training for management that distorted fiscal realities. SouthWest Technical Products (SWTP) built a machine using Motorola's new 6800 CPU. In the UK, the NASCOM-1 kit attempted to mirror the success of the Altair on the other side of the Atlantic.

By the end of 1976, over 40,000 personal computers had been sold, with MITS selling approximately 25%, IMSAI 17%, Processor Technology 8%, and SWTP 8%. There were dozens of other companies selling computers. Many of them sold too few products to even show up on the radar. In ten months, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had managed to sell only 175 units of the hand-assembled Apple I motherboard, which lacked a keyboard, monitor, or even a case.

From left to right: a Vector Graphic, SOL-20, SWTP 6800.
Bottom row: NASCOM-1, Apple I, Cromenco Z-2, IMSAI 8080

The stage was set for the a second, more professional, group of electronics companies to introduce their own products.

The holy trinity: Commodore PET, TRS-80 Model I, and the Apple ][

The first of these was a calculator firm called Commodore, which was started as a typewriter repair company in 1954 by Auschwitz survivor Jack Tramiel. When Texas Instruments started their price war that nearly drove MITS out of business, Tramiel realized that it was vital for his company to own semiconductor technology that could produce chips in-house, just like TI did. He found ex-Motorola engineer Chuck Peddle, who had invented a vastly cheaper 6800 clone called the 6502. Commodore bought Peddle's company, MOS Technologies, and let him continue working on his own projects. One of these projects became the PET computer, ostensibly standing for Personal Electronic Transactor, but Commodore engineers sometimes called it Peddle's Ego Trip after it wound up becoming a smash success.

The PET had its own built-in monitor, keyboard, and tape drive, giving early computer users everything they needed to start working. It even had a version of BASIC purchased from Bill Gates' tiny Micro-Soft company. The keyboard was a cheap "Chiclet" job that was replaced in later models. Commodore sold 4,000 PETs in 1978 and sales kept rising. A base model PET sold for US$795.

Elsewhere, the electronics chain Radio Shack decided that they should get into the personal computer business. Their Tandy-Radio Shack 80, or TRS-80 (known to some computer hobbyists as a "Trash-80," in the first of many platform flamewars to come) was available in modular form, with the keyboard and computer selling for US$399, the black and white display for US$199, and a cassette storage system for US$49. The main advantage that Radio Shack had over the others was their built-in distribution system. Each of their 3,000 stores was given a single TRS-80 to sell, but within a month the company had over 10,000 orders. The lowly TRS-80 quickly became the top-selling personal computer of the trinity, as new models enhanced its capabilities.

The final computer of the trinity was made by the only company to survive into the modern age as a computer company. The Apple ][ was a refined version of the Apple I motherboard, with added color, memory capacity, eight expansion slots, and an attractive beige case with a built-in brown keyboard. It retailed for US$1,298 with 4k of RAM, or US$1,698 with 16k. Initial sales were sluggish as Apple sold only 600 machines in 1977, mostly due to the high price compared to the PET and TRS-80. However, with the addition of the fast and relatively inexpensive Disk ][ floppy drive accessory, made possible by an ingenious disk controller using only eight chips that Wozniak designed, the Apple ][ sold 7,600 units in the following year and 35,000 in 1979. It was still a distant third compared to the other two machines in the trinity, however.

Apple's response to being in third place involved the genius of Regis McKenna, the former Intel PR executive who had spearheaded "Operation Crush," the predecessor of the "Intel Inside" campaign. McKenna decided that what the company needed was great marketing, so all advertising for the Apple ][ was glossy and rich, and some ads even claimed that the Apple ][ was the "best-selling personal computer." It had nowhere near such status at the time.

What really turned the company around, however, was the release of the first ever "killer app." This was VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet application, which was released in 1979. The author, Dan Bricklin, wrote it for the Apple ][ simply because that machine, borrowed from his publisher Dan Fylstra, was the only one he had available. A combination of great marketing and even better luck propelled the Apple ][ from an also-ran to a serious contender. In 1981 the company sold 210,000 units, leaving the PET in the dust and nearly equaling the TRS-80's numbers.

Personal computer market share during the "trinity" years

The 8-bit era (1980-1984)

Time Magazine: January 1983

The star of the personal computer was rising. For 1982, Time Magazine featured a generic version as "Machine of the Year," the one and only occasion a nonhuman has won that award. By this time, many new firms had joined the fight, releasing the third generation of machines. Most of these used the 6502 CPU, because of its excellent bang-for-the-buck ratio.

Commodore, realizing that the PET was running out of gas, started a number of new 8-bit computer projects based around their 6502 and custom chips developed in-house by MOS Technologies. One of them, the VIC-20, named after the Video Interface Chip that ran its graphics, was enormously successful. Despite limitations in the VIC chip that could only display 22 columns of text, the colorful and inexpensive computer sold 600,000 units in 1982.

But the big winner for Commodore was yet to come. Rushed into production by shoehorning components into the VIC-20 case, the Commodore 64 made its debut in late 1982 for US$595 with a full 64KB of RAM, the maximum directly addressable by 8-bit CPUs. At the time, computers with that much RAM cost at least three times as much. By integrating the full 64KB of RAM as part of the standard model, the C-64 enabled software developers to write and port stunning high-resolution games to the platform. An improved VIC chip allowed not only 40 column text but supported sprites, making it easier to create fast-moving, flicker-free game graphics. In addition, a multifrequency synthesized sound chip (the legendary SID) gave the small machine a sweeter voice than any other machine of its time. Sales of this new computer took off, reaching a staggering 2 million units in 1983.

Commodore VIC-20, top. Commodore 64, bottom

This incredible volume, unheard of in the personal computer industry before (and it would still be a respectable figure for a new computer model today!) allowed Commodore to get its final revenge on Texas Instruments. A price war which left the C-64 selling for as little as US$199 caused TI to panic and remove its own computer, the TI-99/4A, from the market.

The Atari 400 and 800

Atari, flushed with the success of PONG and its 2600 games console, released the 400 and 800 series of computers in 1979. The 400 was essentially a cheaper version of the 800 with less memory and an awkward "membrane" keyboard. Designer Jay Miner had fitted these machines with impressive technology, including a custom blitter chip that could blast large sections of graphics on the screen without involving the CPU. The 400/800 could play games, like Frogger, that were indistinguishable from the arcade versions. However, Atari kept most of the details about its hardware secret in order to try and give an advantage to its in-house software developers. This limited the long-term success of the platform, which peaked at 600,000 units in 1982 and went steadily downhill.

The Atari 800 could have been much more, were it not for an accident of fate. Mighty IBM, the 800-pound gorilla of the computer industry, was starting to worry about being left behind in this new market, which had emerged at dizzying speeds.

"The worry was that we were losing the hearts and minds," IBM executive Jack Sams reminisced. "So the order came down from on high: 'Give me a machine to win back the hearts and minds.'"

At first, IBM thought about rebranding an existing computer, and had selected the Atari 800. However, after a visit to Atari headquarters, where IBM businessmen were literally put in a box and run through the assembly line by unorthodox and sometimes stoned Atari employees, the computing giant decided they would rather build their own computer.

To gain an advantage over existing personal computer models, IBM decided to use the new Intel 8088 CPU, which had a 16-bit memory model making it capable of directly addressing 1MB of memory (although unlike the fully 16-bit 8086, the 8088 chip saved money by being 8-bit externally). Bill Gates, in negotiations at the time for delivering BASIC for this new machine, was tremendously excited about the potential for a 16-bit CPU, and to this day claims that his input "tipped the balance" in favor of this chip.

Because the personal computer market was growing so rapidly, a rogue IBM design group in Boca Raton, Florida was given the go-ahead to design and build the new computer in less than a year. This necessitated a few shortcuts in the design, which unlike most IBM computers used primarily off-the-shelf chips. Even the operating system was contracted out to another company. Originally it was meant to be Digital Research, maker of the popular CP/M operating system for 8-bit computers. However, when DR took its time signing IBM's non-disclosure agreements, Microsoft seized its chance and won a deal to provide the operating system instead. A combination of off-the-shelf hardware and an operating system available from a third party made the rise of 100% compatible IBM PC clones possible, once the ROM BIOS of the PC had been successfully reverse-engineered. Compaq was the first company to do so, in 1982, but many others followed.

The original IBM PC, Model 5150. 5150 is also a police code for a severely disturbed person.

The IBM PC was released in late 1981 and retailed for US$2880, with 64k of RAM and a monitor. Despite the popularity of the IBM brand name, sales were initially sluggish, but picked up dramatically in the following year. The PC's own version of the killer app, the multi-function spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3, drove many sales. By 1984 the PC and its innumerable clones were selling 2 million units a year, nearly as many as the Commodore 64 and eclipsing older machines like the Apple ][. Many personal computer companies saw the PC as a threat. Their answer was to try and beat the giant with superior technology. It almost worked.

Personal computer marketshare during the 8-bit era

The 16-bit era (1984-1987)

The original, 128k Macintosh, with optional extra 400k floppy drive

In January 1984, Apple announced the Macintosh, a distinctive computer with a built-in 9-inch monochrome screen. Attached to the keyboard was a curious device called a mouse, invented in 1966 by pioneer Doug Engelbart. While Apple had introduced a mouse-driven computer with a graphical user interface the year before with the Lisa, its US$10,000 price tag drove away all but the most enthusiastic early adopters. The Macintosh sold for US$2,495, still quite expensive for 1984 but much more within the reach of ordinary mortals.

The history of the graphical user interface is a long and fascinating tale. By the mid-1980s, almost everyone agreed that windows, icons, a mouse, and a pointer (affectionately referred to as WIMP) was the way of the future. Bill Gates announced the development of Windows in 1983, and many other projects were already underway to combine the power of new 16-bit microprocessors (including the amazing new Motorola 68000) with the flash of WIMP.

The Amiga 1000 came with 256k of RAM, expandable to 512k

Commodore released its powerful Amiga 1000 computer, designed by ex-Atari guru Jay Miner, in 1985. Selling for US$1,495, its 4,096-color graphics, 4-voice stereo sampled sound and preemptive multitasking operating system made it seem like it came from ten years in the future. You could pull down any screen, including the Workbench, to reveal running screens behind, even if they were in different resolutions. Unfortunately, Commodore was in financial difficulties at the time and was unable to properly market the machine. They also took it off the market prematurely and cancelled all advertising, thinking that the advanced 2000 and cheaper 500 models were imminent. Sadly, these were delayed until 1987.

The Atari 520 ST. Later models would double the RAM to 1MB

In addition, Commodore was fighting one of their own. Jack Tramiel had left the company in a dispute with his financial backer, and had purchased Atari's computer division. He spearheaded the rapid development of the Atari ST, sometimes called the "Jackintosh." It also used a 68000 but lacked the Amiga's advanced custom chips and multitasking operating system. Nevertheless, it was still capable of playing great games, and its cheaper price (it originally retailed for US$799 with a monochrome monitor) hurt Amiga sales.

Apple's Macintosh sold reasonably well in 1984 but sales actually went down in the following year, mostly due to limitations with the original 128KB hardware and competition from Commodore and Atari. It too needed a killer app to survive, and it found one in Aldus' PageMaker, released in July 1985. PageMaker jump started the desktop publishing industry. Even though a PC version came out in 1986 and DTP packages Calamus and Pagestream were later released for the Atari and Amiga respectively, the Macintosh had already won the DTP market. This was enough to lift Macintosh sales above both the Amiga and Atari by the end of 1987.

The redoubtable Commodore 64 enjoyed its greatest sales during this era. The combination of low price and a wide variety of software titles made the little machine irresistible, with over 2 million units being sold each year. Software products like Geos brought a graphical user interface to the platform, and Commodore continued to release newer, cheaper models. However, by 1987, 8-bit computers were widely regarded as being behind the times technologically, and sales began to fall.

In the meantime, sales of IBM PCs and clones continued to relentlessly march ahead. Despite the fact that competing platforms were more powerful and, in the case of the Amiga and Atari ST, less expensive, the PC became acknowledged as the industry standard. By the end of 1986, the PC platform had, for the first time, passed the 50 percent market share mark. It would never look back.

Personal computer market share during the 16-bit era

The rise of the PC (1987-1990)

In 1985, Bill Gates wrote an amazing memo to Apple management. In the memo, he praised the Macintosh for its innovative design, but noted that it had failed to become a standard, like the IBM PC was becoming. He correctly deduced that it was the advent of inexpensive, 100%-compatible clone computers that was propelling the PC ahead, and that any defects in the design of the computer would eventually be remedied by the combined force of the many companies selling PCs and PC add-on products, such as new graphics cards. He proposed a plan, which Microsoft would help bring to fruition, whereby Apple would license their operating system and hardware design to a number of other computer companies. Microsoft had been an early supporter and promoter of the Macintosh, but Gates feared that without compatible machines, it would fail to become a "second standard."

Apple management ignored the memo, and decided to concentrate instead on making better computers themselves. The Macintosh II, introduced in 1987 for US$5,500, eschewed the original's all-in-one design in favor of a standard desktop chassis that supported add-in cards, and could be connected to a color monitor. Professional users loved it, although the price kept it out of the hands of most buyers.

The Macintosh II. Users could add their own video cards using the NuBus slots

Commodore finally introduced the more-powerful and -expandable Amiga 2000 (US$1495) and the cheaper Amiga 500 (US$595) with integrated keyboard, in 1987. The latter was expected to take over the Commodore 64's place as a cheap yet powerful home computer for the masses, and sales rose, peaking at over 1 million units in 1991.

Top: Amiga 2000. Bottom: Amiga 500

Meanwhile, the Atari ST's momentum tailed off, with sales slowly declining as better games started coming out designed specifically for the Amiga 500. Atari did not release any new models of the ST except for a version with extra RAM preinstalled. Thanks to the inclusion of a MIDI port with every model, however, the ST became the computer of choice for digital musicians.

But the real winner of this era was the IBM PC platform. Sales kept increasing, and by 1990 PCs and clone sales had more than tripled to over 16 million a year, leaving all of its competitors behind. The platform went from a 55 market share in 1986 to an 84% share in 1990. The Macintosh stabilized at about 6% market share and the Amiga and Atari ST at around 3% each.

Bill Gates' predictions were coming true, as new, inexpensive graphics cards that cloned the new IBM VGA standard were starting to make the PC a credible game platform. In 1990, Origin released the first Wing Commander game. Its 256-color, scaled, and rotated bitmaps gave the illusion of 3D and made existing 2D space shooters on other computers, game consoles and arcades seem instantly outdated and quaint by comparison. 3D came to role playing games with Ultima Underworld in 1992 and fast-action first-person shooters with Wolfenstein 3D the same year. Now it was the PC that was setting the standard for new games, instead of the Amiga.

Personal computer market share during the late 80s

The end of eras (1990-1994)

The golden age of PC gaming had arrived, with classics like Wing Commander, DOOM, Ultima 7 and System Shock pushing the boundaries of computer entertainment. At the same time, the PC became easier to use with the release of Windows 3 in 1990 and 3.1 in 1992. The latter operating system proved incredibly popular, pushing PC sales back from their minislump in 1991. By 1994 PCs and clones were selling at the incredible rate of 37 million units per year.

The Macintosh was also doing well, rising from 1.3 million units in 1990 to its all-time high of 4.5 million units in 1995. Macintosh market share peaked at 12% in 1993. It was a boom time for Apple, with the future looking bright.

Other companies were not so lucky. Sales of the Atari ST tailed off and only 30,000 units were sold in 1993. Atari itself fell into a severe cashflow crisis as Nintendo had taken all of its console market share, and the company was sold to hard drive manufacturer JTS in 1996.

The venerable Commodore 64 also fell off sharply, dropping from 1.25 million units in 1989 to only 175,000 units in 1993. This sudden loss of revenue hurt the company greatly. Sales of Amigas had also fallen drastically as new management cancelled best-selling units like the 500 and replaced them with the more expensive yet feature-poor 600, while delaying the next generation of AGA machines that would have competed with the PC's VGA chipset. Stuck with tons of old machines that couldn't sell and unable to build enough new machines for the Christmas '93 season, the company fell into a downward financial spiral which led inevitably to its bankruptcy in April 1994.

The NeXT cube, displaying all four of its brilliant shades of grey

Steve Jobs, exiled from Apple in 1985 because of poor sales of the original Macintosh, had built a new company called NeXT out of his personal fortune. The first NeXT cubes shipped in 1988, but their US$10,000 price tag doomed them to the same fate as the Lisa. NeXT never shipped more than 16,000 computers in a single year, and in 1993 the company laid off many of their employees and dropped all of their hardware to focus entirely on an Intel version of their operating system called NEXTSTEP/486. The company still failed to make money, however, and wound up being sold to Apple in 1996.

The PC kept soldiering on relentlessly, rising from 84% marketshare in 1990 to over 90% in 1994. However, there was still a chance for alternative operating systems to rise to dominance on that platform. The release of OS/2 2.0 by IBM in 1992 was briefly seen as a legitimate challenger to Windows, selling over two million copies. A new open-source, enthusiast operating system called Linux, first released in 1991, was starting to take shape and slowly gained popularity in academic circles. There was even GeoWorks Ensemble, a version of the GEOS GUI for the Commodore 64 that was much faster on low-end hardware than Windows due to it being written largely in assembly language. However, everything would change the following year.

Personal computer market share during the end of eras

The Mac stands alone (1994-2001)

The release of Windows 95 in August 1995 was a huge media event, unprecedented in personal computer history. People lined up around the block at midnight to be one of the first to receive the new software, and Tonight Show host Jay Leno emceed the launch party, with "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones playing as the official theme song of the event.

Many Macintosh, Amiga and OS/2 users wondered what all the fuss was about. Windows 95 contained many "new" features, like long filenames and preemptive multitasking, which had been a part of these operating systems since their inception (with the exception of Mac OS, which did not have preemptive multitasking). However, Windows 95 brought all these features to the mainstream, and third-party software developers flocked to it. Strong developer support by Microsoft and an eagerness by OEMs to bundle it with their machines ensured its success. Meanwhile, sales of OS/2 fell off the ends of the earth and IBM eventually stopped updating it in 2001.

PC sales shot up, and Macintosh sales slumped. By 1998, PCs were closing in on sales rates of 100 million units per year, while Macintosh sales fell from 4.5 million in 1995 to just 2.7 million in 1998. Many industry analysts started to predict that the Macintosh was doomed, and that Apple was set to follow Commodore into oblivion. However, Apple was able to float a junk bond in 1997 that kept them financially above water, despite losing over US$700 million in 2Q 1996 and again in 2Q 1997.

Bill Gates and Jay Leno share jokes about things that are Micro and Soft

Apple was at loose ends trying to complete a major update to their operating system, called Copland. Eventually Copland was cancelled, and Apple had to go shopping for a new operating system, one that could support preemptive multitasking and memory protection. Originally Apple had decided to purchase BeOS, which had been started on its own custom hardware then ported to PPC and x86 computers by ex-Apple employee Jean-Louis Gassee. But the flamboyant CEO of Be, Inc. held out for too much money and ultimately overplayed his hand. Steve Jobs jumped at his chance, and sold NeXT, Inc. outright to Apple for US$400 million in December 1996.

The new strategy for Apple was to have two operating systems, one based on NeXTSTEP and aimed at high-end users, and the other based on the now-creaky Classic Mac OS with bits of Copland's corpse bolted on. The latter OS shipped as Mac OS 8, and proved popular with Macintosh users. The former, now called Rhapsody, shipped only in Developer Preview releases, which confused developers completely. What should they develop for, Mac OS or Rhapsody? The two OSes had completely different APIs and programs from one could not work on another. This confusion, combined with more staggering financial losses in 1997, allowed Steve Jobs to stage a coup d'etat, seizing control of the company from the flailing Gil Amelio in July of 1997. Jobs placed most of his former NeXT engineers in charge of the operating system division, with their job no longer to enhance the Classic Mac OS, but to replace it completely.

This was to become Mac OS X, which added a subset of the Classic Mac OS API, called "Carbon," to the existing NeXTSTEP/Rhapsody API, which was now called "Cocoa." With the gradual phasing out of Classic Mac OS and its replacement by Mac OS X, Steve Jobs achieved two of his greatest goals: saving the Macintosh and replacing it with the NeXT Big Thing, all at the same time. The release of the colorful "gumdrop" iMac computer in 1998 revived Apple's fortunes, and with Mac OS X on the horizon, the Macintosh enjoyed a bump in sales to 3.8 million units in both 1999 and 2000.

Personal computer market share during the late 90s

The new era (2001- )

2001 saw many changes in the computer industry. Windows XP was released, finally combining the core and stability of the corporate version of Windows (Windows NT) with the consumer-friendly face of Windows 95, 98 and ME. The first shipping version of Mac OS X, 10.0, was also released, and although the initial version was slow and feature-incomplete, the 10.1 update later that year addressed many of those issues. Now the two remaining platforms, the PC and the Macintosh, were on roughly equal technical footing. Both operating systems supported not only preemptive multitasking but full protected memory for all applications.

Macintosh market share slowly declined from 3.2% in 1999 to 1.98% in 2004 as sales of Macintoshes remained flat, despite the new operating system and several flashy new models, including the Cube and the new, lamp-like, flat-panel iMac. However, with the release and overwhelming sales success of the iPod in 2001, positive buzz began surrounding Apple again and Macintosh sales started to creep up again in late 2004.

The loser in the replacement Mac OS sweepstakes, Be, Inc. ran out of money and closed operations in 2001. Its assets were sold to Palm, Inc., but a new German company called YellowTab bundled together the unfinished bits of BeOS, which would eventually be released as Zeta 1.0 in 2005.

While IBM officially dropped all support of OS/2 in 2005, a company called Serenity Systems continues to sell and update it, rebranded as eComStation. A new version is planned for 2006.

Even GeoWorks Ensemble got into the rebranding game, rereleased as New Deal Office from New Deal Inc. in 1996. Updates continued to be released as late as 2000.

And in an event that has to rank as the most surprising comeback in the entire history of personal computing, a new official Amiga computer, based on a PowerPC CPU, and a new version of AmigaOS for PPC, called AmigaOS4, were released in 2004. While the Amiga market had virtually disappeared after over ten years in the wilderness, enthusiasm for the new platform ran high among those who had not forgotten their fondness for the old computer. While sales figures are in the low thousands and not enough to even show up on a market share graph, this release showed that almost nothing can really kill an operating system. Despite the PC and Windows gaining a completely dominant 97% market share, alternatives like Linux, the Macintosh and even OS/2, Zeta, and the Amiga continue to exist.

Personal computer market share during the recent era

Conclusions

The story of the personal computer is a fascinating tale, and I can't help but get excited every time I read a new book or article that uncovers some new secret about this wild and wooly history. The lack of reliable information about the sales figures and market share for early computers compelled me to stay up all night a few years back, scouring the Internet and flipping through all my computer history books in the hope of compiling a complete set of figures.

It was not an easy job. Many sources are incomplete, and some are contradictory. Before IDC came along to count up all personal computers being sold every quarter, it was difficult to figure out the exact numbers for total machines sold. In the end, I had to combine and cross-reference many sources, canceling out those that contradicted each other and filling in the gaps with interpolation. There are undoubtedly some errors in the figures, but overall I believe they represent the most complete picture available for the industry as a whole over the last thirty years.

When you step back and look at the big picture, the overall dominance of the PC becomes clear. However, this was not always the case, and in fact it wasn't until 1986 that the PC platform first surpassed 50% market share. This was more than a decade after the first personal computer was sold.

What caused the rise of the PC platform? Undoubtedly, it was the clones. No other platform was ever cloned to the extent that the PC was. (The Apple ][ was cloned by Franklin computers and others before Apple sued them out of existence, and Apple did briefly flirt with licensed Macintosh clones from 1995 until 1997). If IBM hadn't come late to the personal computer party, and hadn't rushed its first PC from off-the-shelf parts and a third-party operating system, this story might have read very differently today.

The only person who predicted the Attack of the Clones was Bill Gates, who recalled that many mainframe computers had spawned work-alike clones in the past. It was this foresight that enabled him to get IBM to agree to a contract whereby Microsoft could license MS-DOS to third parties. IBM, thinking in mainframe timelines and assuming that clones would be perpetually years behind the originals, thought nothing of this stipulation. They were only concerned with getting the lowest possible flat rate for MS-DOS (which they mistakenly called PC-DOS) in the first place.

A combination of extreme foresight and even better luck enabled Microsoft's rise to dominance along with the PC platform. While some may look at this story as having a sad ending, I prefer to see things differently. While alternative platforms may be marginalized today, they still exist, and each platform contributed something of importance to the overall rise of the personal computer, which was the real triumph in this tale.

Before 1975, people could only dream of owning a personal computer. A handful of geeks and enthusiasts turned that dream into reality, and today personal computers are everywhere. Over 173 million computers were sold in 2004, and the figures are expected to continue to rise, as falling prices enable people all over the world to enjoy the benefits of personal computing.

Personal computer market share as percentages: 1975-2005