Three Years that Shook the World: 1984, 1995, and 2006

We all like a good law. Some of our favorites are Moore’s Law, which tells us our new computer will be obsolete faster than we can learn to use it, Newton’s Law, which stops us from floating off into space, and of course Murphy’s Law, which tells us bad things are more likely to happen to us if we don’t expect them to. Being one for appreciating the more obscure statistics, now you can add Howard’s Eleven Year Law of Computing Earthquakes, which tells us nothing funny at all, just that there’s a major upheaval in the computing landscape every eleven years.

These are earthquakes that have affected ordinary folks’ use of personal computers. I start at 1984 because, although the term “personal computer” was coming into vogue before then, computers were hardly personal, and had not yet really captured the imagination of the masses. (Although, 1973 was an interesting year, as it saw geeks building personal computers from kits at home really take off, and led to the establishment of the first user groups.)

With the next “biggie” in 1995, I got curious about the next eleven years. For mine, I’m suggesting the 2006 Mac switch to Intel, and what it’s meant for virtualization, to have been the next eleventh year “biggie.”

Many other earthquakes have hit personal computing since 1984 and not eleven years spaced, especially for instance, the world wide web. But I’m just looking at that box of electronics and its OS sitting on your desk.

1984: The Mac. Computing for the masses.
1984, for various reasons, many Apple Matters readers wouldn’t remember. But if you were old enough and sober enough, you would remember the Mac revolution. The graphical user interface (GUI) was not new and already had had another very short lived acronym—WIMP: windows icons, mouse and pointer. The Apple Lisa, released the previous year, also had a WIMP interface. (I don’t think we ever came to calling it WIMPI ) and the announcement of Windows actually preceded the Mac by a couple of months, but who remembers it? Maybe it was wimpy. After all, until Windows 95, Windows was just a glorified menu system plonked on DOS.

The Mac caught the eye, though, because it had personality, it had the new easy-to-use WIMP interface, it was portable, and it was affordable when compared to the Lisa.

The Mac brought the GUI to the masses. Not that we could afford a Mac, but where the Lisa made us think GUIs were for uber-rich businesses, the Mac made us believe usable computers were within reach.

Before the Mac, most people saw desktop computers as something for businesses and geeks. But with the arrival of the Mac, suddenly the masses believed they could use a computer, and more importantly, wanted to.

1995: Windows 95. A GUI OS for all.
As I say, Windows was a glorified menu system, and in fact, in some places it didn’t look a lot different to DOS’s own graphical interface.
But in 1995, eleven long years after Apple made the masses believe that GUIs were for them, Microsoft finally made it a reality. Windows brought the GUI operating system to all computer users. (Of course, we Mac-heads would probably say it brought a WIMPI OS to them.)

An eleven year head start is not easy to catch, and Windows 95 in many regards was still inferior to Mac OS. But for all those millions of folks still suffering under DOS-based PCs with 640K memory limitation problems and pseudo-GUIs, Windows 95 was a revolution. So much so that it spawned probably the first mass queuing for a technology product—certainly the first to get mass media coverage—with many people queuing up for its midnight launch.

The release of Windows 95 totally rocked the personal computer world, for both good and bad. Apple was among the hardest hit and took a further eleven years itself to truly find its feet again.

2006: Mac goes Intel and introduces virtualization to the masses.
True, the switch to Intel in itself was a major earthquake. It’s no joke that hell froze over. Sites that went from spewing vitriolic hate at anything Intel related, now can’t get enough of Intel news, reporting with orgasmic excitement the slightest processor upgrades. It has indeed been a seismic shift.

When this Intel switch first happened, we could only hypothesize about the impact on the role of the Mac in the computing community. Of course we liked to talk it up. But history now shows us both a slow and steady increase in market share, and Macs are selling better than PCs. While the Mac is setting new sales records for Apple, this week we saw another major PC vendor shut shop when Gateway was bought up by Acer.

Coupled with the resounding success of the iPhone and the entrenched dominance of the iPod, both producing significant halo effects, the timing of the switch to Intel now appears to have been perfect.

But the other factor making the switch to Intel a computing earthquake, and the one having broader ramifications, is virtualization. First Apple stunned the world by providing the means to boot Windows on your Mac, but then Parallels released Parallels Desktop, a virtualization software enabling you to run within OS X, Windows and many of its applications with minimal performance loss for those applications.

Just as the Mac introduced the GUI to the masses, the Intel switch has introduced virtualization to the masses. Microsoft has long been keen on virtualization, buying Virtual PC several years ago. Its major intention with VPC, though, was to enable the removal of legacy support of older versions of Windows within its latest versions. However, that hasn’t worked out the way Microsoft intended.

And now Apple has let the cat out of the bag. You don’t need a Windows PC anymore. And Microsoft is nervous as it doesn’t yet know how to tackle virtualization and the threat it poses.

Virtualization releases us from the OS and even has the potential to release us from the hardware.

2017
Who knows what 2017 will bring, but expect it to be exciting and revolutionary.