Slashdot Mirror

Without adjusting for inflation Intel's processors cost about as much as they did 20+ years ago.

http://www.krsaborio.net/intel/research/1991/0422.htm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116492

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116899

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/01/09/business/company-news-intel-moves-to-cut-price-of-386-chip.html

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116775

Almost every other component (except maybe the GPU) has dropped tremendously in price over the past couple decades, but CPUs have stayed almost flat. Hopefully the newly competitive ARM processors will finally drive prices down (iSuppli estimates a measly $18 for Apple's new A7 CPU+GPU) but I'm not holding my breath.

They were the first company with the latop as you know it. (Apple is responsible for a whole lot of 'as you know it's, not technical firsts)

There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor.

Nope. The Powerbook 100 was introduced in late 1991. PC notebooks in the modern clamshell design were showing up as early as 1988. The one I remember best was a Sager 286 model. I noticed they were local to me, so I dropped by their offices and requested to see one (it retailed for over $5k, I certainly couldn't afford to buy one at the time). They brought one out and I got to touch and play with it - a glimpse of what the future held. They were so proud of it, giving me a little spiel about how they were going to upgrade it with a 16 MHz 386SX processor in a few months. They insisted on calling it a notebook, to distinguish it from the clunky laptop computers like the old Compaq Portable and Osborne.

By 1990, the notebook form factor had gained enough traction that Intel announced the 386SL - a low power version of the 80386 made specifically for laptops. They weren't able to churn them out until the following year, but that should demonstrate that the notebook market was thriving long before Apple ever showed up to the game.

I'm starting to wear this phrase out, but: Just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean that they invented it. (To be fair, Apple's big contribution to the form factor was the trackball, then the trackpad. Before then, you had to plug in a mouse if you were going to use it outside of DOS. One laptop had a marble trackball off by the side. The Powerbook was the first with a huge trackball smack dab in the middle.)

"As a supporter and advocate of open source software, and more importantly, the principle of openness"

I totally believe you man, and you didn't come here to piss all over Groklaw, even though that is the impression any disinterested observer would have from reading the above .. :)

I notice in that in that example of ad hominem off-topic personal abuse you managed to not once address the contents of Groklaw viz-a-viz the legal implications of the SCO case and other attacks on the Open Source industry.

As an advocate of the 'principle of openness', are you also in favor of a 'reporter', specifically Maureen O'Gara (a known MS shill) arriving at her home, taking pictures and posting irrelevant personal information regarding Jones' religious affiliation?

Folks: he's just repeating some old PJ-censors_Groklaw fud. Notice how they take special care to not actually address the legal arguments - just go straight for the personal abuse. Always a sure sign of a shill ...

HTTP is the web. FTP isn't. Gopher wasn't.

HTTP is the "Hypertext Transport Protocol", not the "World Wide Web Protocol".

FTP has been accessible in web browsers since the start, and you can view HTML documents in your browser the same whether obtained via HTTP or FTP.

Here is a thread from the early days of the Web on the use of HTTP and FTP.

IIRC Gopher was also accessible in early web browsers.

hey, did you read the MS / IBM Joint Development Agreement ??
uhm.... You are not totally right about it..
http://www.krsaborio.net/research/acrobat/1980s/871126.pdf

I realize this is a post on a user forum and hardly authoritative, but it was the best I could find on short notice to respond to the 'nitwit' belittlement.

• Apple gave Xerox a $1 million block of pre-IPO stock in return for the rights to visit PARC, without an NDA, and take notes. Xerox showed them everything openly and happily. Keep in mind this is well before software patents etc. http://www.woz.org/letters/pirates/12.html, http://www.sitepoint.com/article/real-history-gui/ 5 http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html
• Apple subsequently hired half of the Alto staff.
• Xerox later sued Apple, claiming Apple was using Xerox-"copyrighted" code. The complaint wasn't so much that Apple was making money off of the code, as it was that Xerox was not able to license the code to others because the others were worried Apple would sue them. http://www.krsaborio.net/research/legal/xerox.htm
• The lawsuit was not dismissed on a "technicality" -- it was dismissed because Xerox's claims were found to be entirely unfounded. Apple wasn't using a single bit of Xerox code. Furthermore, Xerox had decided long ago not to patent the relevant technology. And the judge ruled that if other firms were worried about being sued by Apple, then it was they and not Xerox who should be suing Apple.
• Unlike the Apple-Xerox transaction, Microsoft didn't pay Apple anything.