These same businesses shied away from personal computers until IBM released the PC in 1981.
Why has this not extended into the business world?Īs we learned in chapter 1, almost all businesses used IBM mainframe computers back in the 1960s and 1970s. In elementary schools, Apple reigns as well. Why is this? On almost all college campuses, you see a preponderance of Apple Macintosh laptops.
If you’ve worked in the world of business, you may have noticed that almost all of the computers run a version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system.
WHY IS MICROSOFT SOFTWARE SO DOMINANT IN THE BUSINESS WORLD? Features such as multitasking, virtual memory, and voice input have become standard features of both operating systems. It was not until the 1990 release of Windows 3.0 that Microsoft found success with a graphical user interface. Because of the hold of IBM and IBM-compatible personal computers on business, it was not until Windows 3.0 was released that business users began using a graphical user interface, ushering us into the graphical-computing era. Since 1990, both Apple and Microsoft have released many new versions of their operating systems, with each release adding the ability to process more data at once and access more memory. It was quite limited and had little commercial success. This version of Windows was not an operating system, but instead was an application that ran on top of the DOS operating system, providing a graphical environment. In 1985, Microsoft released the first version of Windows. Though not the first graphical operating system, it was the first one to find commercial success. In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer, featuring an operating system with a graphical user interface. The most popular of the early operating systems was IBM’s Disk Operating System, or DOS, which was actually developed for them by Microsoft. The amount of memory that early operating systems could handle was limited as well, making large programs impractical to run. Smartphones and tablets run operating systems as well, such as Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and Blackberry.Įarly personal-computer operating systems were simple by today’s standards they did not provide multitasking and required the user to type commands to initiate an action. For personal computers, the most popular operating systems are Microsoft’s Windows, Apple’s OS X, and different versions of Linux.