Brief History of Microsoft and Apple

Essay by Cenobite321Junior High, 7th gradeA+, February 2008

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The History of Microsoft - Apple"Good artists copyÃ¢ÂÂ¦ great artists steal". This phrase by Pablo Picasso describes in a sense the development of the two titan software companies in the world: Microsoft, known for the Windows Operative System and Apple, known now for the iPod player and the Macintosh. It is interesting to see that not everything "created" by these two companies are really ideas of them.

Apple was started by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976 to market the Apple I a computer they designed and built in Jobs's garage, to compete against the IBM computers. After they were incorporated in 1977, Apple introduced the Apple II, a computer that was able to generate graphics and had its own keyboard.

Apple's innovations started when they hired some people from the Xerox Company who had some ideas of the new Graphical User Interface (GUI) and the mouse driver that company was working on.

Steve Jobs visited Xerox Palo Alto Research Center to see more about these two innovations and decided to pay Xerox in order to gain the rights of using the GUI and the mouse driver on their new computers.

In 1984, Apple introduced the Macintosh computer which had also a GUI that made the computer easy to operate. Unfortunately in 1985 the poor sales and the company's internal fights led to the firing of Steve Jobs.

On the other side of the playground is Microsoft that was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Microsoft started in the computer business by designing BASIC language for the Altair 8800. Years later, the IBM chose Microsoft to write an Operative System for their computers. The problem was that Microsoft didn't have anything like an Operative System for the IBM, so Paul Allen decided to buy from a programmer,