Re: Difference between apple mac and ibm pc

G’day!
   Wow. What a big question to answer. So I'll try to boil it down to the 
essence of the matter.
   Let's see, this would go back to about 1977. I was in 10th grade at the 
time and was already a fourth-year computer geek. Our high school had just 
got in another computer to put alongside of the two teletypes (yeah, 
teletypes, punch cards, punch tape, and 100-baud modems). Gasp! It was the 
brand-new Apple IIe! We almost immediately abandoned the teletypes. After 
the first overheat, we had to bring in a big window fan for it, since no-
one had made a power supply with a built-in fan yet.
   It wasn't until 1981 that IBM released their first PC. If memory serves 
me correctly, it had a 8088 4.77Mhz CPU, 16K RAM, 40K(?) ROM, two 5 ¼" 
160KB floppy disk drives, a video/printer card (I still have one of 
these), and an audio cassette connection (tape drives were still used for 
data backup). All this for about $1,500, I think it was.
   Some of us geeks who attended or hung around CSUN back then were 
finally able to sort out the differences between the two platforms: The 
assembler language instruction set was different (that is, pure 
programming code), the main CPU chips were different (IBM used the 8086 
and 8088, the Apple uses a 6502 chip) the BASIC computer language had 
different commands, and the Apple IIe had sixteen colors and programmable 
sound, something the IBM didn’t have. I think the original quote from IBM 
had been that no one considered color and sound important. Wasn't the 
first time those guys were terribly wrong. However, the IBM supported 
third-party hardware and was considerably easier to physically work on 
than the Apple.
   Over the next decade or so, the only thing Apple and IBM could agree 
upon was not to agree on anything. Thusly, we have the wildly divergent 
technologies we still experience today. Incidentally, Apple came out with 
their much-friendlier GUI (graphical user interface) early in the 1980s. 
People using PC/DOS or MS/DOS had to know a lot of near-UNIX style command 
line code to get things running on that platform. Any wonder why Macintosh 
had more than half the market?
   One other thing: You may have seen a bumper sticker that says Windows 
95=Macintosh 84. Gospel truth.
   Things didn't get much better in the 1990s, either. Microsoft finally 
released their Windows 3.0 in the early 1990s and 3.1 not too long after 
that. 3.1 was stable enough to use in a workplace environment, but still 
had to be fired up from a command-line DOS prompt. Wasn't until Windows 95 
that the Windows environment could finally be launched as part of a direct 
system start-up procedure.

   Yikes! Was I rambling on a bit? Sorry about the history lesson 
there...heh...

   In a nutshell: The PC and Macintosh evolved along completely different 
lines to get to the same end as end-user home computers. The CPU and IC 
chips used were different from the beginning, IBM (and then Microsoft) and 
Apple (and then Macintosh) had completely different ideas about what their 
users wanted, and the programmers and hardware engineers who loved and 
supported these systems went about doing this in completely different 
fashions from one another (ask about their dress codes and you could 
pretty much figure it out from there).

   Hopefully this was a good enough answer to your question. If it wasn't, 
well, then you've got yourself some first-class computer geek trivia...

   Good luck!
   Steve Cartoon
   Web Software Engineer