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Why is Windows "PC"?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2024
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Because Apple ran a series of commercials comparing Mac to "PC" to differentiate themselves from the rest of the market but didn't acknowledge other OSs besides Windows in this series.
Those ads played everywhere and now everyone associates the term PC with Windows.
I could have my timeline off but the first time I heard PC to refer to windows specifically was around the time these commercials aired.
https://youtu.be/0eEG5LVXdKo?si=oSGoV2fpgkJ-1BWX
That's not the reason. The "PC" marketing term originated with the IBM PC, after which every non-Apple device attempted to make some name-wise connection to the former, spawning a series of so called "IBM PC Compatibles" that have principally lived on design-wise until the present day.
Well, also except for any other microcomputer that wasn't trying to run DOS. (Surely there were some -- Amiga, maybe? IDK.)
Yeah I'm pretty sure PC standing for Personal Computer was at one point a trademark of IBM. The IBM 5150 PC launched into a world full of different and incompatible microcomputers, even those that shared processors weren't software compatible with each other. Hell, one of the things that sank Commodore was nearly none of their own machines were compatible with each other; most code written for a VIC20 wouldn't run on a C64, etc.
It was IBM designing a machine from off the shelf components, buying an OS from Microsoft, and relying only on the copyright on the BIOS to keep the machine proprietary that led to their ubiquity even 40 years later. Compaq wrote a non-infringing BIOS and was able to put to market a machine compatible with the PC's software library. And now, for the first time in microcomputer history, you had a de facto industry standard. Build an 8086 machine with ISA slots, write or license a BIOS that MS-DOS can talk to, and now you too can run that growing software library.
This was not a decision anyone made. The 8086 was quite literally slapped together because the engineers didn't think it was going to be much of a big deal, IBM didn't set out to create a standard that would stand for decades after they gave up all involvement with it. The modern x86 PC was metastasized as much as it was designed.
The IBM-PC predates that campaign by almost two decades. PC was firmly associated with Microsoft Windows by the time the ad campaign ran in late 2000's. I don't think the ads even mention Windows, they just say "PC".
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