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OS Wars_part 1

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OS Wars_part 1 | Command Line Heroes

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The OS wars. It is a period of mounting tensions. The empires of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs careen toward an inevitable battle over proprietary software—only one empire can emerge as the purveyor of a standard operating system for millions of users. Gates has formed a powerful alliance with IBM while Jobs tries to maintain the purity of his brand. Their struggle for dominance threatens to engulf the galaxy. Meanwhile, in distant lands, and unbeknownst to the Emperors, open source rebels have begun to gather...

Veterans from computer history, including Andy Hertzfeld, from the original Macintosh team, and acclaimed tech journalist Steven Levy, recount the moments of genius, and tragic flaws, that shaped our technology for decades to come.

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Transcript

Some stories are so epic, with such high stakes, that in my head, it's like that crawling text at the start of a Star Wars movie. You know, like- Episode One, The OS Wars. Yeah, like that. It is a period of mounting tensions. The empires of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs careen toward an inevitable battle over proprietary software. Gates has formed a powerful alliance with IBM, while Jobs refuses to license his hardware or operating system. Their battle for dominance threatens to engulf the galaxy in an OS war. Meanwhile, in distant lands, and unbeknownst to the emperors, open source rebels have begun to gather. Okay. Maybe that's a bit dramatic, but when we're talking about the OS wars of the 1980s, '90s, and 2000s, it's hard to overstate things. There really was an epic battle for dominance. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates really did hold the fate of billions in their hands. Control the operating system, and you control how the vast majority of people use computers, how we communicate with each other, how we source information. I could go on, but you know all this. Control the OS, and you would be an emperor. I'm Saron Yitbarek, and you're listening to Command Line Heroes, an original podcast from Red Hat. What is a Command Line Hero, you ask? Well, if you would rather make something than just use it, if you believe developers have the power to build a better future, if you want a world where we all get a say in how our technologies shape our lives, then you, my friend, are a command line hero. In this series, we bring you stories from the developers among us who are transforming tech from the command line up. And who am I to be guiding you on this trek? Who is Saron Yitbarek? Well, actually I'm guessing I'm a lot like you. I'm a developer for starters, and everything I do depends on open source software. It's my world. The stories we tell on this podcast are a way for me to get above the daily grind of my work, and see that big picture. I hope it does the same thing for you, too. What I wanted to know right off the bat was, where did open source technology even come from? I mean, I know a fair bit about Linus Torvalds and the glories of Linux, as I'm sure you do, too, but really, there was life before open source, right? And if I want to truly appreciate the latest and greatest of things like DevOps and containers, and on and on, well, I feel like I owe it to all those earlier developers to know where this stuff came from. So, let's take a short break from worrying about memory leaks and buffer overflows. Our journey begins with the OS wars, the epic battle for control of the desktop. It was like nothing the world had ever seen, and I'll tell you why. First, in the age of computing, you've got exponentially scaling advantages for the big fish; and second, there's never been such a battle for control on ground that's constantly shifting. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs? They don't know it yet, but by the time this story is halfway done, everything they're fighting for is going to change, evolve, and even ascend into the cloud. Okay, it's the fall of 1983. I was negative six years old. Ronald Reagan was president, and the U.S. and the Soviet Union are threatening to drag the planet into nuclear war. Over at the Civic Center in Honolulu, it's the annual Apple sales conference. An exclusive bunch of Apple employees are waiting for Steve Jobs to get onstage. He's this super bright-eyed 28-year-old, and he's looking pretty confident. In a very serious voice, Jobs speaks into the mic and says that he's invited three industry experts to have a panel discussion on software. But the next thing that happens is not what you'd expect. Super cheesy '80s music fills the room. A bunch of multi-colored tube lights light up the stage, and then an announcer voice says- And now, ladies and gentlemen, the Macintosh software dating game. Jobs has this big grin on his face as he reveals that the three CEOs on stage have to take turns wooing him. It's essentially an '80s version of The Bachelor, but for tech love. Two of the software bigwigs say their bit, and then it's over to contestant number three. Is that? Yup. A fresh-faced Bill Gates with large square glasses that cover half his face. He proclaims that during 1984, half of Microsoft's revenue is going to come from Macintosh software. The audience loves it, and gives him a big round of applause. What they don't know is that one month after this event, Bill Gates will announce his plans to release Windows 1.0. You'd never guess Jobs is flirting with someone who'd end up as Apple's biggest rival. That flirtation was about to turn into one of the most important and vicious battles in tech history. Steve thought that Bill was a secondary character. Andy Hertzfeld was part of the original team that created the Macintosh computer. His company was about software and Steve thought he was all about hardware and the whole user experience, and he just considered Microsoft as an independent software vendor, and not really his main competition. Jobs was making a classic mistake. He was thinking like a hardware guy. But the thing is, in the new world of personal computing, the money was increasingly not in the hardware. It was in the software, and specifically in the operating system. If you controlled the OS, you controlled the whole experience. A guy like Bill Gates knew this, and by 1995, he was worth $12.9 billion, while Apple was just 90 days away from bankruptcy. You know what? I think we need to step back a moment. To really understand this epic battle between Jobs and Gates, and what it ultimately means for all of us developers today, we have to rewind. We have to go back to this amazing moment when the personal computer is about to be born. Okay, we're back to 1975. I'm now negative 14 years old. The Vietnam War has just ended. A Xerox engineer named Gary Kildall creates the first operating system for microcomputers. It's called CP/M, which stands for Control Program for Microcomputers. At the time, it was a pretty brilliant innovation that let applications work on different machines. CP/M becomes the standard for personal computers. Kildall is sitting pretty. He's got the market locked up, for the moment. Then, in 1980, IBM comes calling. And this is a crucial moment in the David and Goliath story of personal computing. Because at this point, IBM is a total giant. The company earned $26 billion in 1980. They owned the computer market. So when IBM wants to get into the personal computer market, and they come knocking on Gary Kildall's door asking to license CP/M for their new personal computer, Kildall should have jumped at the chance. But he didn't. Maybe he didn't realize how important the deal was. Maybe he was distracted. For whatever reason, Kildall missed his appointment with IBM. Legend has it he was out flying his plane. When he finally does show up for a meeting, he refuses to sign IBM's non-disclosure agreement. The deal falls apart. And that's when IBM turned to a young, 25-year-old Harvard dropout named Bill Gates. At this point, Microsoft isn't even two people in a garage. It's literally just Gates and Paul Allen working on programming languages. They don't even have an operating system to offer IBM. But Gates, being Gates, says, "Sure, we can do that." He goes out and buys an OS called QDOS from Seattle Computer Products for $75,000. QDOS stands for Quick and Dirty Operating System. Gates renames it MS-DOS, and Microsoft is born. Now here's the crucial part: IBM wanted to just buy MS-DOS outright, but Gates refused. Instead, he negotiated a deal to license MS-DOS to IBM, but he kept the rights to license it to other computer makers too. Steven Levy is a journalist who's covered the tech industry for decades. He understood that if he owned the operating system that was the same as the IBM operating system, then any company that made a computer that ran the same software as the IBM computer, they would have to come to him. Exactly. Gates had figured out that the real money wasn't in selling an operating system once. The real money was in licensing that operating system to as many people as possible. It was a brilliant move that would change the entire industry. By 1984, when Apple was having their dating game moment, MS-DOS was already becoming the standard. Meanwhile, Apple was taking a very different approach. When the Apple II came out in 1977, it was incredibly successful. But Jobs had a vision for something even better. He wanted to create the perfect computer, with the perfect user interface. And he found his inspiration at Xerox PARC. In 1979, Jobs visited Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, and he saw something that blew his mind. The Xerox Alto computer had a graphical user interface. Instead of typing commands, you could point and click with a mouse. You could see windows and icons on the screen. It was like nothing he'd ever seen before. He saw the future of computing, and he saw that Apple should be the company to bring that to the masses. Andy Hertzfeld remembers how excited Jobs was after that visit. Steve just thought that the way that we were doing computing, with command lines and text, was really primitive and unnecessary, and that everybody should be able to use a computer, not just technical people. And the graphical user interface was really the way to make that happen. So Jobs set out to create the first mass-market computer with a graphical user interface. The result was the Lisa computer, named after his daughter. But the Lisa was expensive and didn't sell well. So Apple's next computer would be the Macintosh, and it would change everything. The Mac launched in 1984 with one of the most famous commercials of all time. The "1984" Super Bowl ad positioned Apple as the rebel fighting against Big Brother IBM. It was a powerful message: Apple was the scrappy underdog fighting for our freedom to think different. But here's the thing about the Mac: it was revolutionary, but it was also expensive and limited. Jobs was obsessed with controlling every aspect of the user experience, which meant Apple made both the hardware and the software. No one else could make Mac-compatible computers. No one else could license the Mac OS. Steve was a perfectionist and he wanted to control every pixel on the screen. He wanted to control the industrial design. He wanted to control the user experience from beginning to end. That's Ken Segall, who worked on Apple's advertising campaigns. And the only way you can do that is if you control the hardware and the software. You can't do that if you're licensing your operating system to other people, because then you can't control what kind of hardware they're putting it on. This was the fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. Apple wanted to make the perfect computer. Microsoft wanted to make the standard operating system. And in the 1980s and '90s, standardization was going to win. While Apple was perfecting the Mac, Microsoft was working on something called Windows. And guess what? Windows was basically Microsoft's version of the Mac's graphical user interface, but it ran on any PC that used MS-DOS. When Jobs saw an early version of Windows, he was furious. He felt like Microsoft had stolen Apple's ideas. There's a famous story about a meeting where Jobs confronted Gates about this. Jobs accused Microsoft of ripping off Apple. Gates's response was classic. Gates said, "Well, Steve, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set, and found out that you had already stolen it." Both companies had borrowed heavily from Xerox's innovations. But Microsoft was about to take those innovations and make them standard across the entire PC industry. When Windows 3.0 launched in 1990, it was a huge success. Suddenly, every PC could have a graphical user interface, not just the Mac. By the mid-1990s, Windows had won the OS war. Microsoft controlled about 90% of the desktop market. Apple was struggling. In 1985, after a boardroom coup, Steve Jobs had been forced out of his own company. Apple was making computers, but they were expensive and had a tiny market share. Microsoft had created this incredibly powerful platform, and they were using that platform to extend into other areas. That's James Allworth, author and journalist. They were bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. They were making it very difficult for competitors to get distribution. They were using their monopoly power in operating systems to dominate other markets. It looked like Microsoft had won permanently. But remember what I said earlier about the ground constantly shifting in tech? Well, the ground was about to shift in a major way. Because while Microsoft and Apple were fighting over the desktop, a group of open source rebels were quietly building something that would change everything. In 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish computer science student named Linus Torvalds was frustrated with his computer. He had this PC that ran MS-DOS, but he wanted to run Unix, which was this powerful operating system used on university computers. The problem was, Unix was expensive and didn't run on PCs. Linus wanted to have Unix on his PC, but he couldn't afford it. So he decided to write his own operating system. That's Steven Vaughan-Nichols, a technology journalist who's been covering Linux since the beginning. It started as just a personal project. He wasn't trying to change the world. He just wanted to have a Unix-like operating system that he could run on his PC. Torvalds started working on what would become Linux in his dorm room. At first, it was just a hobby. He posted about it on a Usenet newsgroup, saying he was working on a free operating system and asking if anyone was interested. What happened next was unprecedented. Programmers from around the world started contributing code, testing the system, and fixing bugs. Linux became a true community effort. Unlike Microsoft or Apple, which developed their operating systems behind closed doors, Linux was developed in the open. The internet, by its nature, at that time, was less client server, totally, and more peer to peer. Paul Jones is the director of ibiblio.org, an online library. He worked as a developer during those early days. We're talking about, really, some sort of VAX to VAX, some sort of scientific workstation, the scientific workstation. That doesn't mean that client and server relationships and applications weren't there, but it does mean that the original design was to think of how to do peer-to-peer things, the opposite of what IBM had been doing, in which they had dumb terminals that had only enough intelligence to manage the user interface, but not enough intelligence to actually let you do anything in the terminal that would expose anything to it. Before Linux came along, there were other attempts at creating open source operating systems. Richard Stallman had started the GNU project in 1983, with the goal of creating a completely free Unix-like operating system. But GNU was missing a crucial piece: the kernel, the core of the operating system. Linux provided that missing piece. When Torvalds decided to release Linux under the GNU General Public License, it meant that anyone could use, modify, and distribute the software, as long as they kept it free. This was revolutionary. I think at the time, what attracted people is that they were going to be in control of their own world. Stormy Peters is an industry analyst and advocate for free and open source software. When open source software first came out, the OS was all proprietary. You couldn't even add a printer without going through proprietary software. You couldn't add a headset. You couldn't develop a small hardware device of your own, and make it work with your laptop. You couldn't even put in a DVD and copy it, because you couldn't change the software. Even if you owned the DVD, you couldn't copy it. You had no control over this hardware/software system that you'd bought. You couldn't create anything new and bigger and better out of it. That's why an open source operating system was so important at the beginning. We needed an open source collaborative environment where we could build bigger and better things. Linux started small, but it grew incredibly fast. In 1991, the first version had about 10,000 lines of code. By 2000, it had over 2.4 million lines of code, written by thousands of developers around the world. What made Linux different was that it was developed in the open, with contributions from people all over the world. You had the best programmers contributing to it, not because they were paid to, but because they wanted to. And unlike the proprietary operating systems from Microsoft and Apple, Linux was free. You could download it, modify it, and distribute it without paying anyone. This was a completely different model from what had come before. At first, Microsoft and Apple didn't take Linux seriously. It was seen as a hobbyist project, something for computer nerds to play with. But Linux kept growing, and it kept getting better. Soon, it wasn't just running on PCs in dorm rooms. It was running on servers at major companies. Microsoft's CEO Steve Ballmer famously called Linux "a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches." But that attitude would eventually change, because Linux wasn't going away. It was becoming the foundation of the internet. Linux became the operating system of choice for web servers, for database servers, for all the infrastructure that powers the internet. While Microsoft dominated the desktop, Linux was taking over the server room. And this is where our story really begins to get interesting. Because the OS wars weren't really over. They were just moving to a new battlefield. The rise of the internet meant that the real action was shifting from the desktop to the server room. And in the server room, Linux was about to become king. 27 years later, Linux is much, much bigger than Linus ever dreamed it would be. By the fall of 1991, Torvalds releases 10,000 lines of code, and people around the world start offering comments, then tweaks, additions, edits. That might seem totally normal to you as a developer today, but remember, at that time, open collaboration like that was a moral affront to the whole proprietary system that Microsoft, Apple, and IBM had done so well by. Then that openness gets enshrined. Torvalds places Linux under the GNU general public license. The license that had kept Stallman's GNU system free was now going to keep Linux free, too. The importance of that move to incorporate GPL, basically preserving the freedom and openness of the software forever, cannot be overstated. In fact, by the license that it's under, which is called GPL version 2, you have to share the code if you're going to try to sell it or present it to the world, so that if you make an improvement, it's not enough just to give someone the improvement. You actually have to share with them the nuts and bolts of all those changes. Then they are adapted into Linux if they're good enough. That public approach proved massively attractive. Eric Raymond, one of the early evangelists of the movement wrote in his famous essay that, "Corporations like Microsoft and Apple have been trying to build software cathedrals, while Linux and its kind were offering a great babbling bazaar of different agendas and approaches. The bazaar was a lot more fun than the cathedral." Mind you, Linux isn't a purely egalitarian utopia. Linus Torvalds doesn't approve everything that goes into the kernel, but he does preside over its changes. He's installed a dozen or so people below him to manage different parts of the kernel. They, in turn, trust people under themselves, and so on, in a pyramid of trust. Changes might come from anywhere, but they're all judged and curated. It is amazing, though, to think how humble, and kind of random, Linus' DIY project was to begin with. He didn't have a clue he was the Luke Skywalker figure in all this. He was just 21, and had been programming half his life. But this was the first time the silo opened up, and people started giving him feedback. Dozens, then hundreds, and thousands of contributors. With crowdsourcing like that, it doesn't take long before Linux starts growing. Really growing. It even finally gets noticed by Microsoft. Once Microsoft really solidified its monopoly, and indeed it was judged in federal court as a monopoly, anything that could be a threat to that, they reacted very strongly to. So of course, the idea that free software would be emerging, when they were charging for software, they saw as a cancer. They tried to come up with an intellectual property theory about why this was going to be bad for consumers. Linux was spreading, and Microsoft was worried. By 2006, Linux would become the second most widely used operating system after Windows, with about 5,000 developers working on it worldwide. Five thousand. Remember that memo that Bill Gates sent to Apple, the one where he's lecturing them about the importance of partnering with other people? Turns out, open source would take that idea of partnerships to a whole new level, in a way Bill Gates would have never foreseen. We've been talking about these huge battles for the OS, but so far, the unsung heroes, the developers, haven't fully made it onto the battlefield. That changes next time, on Command Line Heroes. In episode two, part two of the OS wars, it's the rise of Linux. Businesses wake up, and realize the importance of developers. These open source rebels grow stronger, and the battlefield shifts from the desktop to the server room. There's corporate espionage, new heroes, and the unlikeliest change of heart in tech history. It all comes to a head in the concluding half of the OS wars. To get new episodes of Command Line Heroes delivered automatically for free, make sure you hit subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, or however you get your podcasts. Over the rest of the season, we're visiting the latest battlefields, the up-for-grab territories where the next generation of Command Line Heroes are making their mark. For more info, check us out at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. I'm Saron Yitbarek. Until next time, keep on coding.

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About the show

Command Line Heroes

During its run from 2018 to 2022, Command Line Heroes shared the epic true stories of developers, programmers, hackers, geeks, and open source rebels, and how they revolutionized the technology landscape. Relive our journey through tech history, and use #CommandLinePod to share your favorite episodes.