Alex Jones and Apple
Alex Jones has not died or moved to alpha Centauri or anything like that, despite anything which you might have read and the corporate left effort to totally de-platform the guy appears to be failing. It may be the case that the most major player in that effort is Apple…..
Over a career in software development spanning 40 years, I have worked with pretty nearly every kind of computer that there is with one exception; I would sell shoes or used cars for 100 years before I would ever touch and Apple Computer in that has nothing to do with Alex Jones. To really understand that one you have to go back to about 1978…
At that time people had been producing 8-bit microcomputers for three or four years utilizing components which had originally been used for traffic light controllers. Those computers were useful for very small databases and for word processing, largely because the worst word processor is so far above the best typewriter that it isn’t worth thinking about. But the memory architecture of those computers was extremely limited. Everybody could tell that they needed 16 or 32 bit architecture and reasonable memory addressing schemes if they wanted to do anything more than very simple word processors with personal computers. Intel was first to the market with a 16-bit microprocessor, the 8086 which, while being a true 16-bit chip, retained a segmented memory architecture which could only address 64 k bytes at a time.
Pretty much the entire OEM microcomputer market, some 200 advanced companies in Silicon Valley, took one look at the 8086 and also at the specifications for the Motorola 68,000 chip which was still two years away (but which had true 32-bit architecture and essentially unlimited memory addressing) and told Intel something like “thanks but no thanks, would rather wait the two years”. At that point, if Intel had been a Japanese corporation, the executive Board and Pres. of the company would have all committed seppuku, that would have been more shame that they could live with.
And then, starting around 1980, with OEM microcomputer companies taking the first steps towards marketing Motorola 68,000 based microcomputers running Idriss and other hot rod versions of UNIX 5, IBM began a colossal marketing campaign for the original PC, which was a crippled toy by comparison. Two or three years later, all but one or two of those bright little companies which had planned a Motorola/UNIX revolution, were lying around dead.
The one company which was in a position to try to challenge IBM by creating a mass-market personal computer utilizing Motorola chips, was Apple. So what did Apple do? The answer is, they created two computers, the Lisa and the toaster Mac, which were so pathetic that they convinced the entire world that the 68,000 chip itself was a bad idea. Both of those computers used more than half of the compute power of the 68,000 chip to hold graphics up on a screen (no graphics card), with remnant compute power being less than an 8 bit trash 80 running at 4 MHz and a floppy disk which was unusually slow even by the standards of that time. Basically a $10,000 paperweight.
And then, around 1985, Atari produced a computer which was exactly what the PC should have been from day one: a micro computer with an 8 MHz 68,000 chip, a real graphics card, a splendid graphical user interface (GEM), and pretty much everything else which the original PC lacked.
Knowing that they would require four years to produce anything to compete with that, Apple hauled representatives of Atari into their offices in Cupertino and threatened to tie the Atari computer up in lawsuits for 10 years unless a list of crippling changes was made to it and to its operating system. Atari, at that point, went back into the toy business.
Apple believes in closed systems. Everything you ever do to an Apple Computer or try to add to an Apple Computer has to come through Apple. They don’t even allowed users to change the battery in an IPhone. I mean who would actually purchase a car which had to be replaced altogether any time that the battery died….
Aside from any kind of problem like that, Alex Jones is now claiming that Apple is helping China with their social score rating system for all citizens of China. Who the hell would want to deal with a company like that for anything, or take the chance that any kind of a system like that might ever materialize in the United States?