Infographic – Microsoft vs. Apple: The History of Computing

Sean Lind at Manolution has posted a FREAKING HUGE infographic highlighting the battle between Microsoft and Apple. I would have added it to this post but the infographic is 3.1 Megs in size. You can view the full image by clicking on the big thumbnail at the bottom of this post. The super long chart lists every major product launch by the two rival companies and their respective stock prices at the time (the stock price was adjusted for stock splits).

As Richard Nixon destroyed happiness with his war on drugs, the 1970’s saw the world’s first personal computers, inspiring five geeks to start a pair of companies which would go on to shape the future of computing as we know it.

In January of 1975 Bill Gates and Paul Allen called up Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems claiming to have a working BASIC interpreter for the MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer. While that claim was entirely fictitious, it took Gates and Allen just two months to create the product they claimed to already have.

Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne founded their company, Apple, on April 1st 1976, just short of one year after the inception of Microsoft. Unlike Microsoft, who chose to focus on operating systems for other people’s hardware, Apple began their business by selling bare-bones hand-built computer kits, named the Apple I.

Image By Manolution – The Blog for Men