Actually Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt lobbied for a one-time tax holiday so they could repatriate their income earned overseas without losing a large portion of it in taxes. Congress didn't like the idea. Congress is putting on a dog-and-pony show to chastise Apple but doesn't seem to mind giving extremely profitable corporations like Exxon tax subsidies.

Its the creepy camera that is going to make this go mainstream eventually - not looking at others, but looking at your hands.

You're close. Google Glass wants the wearable camera to become mainstream. When it comes to privacy, they like to slowly boil the frog. They want you to get used to the idea of cameras everywhere. More importantly they want you to get used to the idea that there is nothing wrong with you using the camera everywhere.

anyone talking on a cellphone was assumed to be a jerk.

This changed? I just assumed that the number of jerks increased exponentially. ;)

There is simply nothing MS did that wouldn't have been done anyway and likely better had Gates not been at the right place at tghe right time with money in his pocket.

Which brings us back to the beginning of the thread where the assertion was that Microsoft impeded the advancement of computers. I asserted that there is no proof of such a thing. If someone else had came out with a popular OS (due to timing or whatever) we would be arguing about their name instead of MS, which is the basis of my "the market did consolidate but the winner isn't the one the poster liked."

Also I would call 20 (68 F) to 25 (77 F) hot either.

You claimed that the bulk of the Apple DOS functionality was provided by MS BASIC. I refuted that.

The library calls that provided FP support and other things were provided by AppleSoft BASIC.

Or did you not notice that the 4K TRS-80 was no longer seen as adequate even before the IBM PC was available.

Yet the TRS-80 Color Computer (aka CoCo) lived on through the 80s and still have an active community today.

Without the hacker's end-run, modems wouldn't have existed.

I doubt that. Modems are old technology and had heavy use outside of the home market. I used them to send telexes back in the day. I ran a BBS back in the late 80's and I wouldn't confuse FidoNet with the modern internet. GEnie was pretty novel at the time. Prodigy (Sears + IBM), Compuserve, and AOL were an okay data service but they controlled what was offered to their users. It was the communications act of 1991 that broke their strangle hold and gave us the more free form internet we have today.

AppleSoft BASIC is MS. Integer isn't.

True, but AppleSoft BASIC, which came in the ROM of Apple II+ and later, brought floating point libraries and higher resolution graphics.

What do you mean "most of the functionality was provided by it"? DOS obviously refers to the *disk* interaction, and BASIC has none of that.

You assume that all the functionality required by the software at the time was solely provided by the DOS. AppleSoft BASIC being in ROM provided some functions to programs that called them (like the aforementioned FP routines). A practical example being that unlike the Franklin which didn't survive the lawsuit, the Laser was a "clean room" clone of the Apple II+. The feature that made Vtech's Laser compatible was their ability to license AppleSoft BASIC directly from MS. This was important since, despite most commercial programs were not in BASIC, they did take advantage of some functions provided by the ROM including AppleSoft routines.

The BASIC interpreter provided by MS could be dumped out of the Apple entirely as long as you loaded something such as integer basic to provide a command prompt. More advanced users could use the machine language monitor. MS BASIC provided BASIC, the rest was Apple's doing.

It could but it wasn't. Mentioning that by coincidence that Apple licensed the BASIC from Microsoft does not diminish Apple's work by one iota.

MS had nothing to do with the design of the PC or the follow-on XT, AT, and various AT386 machines...

I did not say that MS designed the original PC. However, I do believe that, as the platformed aged, MS did influence the subsequent designs of the platform. The demand generated by the MS Windows upgrade machine gave Intel enough revenue to continue investing more R&D into the platform. You don't honestly believe that the x86 platform survived solely by some technological advantage?

As far as the net goes, DARPA did some really good work, but it became our communications structure mostly due to hackers (in the old sense of the word) doing an end-run around ma-bell.

The '91 did more to increase access to the internet than any supposed work by a few hackers...

LibreOffice comes pre-packed in most Linux distributions. If you want OpenOffice you have to download it from Apache.