Microsoft - College dropout and Espstien lister Bill Gates and Rock Memoribelia collector Paul Allen started a range of computer-based startups in the 1970's including Traf-O-Data. It was through a MITS Altair computer user's group that Microsoft was started. Microsoft's first major product was the BASIC progamming language, developed by a college in 1964. In 1981, their first major grift was carried out by bluffing the once great computer manufacturer IBM that they had a new operating system to compete with Digital Research's CP/M 86, only to pay a man named Tim Patterson at Seattle Computer Products $15,000 for a beta test-O/S copycat of CP/M called "QDOS" for "Quick and Dirty Operating System". A few strings of text were changed and some small tweaks made to make it work with IBM's new PC, and lo and behold, PC-DOS was born. Then, to make sure the profit train kept running, contractually, Microsoft released a rebadged version known as MS-DOS to allow for the competitive, open architecture PC market to flourish. While M$ and IBM continued their path of 80's-esqe greed and excess, the public took note they could get PC's for cheaper, allowing many startups such as Dell, Compaq, and Gateway 2000, to name a few, to start up and offer better machines at less of a cost. This started the whole PC standard which every single mainstream computer minus Apple's is based on today (well...apple was between 2015 and 2020, mostly anyway). Microsoft now is trying to keep a stranglehold on their 40 year domination of a market of business but people are catching onto their crap with crap products like Windows 11 or Office 365.

Apple - Apple computer was started by talking head Steve Jobs and his engineering genius friend Steve Wozniak in 1977, after a brief jaunt at HP and Atari (where Jobs basically cheated Wozniak over the development of the arcade game Breakout). Their first product in 1977 was the "Apple I" which was basically just a circuit board you DIY'd together with a screen and keyboard yourself - a "Hobbyist" computer like the MITS Altair or Cosmac ELF. Their breakthrough product, the Apple II, released in 1978, put Apple on the map as a legitimate contender in the "Appliance PC" market, before having it eclipsed by IBM's Personal Computer 5150 in 1981. After a failed attempt to release a more complex, GUI driven PC, the Lisa, in 1982, Steve basically drove Woz away with his intention of making a "closed source, closed architecture" computer known as the Macintosh - which was released in 1984, famously first advertised during the 1984 Olympics as "you will see why 1984 won't be like (Geoorge Orwell's book) 1984". Now through sharing of data with data brokers, Apple is yet another one of a long string of "Tech Bro" companies showing why 2034, will be just like George Orwell's 1984.

Linux - Computer Science Major and Hobbyist Linus Torvaldes watched as the late 80's computer industry struggled to bring their aging 16-bit operating systems to newer 32-bit hardware at the time. The Intel 386 and Motorola 680003 offered more power than Apple's System Software 6.x and Microsoft's MS-DOS could fully take advantage of (at least, not without a pile of other shit grafted in to take full advantage of these new 32-bit platforms). So Linus decided, as a hobby, to make his own operating system loosely based on SCO/Unix, a system he was fond of - which became LINUX. Unlike Microsoft who paid off someone for their own creation, or Apple who purpose designs OSes to run on their hardware, Linux was sort of a hardware-agnostic 32-bit solution. It was "OpenSource" meaning that you could download the source code for free, modify it, and freely compile it for yourself, so as long as you continued to share your edits you made to the source code. This effectively makes it free for anyone at home using it. However, once released to the public, Linux has become a very confusing ecosystem of "Distributions" that are based on older distriibutions like RedHat, Slackware, Ubuntu, and Debian. That plus the technical skills once required have made it hard for the public to want to adopt it, and suits n' ties, being suits n' ties, are afraid of anything that's not in control of other egomaniacs with big bank accounts and suits n' ties, so it's never gotten the appreciation it deserved despite running 2/3rds of the internet quietly in the background for about 35 years.

Now with that out of the way....let's get to brass tacks...

In the spring of 2023, I took a disused iMac I got from my auntie in-law and loaded it "Triple Boot" with all three of the above OSes. This was a late 2015 iMac 21.5" non-retna, with a 6th gen Core i5 running at 1.6GHz, and 8GB of DDR3 RAM soldered to the motherboard. Let's put all three Operating Systems to the test I thought, and see who the real winner is.

Apple - Apple's MacOS 12 Monterey has a real advantage in that I don't have to find install media to put it on the computer. I just boot the Mac to the internet using COMMAND+OPTION+R and then download the O/S to install, and go to town. It also caters to Windows (which feels like an Admission of Guilt on Apple's part) via "Bootcamp" - so I put Windows 10 x64 Pro Plus on Bootcamp after this. However, as simple as Apple's install process is....it's f***ing slow! It took about half a day to install MacOS by itself. This was fixed a little bit by putting an SSD in the iMac later on, but it still didn't make enough of a difference for me to say "hey, just slap in an SSD and bob's your uncle!" - it was still longer than WIndows, and most especially Linux.

Windows -

Linux - Linux Mint Cinnamon 21 took me about 20 minutes to install on the iMac and that is WITH the spinning rust behind the screen. How the hell a free *nix variant from the internet installed via USB can eat a USB install of a commercial *nix variant is