What would have been the world without Steve Wozniak,Steve Jobs and Apple?

We would all be using windozzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I believe Apple brought out the color in technology.

We might not have the “mouse” as invented by Wozniak. The personal PC, as envisioned by Woz may not have happened either, but others were working on similar concepts I would bet – so PCs would still exist, but maybe in a slightly different form. Same goes for the GUI interface.

While Woz was an engineer and inventor, Jobbs’ real genius was in marketing. Making the PC attractive to every-day-folk (a concept poo pood by most computer execs at the time). So, maybe the home computer market would look very different.

Of course, some would argue that their greatest contribution is in style and industrial design (Jobbs may deserve more credit for this than Woz).

While the other things I mentioned probably would still exist in some firm or another, I don’t think (some) PCs would be as elegant with such a beautiful interface if it weren’t for Apple.

Of course, many computer enthusiasts couldn’t care less about asthetics – but I certainly appreciate them.

@cprevite actually, Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse back in 1963, while working at the Stanford Research Institute. it was ten years later that woz started fooling around.

Bill Gates would be almost twice as rich.

I would be writing letters with a quill pen and parchment and using the phone more. I’d spend more time at the library; I’d be outside now instead of here.

The idea of the personal computer and the laptop predate Apple significantly—they were first imagined by Alan Kay in the late 1960s. The Apple II was not even the first commercially successful personal computer.

Where Apple was really brilliant was in finding a way of bringing these concepts to market, and in making people appreciate the need for them. But the ideas were floating around—it was just that Apple made them commercially successful.

If Apple hadn’t been around, would anyone else have managed to do the same? That’s hard to say. Microsoft’s success is largely because they stole from the best—the Windows NT kernel from DEC, the idea of a GUI from Apple, the Windows 3.1 user interface from IBM and OS/2. Without Apple in there, it’s not clear who Microsoft would have copied.

We’d be buying iPod’s from Atari.

Microsoft would have been thoroughly broken up by the 1998 antitrust trial. This is why Microsoft threw Apple a lifeline and kept them afloat in 1997, they needed at least a nominal competitor in the business.

There were, and are, many other people just as talented and knowledgeable as they are who would have done it sooner or later.

Our “smart phones” would still use styluses.

Just out of curiosity is there any other smart phone that uses multi touch with a glass screen? All I see these days is plastic..