This seems strangely parochial to me. It reads a little like an American who knows San Francisco and so knows about trams has tried to imagine what a European city and country is like, and hasn't quite made the pieces fit together.

It has what I guess are American references that are meaningless to me. What is or was The Homer? In what universe are mopeds some sort of unsuccessful trial? Much of Asia has travelled by mopeds for ~75 years now; the Honda C90 is the best-selling motor vehicle of all time, and it's not even close.

As a super-extended metaphor for computing, I don't think the timeline fits together: it has Xerox, Apple, and IBM in the wrong order, but I'd find that hard to nail down. There was overlap, obviously.

It feels to me like the big influences are squeezed in, but not the smaller ones -- possibly because they mostly aren't American and don't show up on American radar. Wirth and Pascal/Modula-2/Oberon, the Lilith and Ceres; Psion; Acorn; other Apple efforts notably the Newton and things it inspired like Palm; Symbolics and InterLisp.

Nice effort. I respect the work that went into it, but it doesn't fix Stephenson's effort -- it over-extends it until it snaps, then tapes the bits together and tries again.

> What is or was The Homer?

It's a reference to a Simpsons episode where Homer Simpson designs a car, and it's supremely hideous: https://simpsonswiki.com/wiki/The_Homer

If I mentioned every operating system that Apple was involved in, my original post would be twice as long. Acorn, Psion, Newton, and Palm in particular are historically relevant today[0] but have no bearing on what Neal Stephenson was writing about. He was talking exclusively about desktop operating systems running on personal computers. That's where I drew the line. If you didn't ship something that ran on a normal PC[1], you didn't make the cut.

Ok, I also swapped out Be for NeXT, mainly because NeXT was the one that actually got bought by Apple and ultimately had a lot more influence.

Xerox, Apple, and IBM were all releasing products concurrently to one another, so I kinda just had to pick a (wrong) order and stick with it.

I wasn't trying to make a ding at mopeds, I was trying to make a ding at the classic Mac OS. I guess if you want to fix that metaphor, the classic Mac OS was like a nice moped that had a bunch of shit added onto it until it became a really unstable but nice-looking car, while Microsoft just made a real car that looks like dogwater. If that still feels too American, well, I'm sorry but Neil started with a car metaphor, and I've already exhausted my permitted number of dings at American car centric urban design with the Linux bit.

The Homer is a Simpsons reference. The joke is that Homer Simpson designed a car in almost the same way that managers decided what features shipped in Copland.

[0] If this was a mobile OS discussion, I'd be dropping IBM, UNIX, and XEROX from the discussion to make way for Psion, Newton, and Palm. Microsoft would be pared down to "Well around the same time they were shipping real desktop OSes they also shipped Windows CE and Windows Mobile".

But even then, I almost feel like mentioning the actual inventors of the PDA is overindulgence, because absolutely none of those companies survived the iPhone. Microsoft didn't survive iPhone. Nobody survived iPhone, except Android, and that's only because Android had enough Google money backing them to pivot to an iPhone-like design. Even flipphones run Android now (or KaiOS). It's way more stark and bleak a landscape for innovation than desktop was in 1999 when Windows was king.

[1] OK, yes, both early Mac OS and early Windows were built in Pascal, not C. But neither of those are operating systems, and normal users would not be able to tell if their software was written in one or the other unless it crashes.