Opinions vary of course, but I dont think fat clients would have been anything like they turned out to be if apple hadnt gotten the market penetration that they did. The ONLY reason IBM released the XT was because of the apple ii.
IBM had made it obviously clear that they intended to make home based mini computers. They just didnt get to in time to make their ideology pervasive. Apple did. There were other contenders, but they were almost exclusively toys. It wasnt until the apple ii that fat clients started showing up in schools and businesses.Prior to that computing was almost exclusively the domain of very expensive mini computers. Due to the cost IBM had made it a stated goal to bring the cost of mini computers down low enough that they could be affordable enough to put in a home to interface with other home electronics.
EDIT: Apple didnt have any other products of the time, the apple ii was the first viable product that they released. Based based on the success of that product apple started marketing the lisa which was by all accounts a failure. It wasnt until the macintosh was released that apple really dropped support for the apple ii, and even then it could be argued that xerox had more control over apple then IBM did.
IBM had made it obviously clear that they intended to make home based mini computers. They just didnt get to in time to make their ideology pervasive. Apple did. There were other contenders, but they were almost exclusively toys. It wasnt until the apple ii that fat clients started showing up in schools and businesses.Prior to that computing was almost exclusively the domain of very expensive mini computers. Due to the cost IBM had made it a stated goal to bring the cost of mini computers down low enough that they could be affordable enough to put in a home to interface with other home electronics.
EDIT: Apple didnt have any other products of the time, the apple ii was the first viable product that they released. Based based on the success of that product apple started marketing the lisa which was by all accounts a failure. It wasnt until the macintosh was released that apple really dropped support for the apple ii, and even then it could be argued that xerox had more control over apple then IBM did.
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