Re: Typical el Reg
To quote Jerry Pournelle on the subject, that Apple had nothing to do with the democratization of personal computers, is to forget who Jerry Pournelle was. Apart from his brand of SciFi, he was a writer for PC magazines. And, he was simply wrong. The Apple 2 and Visicalc legitimized personal computers in business. MS and others saw the light and steered their app R&D into applications that could ride that wave. The large quantity of IBM PCs ("nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"), and then closes with MS DOS, sealed the deal. If you indeed worked in an office (accounting, law, clerks, etc.) you will recall the "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" which without doubt caused lock-in. To use a Mac with Word and Excel required essentially no training. Use of the character-based GUI DOS boxes generally did require training of staff.
Windows and MS didn't democratize computers. Oddly enough, businesses did. Purchasing agents counted cost above all else, and generally were not responsible for training expenses. Further, few executives were willing to risk betting with Apple against IBM, HP, et al. Done.
For years now Mac OS X (MacOS) has offered an accessible certified System 3 UNIX under the GUI. Few people need that access, but applications developers (including MS) have made good use of it.