‘(Apple) Have No Idea What They’re Getting Into’. Where have I heard that before?

There’s a rumor that Apple is working on a car. Someone asked a former GM CEO about the rumor. His response

“They’d better think carefully if they want to get into the hard-core manufacturing,” he said of Apple. “We take steel, raw steel, and turn it into car. They have no idea what they’re getting into if they get into that.”

Didn’t GM go bankrupt? Maybe GM isn’t really the company to ask about someone else’s ability to run a successful car company.

This is almost an echo of when Apple launched the iPhone. You know, the product that would make Apple the largest, most profitable company in history.

Jim Balsillie (former) CEO of RIM (Blackberry):

“It’s kind of one more entrant into an already very busy space with lots of choice for consumers … But in terms of a sort of a sea-change for BlackBerry, I would think that’s overstating it.”

Steve Ballmer (former) CEO of Microsoft

“Five hundred dollars fully subsidized with a plan! I said that is the most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard, which makes it not a very good email machine …. I like our strategy. I like it a lot….Right now we’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones a year, Apple is selling zero phones a year. In six months, they’ll have the most expensive phone by far ever in the marketplace and let’s see … let’s see how the competition goes.”

So found an antique…

A few months ago I rescued a box of stuff from my mothers house. It was mostly things that I left in my room when I moved out many many years ago. One item was a Compaq Contura laptop. It didn’t have a power cord but today I found one that worked in my basement.

Surprise! It boots! Into Windows 95!

It had an amazing 45mb of free disk space and a rockin 640×480 screen.

The trackball doesn’t quite work, but I was able to navigate around with the keyboard. Windows explorer reveled a curious folder called “Linux”. Hmmmmm. Shutdown to DOS, cd \linux, Linux.bat, and some version of Linux is now loading. Wild!

There’s no password for the root account so I’m in without issue.

I think I mostly used this for icq and irc while watching TV. That means I must have a PCMCIA Ethernet card somewhere for this. No ssh client or server installed, so we just have to do with iPhone pictures for now.

uname says we’re on kernel 2.2.6. /proc/cpuinfo says we have a 486 with almost 20 bogomips (a Kindle fire is about 100x that for comparison).

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No Vim, but vi brings up a familiar looking screen, but wait! It’s Elvis 2.1!

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