How did Apple flourish despite Neal Stephenson's prediction that proprietary software companies would fail?
In the Beginning... Was the Command Line In the Beginning... Was the Command Line is an essay by Neal Stephenson which was originally published online in 1999 and later made available in book form (November 1999, ISBN  ). The essay is a commentary on why the proprietary operating systems business is unlikely to remain profitable in the future because of competition from free software. It also analyzes the corporate/collective culture of the Microsoft, Apple, and free software communities.
Excelan Excelan was a computer networking company founded in 1982 by Kanwal Rekhi, Inder Singh and Navindra Jain. Excelan was a manufacturer of smart Ethernet cards, until the company merged with, and was acquired by Novell in 1989. The company offered a line of Ethernet "front end processor" boards for Multibus, VMEbus, Q-Bus, Unibus, and IBM AT Bus systems. The cards were equipped with their own processor and memory, and ran TCP/IP protocol software that was downloaded onto the cards from the host system. Excelan offered software that integrated the cards into a variety of operating system environments, including many flavors of UNIX, RSX-11, VMS, and MS-DOS. The hardware and software were sold under the "EXOS" brand. In 1987, Excelan also acquired Kinetics, a small networking company that manufactured and sold a variety of Ethernet networking products for Apple Macintosh environments, most notably an AppleTalk-to-Ethernet gateway called the FastPath.