On 2022-11-16, Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 17:15:38 -0000 (UTC), Ben Collver wrote:
>>
>> On 2022-11-15, greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:
>>> On 2022-11-15, Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:
>>>> Nice question. Do you mean the me of the present, or me as i was in
>>>> 1989? On the exotic front, i'd consider the MSX2+
>>>>
>>>> https://www.msx.org/wiki/Panasonic_FS-A1WSX
>>>
>>> That was the one, made by several companies, but with the same OS..Nice
>>> keyboard?.. I have one regret, buying a spectrum instead of a C64.
>>> The Amiga was whole generation ahead of the MSX.
>>
>> I like that the MSX had an open specification.
>>
>> An uncle of a friend used an Amiga for video production in the early
>> 90's. The Amiga was definitely ahead. OTOH, the Amiga and MSX game
>> lists are both about 2,000 games long.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_MSX_games
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Amiga_games
>
> Amazing the Amiga didn't really kick off in the US. From 1985 to may be
> 1988 (which was a "generation" or two back then) it blew everything out
> of the water, especially at that price. Like the IBM PC and its clones. And
> the Macintosh only just got color and couldn't even do preemptive
> multitasking.

the amiga was doomed because it was fun.

The IBMPC had the name IBM on it.

>
> Amazing the Amiga didn't really caught on in the US.

--
greymausg@mail.com

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the stench of an Influencer.
Where is our money gone, Dude?

On 16 Nov 2022 22:20:10 GMT
greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:

> There was a public event about the internet at about that time, 1994, so
> I brought my son up. He showed no interest. Blackrock Collage, Dublin,
> and the talk was by a man called Andy Mowett, who arrived onstage
> wearing an Army coat and frayed jeans.

How on earth did I miss that ? In 1994 I was living in Blackrock
setting up Internet Eireann as the first low cost dial up IP service in the
country. Our advertising had to explain what the internet was.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 18:32:52 -0500
Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:

> Printers back that were usually dot matrix and when printing text they

This was the era of the NLQ 24 pin dot matrix displacing the Qume
and Diablo daisy wheel printers for all but the most fussy or well heeled.

> used an installed font for each letter. Today it's more like postscript
> or PDF and all printers probably print graphics even if it's "text".

These days decent printers talk PostScript, PCL and perhaps PDF,
cheap printers take proprietary format images from a driver.

Laserjets and Laserwriters were around since the mid 1980s but they
were expensive especially since PostScript licenses were expensive and the
hardware for a RIP was probably more powerful than the computer generating
the printout. One big win with PostScript was that it was also used on
Linotron so a PostScript printer could be used to produce accurate proofs
of material being sent for printing.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 06:39:11 -0800 (PST)
Douglas Miller <durgadas311@gmail.com> wrote:

> In 1989, I would have chosen a Sequent Symmetry. Nothing too fancy, 2 or
> 4 '386 procs. Each of their 386's running DYNIX/ptx could run circles
> around any 386/486 PC. Of course, the power bills would have killed me.

Now that brings back a memory. We benchmarked a big Sequent at BT
around then, it had thirty two 486s each with a full 16MB of RAM, the
competition was the best Sun and HP had to offer (details forgotten,
except we had to downgrade the compiler on the HP because of a C++
compatibility issue - a deprecated keyword had become illegal in the
latest version and we had to support systems where it was mandatory) at the
time and a quarter of an Amdahl mainframe running UTS. There was no clear
winner but there was a clear loser - the Amdahl never completed the build
let alone the tests.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

On 2022-11-17, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:
> On 16 Nov 2022 22:20:10 GMT
> greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:
>
>> There was a public event about the internet at about that time, 1994, so
>> I brought my son up. He showed no interest. Blackrock Collage, Dublin,
>> and the talk was by a man called Andy Mowett, who arrived onstage
>> wearing an Army coat and frayed jeans.
>
> How on earth did I miss that ? In 1994 I was living in Blackrock
> setting up Internet Eireann as the first low cost dial up IP service in the
> country. Our advertising had to explain what the internet was.
>

We live in far different spheres :)

--
greymausg@mail.com

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the stench of an Influencer.
Where is our money gone, Dude?

Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
> On Tue, 15 Nov 2022 10:38:50 -0600, D.J. wrote:
> >
> > I received a new Amiga A1000, monitor, and the box the computer came
> > in. The box had some software and a couple of books.
> >
> > Unfortunately the printer, I live in the US, printed the British pound
> > symbol instead of the $ sign. Weird printer... cellophane with wax as
> > the print medium. The printer melted the wax into the standard paper,
> > tracter feed 8.5x11.
>
> What printer?

I was wondering if it might a Tektronix Phaser, before they were bought by
Xerox:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Phaser

ISTR there were some smaller desktop Phaser models.

> Reading some old manuals I came across the Epson RX80 (or FX?). It
> allowed to use different font sets already in the early 1980s. You just
> needed to know *how*.

That was commonly a DIP switch somewhere in the depths of the machine or
maybe on the back - allowed you to swap out certain characters for others
(currency symbol was common, also other Latin1 characters), as well as set
the default font if no control codes were sent.

> Would be lame though if the retailer sold printers in the US set up for
> the UK market.

That does surprise me. Although 'grey imports' were common at that time -
you got the machine cheap due to currency arbitrage because it was intended
for some other country, maybe the distributor had to cut off the mains plug
and replace it with the local one (if any plug was supplied at all), the
manuals might have been in the wrong language, etc. The downside of a grey
import was you didn't get local warranty support from the manufacturer, you
had to send it back to whatever market it came from.

Theo

On 2022-11-17, Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 04:05:23 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> On 2022-11-16, Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Amazing the Amiga didn't really kick off in the US. From 1985 to may be
>>> 1988 (which was a "generation" or two back then) it blew everything out
>>> of the water, especially at that price. Like the IBM PC and its clones. And
>>> the Macintosh only just got color and couldn't even do preemptive
>>> multitasking.
>>>
>>> Amazing the Amiga didn't really caught on in the US.
>>
>> Part of that was poor marketing. The president and chairman of the
>> board, Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould, were pulling down bigger salaries
>> than their counterparts at IBM, while running the company into the
>> ground. Stockholder meetings were held in the Bahamas to minimize
>> the number of pesky shareholders asking embarrassing questions.
>
> I know (Mr. Gould messed up). But why was the Amiga so highly successful
> in Europe, but not in the US? Might really just boil down to poor
> marketing.

It was indeed poor marketing. The joke at the time was that if
Commodore made sushi, they would market it as "cold dead fish".

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.

Charlie Gibbs <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> writes:
> It was indeed poor marketing. The joke at the time was that if
> Commodore made sushi, they would market it as "cold dead fish".

previously posted

Total share: 30 years of personal computer market share figures
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars
and has graph of personal computer sales 1975-1980
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/3
and graph from 1980 to 1984 ... with the only serious competitor to PC
in number of sales was commodore 64
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/4
and then from 1984 to 1987 the ibm pc (and clones) starting to
completely swamp
http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/total-share.ars/5

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:09:15 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>
>> I think it was not only the currency symbols, but also some other
>> letters used in Spain.
>
> Which one's you meañ? ;-)

¿¡

--
Pete

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 18:37:48 GMT, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
> On 2022-11-17, Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>
>> I know (Mr. Gould messed up). But why was the Amiga so highly successful
>> in Europe, but not in the US? Might really just boil down to poor
>> marketing.
>
> It was indeed poor marketing. The joke at the time was that if
> Commodore made sushi, they would market it as "cold dead fish".

Good one. Have to remember that. :-)
--
Andreas

On 17 Nov 2022 08:18:39 GMT, greymaus wrote:
>
> On 2022-11-16, Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>>
>> Amazing the Amiga didn't really kick off in the US. From 1985 to may be
>> 1988 (which was a "generation" or two back then) it blew everything out
>> of the water, especially at that price. Like the IBM PC and its clones. And
>> the Macintosh only just got color and couldn't even do preemptive
>> multitasking.
>
> the amiga was doomed because it was fun.

May be because people thought it's a gaming machine. And it sort of
was. Because it was "everything".

> The IBMPC had the name IBM on it.

Indeed. Had first (second) hand experience. A work mate of my dad was
rich (for some reason...). When my dad once mentioned to him his son (me)
is "in computers" in 1989 or so he asked if I may come by to recommend a
computer for his 10 year old son. I agreed (free beer was also promised ;-).
I already mentioned that I'll recommend the Amiga and to bring mine next
week.

A few days before the meeting he called and said there was no need to
bring mine, as he just (like it would be no problem) bought an Amiga
500. I brought some software I "got from where I cannot remember". ;-)

Besides games (I remember he liked Boulder Dash and Leaderboard Golf) and
"professional" software, like a word processor and a spreadsheet. And
mentioned he doesn't need to update his IBM XT (or AT) to PS/2, because
the Amiga can do all what the IBM can - and more.

Well the Amiga had no IBM logo on it. And months later I learned that
only his son used the Amiga, and he paid some 12,000 Deutsch Mark (5,000
USD or more?) for a PS/2.
--
Andreas

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 08:19:40 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 18:32:52 -0500
> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>
>> Printers back that were usually dot matrix and when printing text they
>
> This was the era of the NLQ 24 pin dot matrix displacing the Qume
> and Diablo daisy wheel printers for all but the most fussy or well heeled.

With a daisy wheel printer you have the same problems of dot matrix
printers, that some characters are not available without some effort.

>> used an installed font for each letter. Today it's more like postscript
>> or PDF and all printers probably print graphics even if it's "text".
>
> These days decent printers talk PostScript, PCL and perhaps PDF,
> cheap printers take proprietary format images from a driver.
>
> Laserjets and Laserwriters were around since the mid 1980s but they
> were expensive especially since PostScript licenses were expensive and the
> hardware for a RIP was probably more powerful than the computer generating
> the printout. One big win with PostScript was that it was also used on
> Linotron so a PostScript printer could be used to produce accurate proofs
> of material being sent for printing.

My saying: Today you don't need to concern yourself with foreign characters.
--
Andreas

On 17 Nov 2022 12:26:54 +0000 (GMT), Theo wrote:
>
> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>
>> Reading some old manuals I came across the Epson RX80 (or FX?). It
>> allowed to use different font sets already in the early 1980s. You just
>> needed to know *how*.
>
> That was commonly a DIP switch somewhere in the depths of the machine or
> maybe on the back - allowed you to swap out certain characters for others
> (currency symbol was common, also other Latin1 characters), as well as set
> the default font if no control codes were sent.

I think with the Epson I mentioned you could use ESC-sequences to do some
magic, like swapping the character set. You could do this in BASIC. Like

PRINT CHR(27) ...
--
Andreas

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 17:00:07 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>
> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:09:15 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>>
>>> I think it was not only the currency symbols, but also some other
>>> letters used in Spain.
>>
>> Which one's you meañ? ;-)
>
> ¿¡

Ah, I forgot those. That sentences with "!" and questions start with.
--
Andreas

On 17 Nov 2022 08:18:39 GMT
greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:

> the amiga was doomed because it was fun.
>
> The IBMPC had the name IBM on it.

Quite so, but alone that would not have killed the Amiga because it
was clunky, slow and expensive - which was fine for IBM's market.

However IBM published every detail of the PC (and AT) and the
market for a cheap IBM workalike was so obvious that it exploded almost
instantly and became brutally competitive. Then the chipsets appeared
making PC and AT clones really easy (and cheap) to make. The 80386
delivered the final nail in the coffin for everything else but by then
there wasn't much left to kill apart from the Apple who took some important
niches and hung on. After the 80386 the PC design started to take over the
data centre starting with minis - which by then were mostly unix boxes. The
BSDs and Linux accelerated that process dramatically (wot no license fee).

Notice that IBM no longer play in the market they created, they've
retreated to their comfort zone of high support mainframes.

This monocultural trend has shown no cracks until recently with the
emergence of ARM from the mobile and low power space into the desktop,
laptop and server world (there are some really impressive 48 core ARM
chips in use - don't ask about price). Even here there is convergence with
PCI-e, SATA, NVMe etc turning up in ARM chips now.

BTW ARM RISC ? Have you seen the size of the ARMv8 instruction set
documentation ? If that's reduced these days please don't show me complex.
High level languages used to be more complex than assemblers, I reckon it's
a toss up between C++ with STL and ARMv8 for complexity - Algol68 got lost
in the dust a long time ago.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 21:25:02 -0500
Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:

> On 17 Nov 2022 12:26:54 +0000 (GMT), Theo wrote:
> >
> > Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
> >
> >> Reading some old manuals I came across the Epson RX80 (or FX?). It
> >> allowed to use different font sets already in the early 1980s. You just
> >> needed to know *how*.
> >
> > That was commonly a DIP switch somewhere in the depths of the machine or
> > maybe on the back - allowed you to swap out certain characters for others
> > (currency symbol was common, also other Latin1 characters), as well as set
> > the default font if no control codes were sent.
>
> I think with the Epson I mentioned you could use ESC-sequences to do some
> magic, like swapping the character set. You could do this in BASIC. Like
>
> PRINT CHR(27) ...

Espon Escape codes; takes me back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESC/P
(but most of the links there are dead; I had hoped to link to a list of
Esc codes)

Dot matrix:
https://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/17/science/peripherals-getting-the-most-out-of-a-dot-matrix-printer.html
(TL;DNR: 1985 Basic printer cost $299, IBM $549)

Almost as much 'fun' as Dialup modem "AT" commands.

--
Bah, and indeed Humbug.

Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> schrieb:
> On 17 Nov 2022 08:18:39 GMT
> greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:
>
>> the amiga was doomed because it was fun.
>>
>> The IBMPC had the name IBM on it.
>
> Quite so, but alone that would not have killed the Amiga because it
> was clunky, slow and expensive - which was fine for IBM's market.
>
> However IBM published every detail of the PC (and AT) and the
> market for a cheap IBM workalike was so obvious that it exploded almost
> instantly and became brutally competitive. Then the chipsets appeared
> making PC and AT clones really easy (and cheap) to make. The 80386
> delivered the final nail in the coffin for everything else but by then
> there wasn't much left to kill apart from the Apple who took some important
> niches and hung on. After the 80386 the PC design started to take over the
> data centre starting with minis - which by then were mostly unix boxes. The
> BSDs and Linux accelerated that process dramatically (wot no license fee).
>
> Notice that IBM no longer play in the market they created, they've
> retreated to their comfort zone of high support mainframes.

POWER (now styled Power, I believe) isn't a mainframe (not a descendant
of /360), but it is certainly used in datacenters, and is the basis
for the what used to be System i.

[...]

> BTW ARM RISC ? Have you seen the size of the ARMv8 instruction set
> documentation ?

It is on the border of insanity (12000 pages these days?), and
I'm not clear which side.

Nobody ever accused POWER of being small, and the ISA is _far_ smaller.

> If that's reduced these days please don't show me complex.

I understood that RISC meant reduced complexity for each instruction.
At least ARM is still load/store (or is it?)

> High level languages used to be more complex than assemblers, I reckon it's
> a toss up between C++ with STL and ARMv8 for complexity - Algol68 got lost
> in the dust a long time ago.

C++ is also borderline insane. Their module concept is... breathtaking
(why does a macro which is defined before using the module have to
have an effect inside the module? Hello world?)

Listening to a talk about that was one of the weirdest experiences
related to computers that I ever had, especially since the speaker
suggested having the compiler make http queries to an oracle during
compilation to find the placement of modules, to solve the "which
file contains which module" question.

When asked "how does the oracle know", the answer was "not my
department".

On 2022-11-18 09:53, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On 17 Nov 2022 08:18:39 GMT
> greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:
>
>> the amiga was doomed because it was fun.
>>
>> The IBMPC had the name IBM on it.
>
> Quite so, but alone that would not have killed the Amiga because it
> was clunky, slow and expensive - which was fine for IBM's market.
>
> However IBM published every detail of the PC (and AT) and the
> market for a cheap IBM workalike was so obvious that it exploded almost
> instantly and became brutally competitive. Then the chipsets appeared
> making PC and AT clones really easy (and cheap) to make. The 80386
> delivered the final nail in the coffin for everything else but by then
> there wasn't much left to kill apart from the Apple who took some important
> niches and hung on.

And there was an explosion of software, too.

I bought a PC clone mid 80's because the chaps at the students club at
uni told me that they could provide me with the software I needed, and
everybody, including teachers were using PCs. I would be alone if I got
a Mac, or any other thing. Compatibility was the word.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 2022-11-18 03:25, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 17:00:07 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:
>>
>> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>>> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:09:15 +0100, Carlos E.R. wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I think it was not only the currency symbols, but also some other
>>>> letters used in Spain.
>>>
>>> Which one's you meañ? ;-)
>>
>> ¿¡
>
> Ah, I forgot those. That sentences with "!" and questions start with.

Yep. And accented vowels. And ª, used on numbers, like 1º or 1ª. Meaning
"first", female or male. It is the letter 'a' 'o' with an underscore,
upperscript. Similar, but not the same as '°' used on '°C', meaning
"degrees".

It is not a problem if the printer supports unicode, but it seems this
is not universal, or not done on cheap printers.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 2022-11-18 03:21, Andreas Kohlbach wrote:
> On Thu, 17 Nov 2022 08:19:40 +0000, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> On Wed, 16 Nov 2022 18:32:52 -0500
>> Andreas Kohlbach <ank@spamfence.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Printers back that were usually dot matrix and when printing text they
>>
>> This was the era of the NLQ 24 pin dot matrix displacing the Qume
>> and Diablo daisy wheel printers for all but the most fussy or well heeled.
>
> With a daisy wheel printer you have the same problems of dot matrix
> printers, that some characters are not available without some effort.
>
>>> used an installed font for each letter. Today it's more like postscript
>>> or PDF and all printers probably print graphics even if it's "text".
>>
>> These days decent printers talk PostScript, PCL and perhaps PDF,
>> cheap printers take proprietary format images from a driver.
>>
>> Laserjets and Laserwriters were around since the mid 1980s but they
>> were expensive especially since PostScript licenses were expensive and the
>> hardware for a RIP was probably more powerful than the computer generating
>> the printout. One big win with PostScript was that it was also used on
>> Linotron so a PostScript printer could be used to produce accurate proofs
>> of material being sent for printing.
>
> My saying: Today you don't need to concern yourself with foreign characters.

That's what I thought, but recently I hit that problem in the ticket of
a shop, that had some Spanish letters wrong. I think the printer was
Chinese made. Meaning a Chinese name, too.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On Fri, 18 Nov 2022 13:03:58 +0100
"Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:

> It is not a problem if the printer supports unicode, but it seems this
> is not universal, or not done on cheap printers.

Even with unicode support I doubt there's a printer around with
*all* the glyphs.

--
Steve O'Hara-Smith
Odds and Ends at http://www.sohara.org/

On 2022-11-18, Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
> On 2022-11-18 09:53, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>> On 17 Nov 2022 08:18:39 GMT
>> greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:
>>
>>> the amiga was doomed because it was fun.
>>>
>>> The IBMPC had the name IBM on it.
>>
>> Quite so, but alone that would not have killed the Amiga because it
>> was clunky, slow and expensive - which was fine for IBM's market.
>>
>> However IBM published every detail of the PC (and AT) and the
>> market for a cheap IBM workalike was so obvious that it exploded almost
>> instantly and became brutally competitive. Then the chipsets appeared
>> making PC and AT clones really easy (and cheap) to make. The 80386
>> delivered the final nail in the coffin for everything else but by then
>> there wasn't much left to kill apart from the Apple who took some important
>> niches and hung on.
>
> And there was an explosion of software, too.
>
> I bought a PC clone mid 80's because the chaps at the students club at
> uni told me that they could provide me with the software I needed, and
> everybody, including teachers were using PCs. I would be alone if I got
> a Mac, or any other thing. Compatibility was the word.
>
>

From memory, both A500 (amiga) and the early Mac's needed extra memory
to do anything serious. Compared to present computers, their memory
installed memory was tiny. A lot of the present need is bloat, IMHO.

--
greymausg@mail.com

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, I smell the stench of an Influencer.
Where is our money gone, Dude?

On 2022-11-18 15:43, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
> On Fri, 18 Nov 2022 13:03:58 +0100
> "Carlos E.R." <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>
>> It is not a problem if the printer supports unicode, but it seems this
>> is not universal, or not done on cheap printers.
>
> Even with unicode support I doubt there's a printer around with
> *all* the glyphs.

That too.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 2022-11-18 17:26, greymaus wrote:
> On 2022-11-18, Carlos E.R. <robin_listas@es.invalid> wrote:
>> On 2022-11-18 09:53, Ahem A Rivet's Shot wrote:
>>> On 17 Nov 2022 08:18:39 GMT
>>> greymaus <greymaus@dmaus.org> wrote:
>>>
>>>> the amiga was doomed because it was fun.
>>>>
>>>> The IBMPC had the name IBM on it.
>>>
>>> Quite so, but alone that would not have killed the Amiga because it
>>> was clunky, slow and expensive - which was fine for IBM's market.
>>>
>>> However IBM published every detail of the PC (and AT) and the
>>> market for a cheap IBM workalike was so obvious that it exploded almost
>>> instantly and became brutally competitive. Then the chipsets appeared
>>> making PC and AT clones really easy (and cheap) to make. The 80386
>>> delivered the final nail in the coffin for everything else but by then
>>> there wasn't much left to kill apart from the Apple who took some important
>>> niches and hung on.
>>
>> And there was an explosion of software, too.
>>
>> I bought a PC clone mid 80's because the chaps at the students club at
>> uni told me that they could provide me with the software I needed, and
>> everybody, including teachers were using PCs. I would be alone if I got
>> a Mac, or any other thing. Compatibility was the word.
>>
>>
>
> From memory, both A500 (amiga) and the early Mac's needed extra memory
> to do anything serious. Compared to present computers, their memory
> installed memory was tiny. A lot of the present need is bloat, IMHO.

Well, that PC had 512 KB. It was in the name: Amstrad PC 1512DD.

--
Cheers, Carlos.

On 2022-11-18, Ahem A Rivet's Shot <steveo@eircom.net> wrote:

> However IBM published every detail of the PC (and AT) and the
> market for a cheap IBM workalike was so obvious that it exploded almost
> instantly and became brutally competitive.

IBM realized their error and tried to reverse it with MicroChannel,
but it was too late; as with Pandora, the box had been opened and
couldn't be closed again.

> Notice that IBM no longer play in the market they created,
> they've retreated to their comfort zone of high support mainframes.

They don't like to play in areas they can't control, and they
realized they had lost control of the PC.

--
/~\ Charlie Gibbs | Microsoft is a dictatorship.
\ / <cgibbs@kltpzyxm.invalid> | Apple is a cult.
X I'm really at ac.dekanfrus | Linux is anarchy.
/ \ if you read it the right way. | Pick your poison.