30 ms·

The Coming Crisis in Home Computers (1983)

130 points by indigodaddy 8y ago

JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
Whenever I read things like this I grow sad that this generation threw out all their computers and traded them in for smartphones, which aren’t really computing at all in my opinion. They are more like watching tv, something we already did too much of.
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Annual Apple Mac sales are about the same as the whole of their Apple II production.
- qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
  There are two types of computing today (2019) - producing and consuming. I can't cite the correct reference, but it's something along the lines that when the masses do more of one thing than the other, something will suffer bad.
- Kaveren 8y ago
  You know this already, but smartphones are just computers that are small and portable. That's the only difference. Many of the operating systems are similar or based on those you'd use on a desktop or laptop computer. There's a large amount of software available on both mobile and traditional computer operating systems. TV is non-interactive, smartphones allow a great deal of interactivity. Besides, I don't think watching a fair amount of TV is a bad thing in the first place. It's a creative medium, you're consuming art (okay, maybe a lot of it isn't very good, but it's art nonetheless). I think you might just be nostalgic.
  - beatgammit 8y ago
    Smartphones aren't nearly as good for being productive as desktops and laptops, though they're pretty good at consuming content. I think this shift away from desktops and laptops indicates a shift away from productivity. Yes, a lot of people watched too much TV, but at least they had the capability of doing things like image editing, building spreadsheets, etc. Smartphones can do those things, but it's so awkward that it's more likely that you're not going to bother, so you're more likely to just consume content instead of create it if you don't own a desktop or a laptop. Personally, I'm not really nostalgic over traditional computers, but I am a little nostalgic for stuff created by hand instead of filled in with a template.
    - bluntfang 8y ago
      >productive That's an interesting word choice and something tells me "productivity" is highly subjective. For example, can you code on a smartphone? Yeah, but not as productively as on a desktop. Can I manage my sales team's day to day from my smart phone? Absolutely and that might be a great choice as managing sales probably doesn't lend to being in one place for very long.
      - simonh 8y ago
        Smartphone no, but I’ve written thousands of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of words of material on an iPad, because it’s what I have with me on the train. Context is everything. I have written a few small programs on my phone too. Google Docs makes writing seamless with the desktop, and I can ftp my code out of Pythonista. Probably not a typical setup, but I find it very productive. They’re just tools.
    - meuk 8y ago
      This. If we'd have a smartphone with a proper USB connection (one that doesn't stop working after a few years), and the possibility to connect it to a keyboard, screen, and mouse, I'd do pretty much everything on my phone. Instead, I can't even browser normally: I get a dumbed down version of most sites.
      - windows_tips 8y ago
        It's possible to 'dock' a phone with a keyboard, monitor, and mouse. I'm not sure many easily support that setup though.
  - scandox 8y ago
    A keyboard connected to nothing is a more creative device than a smart phone.
    - 14 8y ago
      I agree. To me a computer is a machine under a persons control and I believe if you own something you should have full control. This is why we have a jailbreak scene. People want control.
    - thenanyu 8y ago
      Can a keyboard shoot video, take a photo, record a podcast? Definition of “creative” seems narrow here.
  - simonh 8y ago
    I’m reading this thread and replying from my phone while on the bus. Try that with a desktop or even a laptop. I consume a huge amount of educational and special interest material from YouTube that wouldn’t exist let alone be accessible in the age of TV. Mobile devices do have some negative consequences, sure, but they also enable engagement, contribution, self improvement and creativity. My kids watch a lot of YouTube, but also use their iPads to do homework and sketch and draw. These are fantastic tools. How we use them is up to us.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Using Swift Playgrounds, Pythonista, Continuous and similar apps is not much different than booting up my Timex 2068 and coding away in the realm of Timex Basic.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    No - for two reasons. The first is that those old systems were so limited you could either write BASIC or machine code. There were no distractions, no other apps, and no social media - except paper magazines. So 100% of your computer time was devoted to typing in code, learning about code, or writing your own code. The other reason is that in the UK at least, a lot of one-man-shops produced an entire games industry around the Sinclair (Timex) Z81, Spectrum, and other 8-bits of the day. The business had all of the magic characteristics of an open market: minimal cost of entry, minimal cost of marketing (through cheap ads in paper magazines), low-cost distribution, and an enthusiastic and largely untapped potential customer base. No platform today has those characteristics. Web "apps" probably come closest, which is why we're talking about this on HN. But a lot of 8-bit businesses and careers were started without the corporate and financial cruft that surrounds modern start-ups.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      The large majority of those UK professional shops were using 16 bit machines for coding those 8 bit games, while deploying them over connection cables. Coding on the machines themselves was more of an indie kind of thing. Plenty of stories about it on the Retro Gaming Magazine. Most of my friends back on the 8 bit days never learned to code anything beyond LOAD "", as they had plenty of games to choose from at the local bootleg shop.
    - jfoutz 8y ago
      Also, you had to memorize everything. No search. You either knew the solution or you spent a lot of time looking at manuals.
- pmorici 8y ago
  This generation didn't throw out their equivalent to the TI home computer. The same kind of people who were inclined to buy a TI in '83 are buying the RaspberryPi today. More computers are sold today to a wider variety of people that were ever sold in 1983.
  - gbin 8y ago
    The big difference is that in 1980s, we had no choice. If I wanted to play games I had to learn how to use this new TI99/4A. Back to those cartridges were in limited number and my time was kind of infinite (it seemed looking back ;) ). So I started to borrow books and copy listings, then started to understand basic and finally tried to adapt the gameplay etc... I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined! He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it. But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!
    - ido 8y ago
      I don't buy it - your kid may just not be into programming as much as you were. I was born in '83 and in the 90s (when I got into computers) QBasic was already well buried in some obscure directory inside DOS (or later the windows 95 installation CD) & with all the piracy there was no shortage of games around. I still got into programming as a kid & have been doing it for a living since I was 18. And I had plenty of friends (most!) who just wanted to play the games, as well as those that got into programming to make their own.
      - dorkwood 8y ago
        Did someone give you a book, or something? I’m curious about people who learned to program as children. I was an intensely curious kid too, and would quite happily dig around the Windows 3.1 OS hoping to uncover something cool. All I really got out of it was a knowledge of the computer’s file system, though. In my early teens I had access to the internet, and managed to find a C++ tutorial online. I learned to print text to the command line, but not much more than that. It took until my late 20s that I finally had the resources and mental stamina to start learning it for real.
- fit2rule 8y ago
  Removing the expectation that a computer would ship with a compiler onboard, ready for use, was a big mistake. We lost so much control over our devices when we passively allowed the computer companies to take that power from our devices ..
  - whyenot 8y ago
    The TI-99/4A didn't ship with a compiler. Neither did the Atari 400 or 800, the Commodore VIC-20 & 64, or for that matter, the Apple II. Sure, the Apple came with a BASIC interpreter, as did several of the others, but not a compiler and you could usually purchase an assembler. This isn't something we "lost," it's something we didn't have.
    - nosecrets 8y ago
      There was a very expensive compiler for the Apple ][. Apple Pascal, based on UCSD Pascal, had its own operating system, released in 1979. I ran into it in 1983 in my very first computer class (8th grade). https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01 https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01
      - walshemj 8y ago
        I recall supporting our companies scientific software on apple ]['s that used UCSD - don't suppose any on remembers "Tec Pack" I had to recompile the programs to hard code the security dongles key into it.
    - fit2rule 8y ago
      Yes, those things did come with the means onboard by which software could be created. It wasn't a compiler, if you want to be pedantic about it, but no computer shipped in the 80's ever survived unless it had the means onboard to support development of software for it. BASIC was a very effective means by which to write software in those days... We do not have that capability with the iDevices. Nor do we really have it with workstation devices (except of course Linux). Manufacturers don't consider it important to breed a generation of users who can be developers with little more than the initial shipment of software - instead the base has been split, such that more profit can be gained, and more control over an elite market, can be applied. Developers are the tip of the spear for OS vendors. There is a great deal of control over this end of things, for no reason other than to make it possible to have a separated distinction between developer and user. I believe this distinction is having a net deleterious effect on computing ..
- ido 8y ago
  "this generation" is buying a lot more computers (the traditional pc/mac kind) than their 1983 equivalents, even accounting for the greater world population today.
- andybp85 8y ago
  I borderline take offense to this lol. I first got interested in computers and eventually programming by playing with custom ROMs for my Windows Mobile phone when I was in college, circa 2006. If it wasn't for smartphones, I never would have taken a networking class (I was a radio/TV major) and realized I was very interested in what I could make a computer do (I'm a software engineer now). I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past.
  - PavlovsCat 8y ago
    I got interested in computers because I wanted something to play games on, that's all I cared about... and my cousin wisely told my parents to get me an Amiga 500 instead of what I wanted. It came with a lot of manuals which I devoured, and though I didn't program much on the Amiga, I owe a lot to all that (most importantly a point of comparison -- it's not like I haven't experienced all the stuff that came later, and I know I missed out on an even more "empowered" time in the 80s, I barely just catched the tail end of a golden age). https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals Glorious. Sure, most kids who had an Amiga didn't get that deeply into it, e.g. a friend of mine who also had an Amiga never seems to use his computer for much more than playing games and watching movies to this day. But for anyone interested to dive deeper, the doors were wide open and and as encouraging and honest to newbies as humanly possible. Even my non-technical kid friends knew how to load up a neat module in protracker. None of that focus on quality and openness for the sake of quality and doing the right thing was to the detriment of the "casuals", and a polar opposite of a world of stuff like miniminzed JS that does nothing interesting, smartphone apps that half-ass what a website could do, games that just rehash and dumb down the same shit to keep people consuming. The shift from tools and variety to mere consuming and fads is rather crass, come to think about it.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    > "I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past." True. But most people never took the TV to the toilet with them. Yes, It's the same type of person. But today there's no norms to discourage usage (e.g., most people didn't watch TV at work) and thus ever less self-regulation. Note: I'm not longing for the good ol' days. Just wanting to add some clarity to the comparison.
- tyingq 8y ago
  I don't think it's really that different. I only knew a few other kids in the 80's that had a PC. It seems similar with my kids. They are among a few in their school that have an interest in things like Rpi, Arduino, ESP8266, etc.
- jackhack 8y ago
  It's the difference between consuming and creating. Smartphones are for consumers of information. Computers are (were?) for creation of information.
rangibaby 8y ago
I wasn’t alive then but always has the impression that “home computers” like those described were much more popular in Europe and Japan while PCs became the dominant platform in the US. Is this why?
- ams6110 8y ago
  Well, people wanted the same computers at home that they used at work, at least many did. For a while, when businesses were using computers like the TRS-80 line, people would buy them for home also. But when the business world standardized on the intel-based PC, that's what drove a lot of people to buy those for their homes also. So they could do work at home, and use software they were familiar with.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    It also just seemed pretty obvious (perhaps modulo even pre-Mac Apple) that the "PC" was just where the puck was headed in terms of software, etc. I was shopping for my first computer ~1982/3 and I started out looking at a whole bunch of different options (mostly various Z80 systems) but by the time I bought one (in probably 1983), it was pretty obvious to then me that an IBM PC clone was the way to go. As you suggest, at least part of the influence was that, although I had used some Apples at work, we had switched to using an IBM PC which probably colored my thinking. Although I used them some in grad school later, I never got into Macs until relatively recently--and that was for basically work related reasons as well. (We basically don't use Windows and I didn't want to use solely Linux for presentations, etc.)
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      > IBM PC clone was the way to go. It was also many times as expensive, I think.
      - ghaff 8y ago
        As I recall, it varied. There were certainly relatively cheap Z80 and other machines like the Commodore 64. But I don't remember systems like the Apple III, Epson's machines, etc. being vastly different in price given the same floppy-only configuration.
ontouchstart 8y ago
> The history of the personal computer business, brief as it is, has shown that the successful machines are the ones that have the most and best software available for them. It has also shown that no single company can write all the software itself. It must take advantage of the cottage industry of programmers.
emmelaich 8y ago
Classic NYT. Falling prices is a "crisis"
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  Sounds like Trump. And yes, TI was falling and have you read the article?
dwheeler 8y ago
That was not really a crisis, that was a shake out. The article really focuses on the Texas instrument computer. They basically bungled it, everybody knew that software was key for having a popular computer, and yet they do not take steps to make sure there was lots of software available for it... indeed, they discouraged it.
- tzs 8y ago
  Amazingly, years later IBM made the same mistake with OS/2, but more so. Some well known computer columnist, I think it was Jerry Pournelle in his BYTE column, wrote of attending a trade show when Windows 3 was still king where IBM was showing OS/2 Warp and Microsoft was showing Windows 95. OS/2 was out at the point, but Windows 95 was still in beta. He went to the IBM booth, told them he was interested in programming for OS/2 Warp, and asked what he had to do. They gave him a bunch of forms to fill out to apply for the developer program. The forms asked for details of his business and analysis of why he thinks it will make money with OS/2. If they were satisfied with this, they would allow him to buy the SDK. Then he went to the Microsoft booth and asked the same question about Windows 95. They handed him the SDK right there, no charge and no strings attached. That was when, he said in his column, he knew Windows 95 would be the successor to Windows 3, and OS/2 Warp would be at best a niche OS. I said IBM made the same mistake as TI, but more so. The more so is because IBM also neglected promoting OS/2 to consumers, and they neglected hardware support, so even if it had all the software that you cared about, it was hard to discover that OS/2 was an option, and if you did it could be a nightmare getting it to work with readily available hardware. By 1996, Linux was easier to get working than OS/2 with most hardware sold at the major retail computer stores (CompUSA, Computer City).
  - Renaud 8y ago
    Developers, developers, developers! [1] That has always been Microsoft's strength: their ability to bring developers to their ecosystem. It doesn't matter if your OS is the best, most modern and revolutionary: it means nothing if you can't do anything with it. The same mistake almost bit the iPhone when it was launched.[2] [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs [2]:https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st...
shubhamjain 8y ago
> Referring to the $100 rebate that had helped make the T.I. home computer popular, Mr. Cosby joked about how easy it was to get people to buy computers if you paid them $100 to do it. It makes sense for Sony, Nintendo, and Amazon to sell their devices at a loss, making up for it later in selling digital games and books. The loss is an acceptable cost for a bigger distribution platform. But what reasons T.I. had to pursue the strategy without having any footprint in software? Can anyone help me understand this?
- 83457 8y ago
  May not have been that was the strategy they wanted to take initially but they were undercut severely on price my commodore's vic-20 and may have been seen as the only option.
  - russfink 8y ago
    I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, and then bought a Commodore 64. I used a vic-20, and for the life of me, I cannot see how a vic-20 compares to a Texas Instruments 99 / 4A. I honestly would have preferred my Timex over a vic-20 just because the 20 character screen with was super annoying. How did you live with it?
    - reaperducer 8y ago
      I used to feel the same way. But it’s importamt to remember that the VIC 20 wasn’t so much a contemporary of the 99/4A as it was its predecessor. The VIC was somewhat out of phase with the rest of the computer industry at the time. It was more akin to being a step between CP/M machines and the full-on 1980’s home computer scene. Amazingly, people are still producing new VIC 20 carts today. And the quality of the games is quite impressive.
- pmorici 8y ago
  The article implies they were doing it to clear out over stock not as part of some plan to dominate the market.
- 8y ago
code_duck 8y ago
I have one of the original TI PCs, with an 8086. My father purchased it around 81-82. We did have a Commodore 64 as well, and indeed it was far more capable, convenient and user friendly.
- russfink 8y ago
  I was about 14 at the time and had to save my own money to buy a computer. I bought a Timex, and then a Commodore 64. I often wished for the Texas Instruments, because it looked more like a grown up or professional computer, while the Commodore 64 seemed to emphasize games. In particular, I liked the Texas Instruments keyboard a lot better than the Commodore. What was your experience and perceptions? Did you like the Commodore more because it had better games?
  - code_duck 8y ago
    First off I found the BASIC environment of the Commodore 64 much more enticing and then MS-DOS 2. It was my initial hacking environment. Then, we did have a lot better software on the C64 such as logo and indeed many games, and all of the hardware capabilities were far superior such as the graphics and sound. The TI had an ASCII display only… I don’t even think it had CGA, which is far inferior to the Commodore and all the PC world had to offer for years. Even EGA was not as good as the Commodore (one year my friend got a PCjr for Christmas...). It wasn’t until the PS/2 came out that I was excited about having a PC.
- UncleSlacky 8y ago
  When I worked at TI in the UK (circa 1991) they were still using their not-quite-PC-compatible "TI Professional Computer" as dumb terminals.
baus 8y ago
I learned to program in BASIC on T.I. 99/4A. The computers themselves were not expensive, but the peripherals were. It seems insane now, but we used them by hooking them to a TV. Even back then it was a niche compared to the Commodore vic-20/64. I think the real loser from the that time frame wasn't TI, but Commodore who was in a market leading position, but ultimately lost to the PC and Mac.
ezconnect 8y ago
Spectravideo was my first hone computer
bsenftner 8y ago
In '83 I was a 17 year old wise-ass with a dippity-doo mohawk and video games I'd authored in every Sears and K-Mart nation-wide. My best friend did the contacting of computer stores, and one of them turned us onto his brother - a distributed of games and toys to Sears and K-Mart. Our best seller was a Vic-20 game called "GraveCave". Through that experience I became a beta tester for the original pre-release Mac and backdoored by way into Harvard, working with Mandelbrot and quite a bit more. Ah, the risks of youth...
- FiveSquared 8y ago
  r/humblebrag. BTW, it was you who made GraveCave? Hello!
  - bsenftner 8y ago
    Hi! :)
- nighthawk1 8y ago
  A classic humblebrag. I shall post on reddit.
grigjd3 8y ago
With hindsight, this article has all the pieces for understanding what happened with home computers but didn't quite put it together. The article is correct that software was going to drive computer sales and that you had to depend on what at the time was a cottage industry. They even mention IBM being about to enter the market, but the article doesn't seem to be aware of or recognize the importance of the PC architecture in providing a common platform for software creators to target.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  Maybe because it wasn’t the first to do so. There were thousands of pieces of software available that would run on all different CP/M machines from lots of different manufacturers. Usually the only difference was the disk format, and in those cases you could often order the software on the disk type of your choice. If you had a real outlier of a system, there were often equivalent packages written in BASIC or LISP or PASCAL that you could buy the source code for to run on your machine. People today would laugh at the notion of paying $1,500 for an accounting program delivered in BASIC. But that’s how it was.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Because PCs were IBM only when they appeared. The clone market only happened thanks to the clean room reverse engineering done by Compaq, which prevented IBM to legally kill the clones. They tried to do it later via the MCA architecture and PS/2 platform, but failed to do so.
- davidgay 8y ago
  > They even mention IBM being about to enter the market They're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr - a (very much failed) "home computer market" entry. (The IBM PC is 1981, this article is 1983)
  - grigjd3 8y ago
    The Wikipedia article you link even has a quote of an analyst saying this machine will establish the operating system for the home computer market.
sys_64738 8y ago
Jack Tramiel truly was a business genius whose legacy is unfortunately being written out from history. Only the winners write history in their narrative but Jack is the forgotten hero who was ruthless with competitors. "Business is war" RIP Jack.
- classichasclass 8y ago
  I'm glad to have met him before he died. He was at the CHM with Woz and many other luminaries were in the audience like Al Alcorn and Bil Herd. My PET 2001's manual is autographed by him and Leonard.
- gnachman 8y ago
  How can this be in light of his performance at Atari? I’ve always blamed him for their downfall, but maybe there’s something I don’t know.
  - rwallace 8y ago
    He performed well enough at Atari: turned the company around, got a 16-bit machine into production, ran several good years before the PC standard swept the board clear for everyone. Muffed the console side, granted, but I don't think he ever claimed to know consoles.
  - jfultz 8y ago
    There's lots to criticize re Tramiel's performance at Atari, especially on the console side where he sat on the already-finished 7800 for two years while letting Nintendo redefine the marketplace. But Atari had been failing in many ways up to that point (mostly management failures), and all of those chickens came home to roost in 1983. What Tramiel took over in 84 was a company that had already fallen, and was on the brink of utter collapse. They drove away many of their best software developers, forming competitive software companies such as Activision and Imagic, and then spent resources trying and failing to sue them out of existence. Also departing were hardware folks like Jay Miner and Joe Decuir, who would be major contributors to the Amiga, an opportunity that Atari would later have in their hands and throw away. They completely muffed the next-gen console release with the Atari 5200, which was basically nothing more than a repackaged Atari home computer (already 3 years old at the time of the 5200's release), crippled by a terrible analog joystick that didn't self-center and was prone to breaking. They rushed VCS games to market assuming they would print money regardless of quality issues. After 9 months of raking in over $300m in profits in 1982, they ineptly handled the warning signs of Christmas 1982, leading to over half a billion in losses in 1983. There was no way the crash of 1983 wasn't going to hurt Atari, but IMO a company which had been better run could have survived. As it was, without somebody that had Tramiel's level of discipline at the helm, Atari probably would have died in 84 or 85.
apo 8y ago
''I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this,'' said Everett Purdy, senior vice president of merchandising for Service Merchandise, which sells home computers through its catalogs and showrooms. Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100. That price plunge turned an unaffordable extravagance into something I could actually buy and start using every day. It wasn't just the computers that became cheaper, but the peripherals (disk drives, modems, printers) and software as well. Suddenly, a home system that was never going to happen could be picked up piecemeal at a fraction of the price. I wonder how many programmers owe their current careers to this early shakeout and price collapse.
- femto113 8y ago
  I for one learned to program on a TI 99/4A, which I suspect my parents chose based on price. I didn’t really choose a career in software, it just grew out of summer programming jobs I had during college, so reasonable to say I at least partially owe my career to the prices of that time.
  - abecedarius 8y ago
    Same: I was offered a choice between the TI and the Vic-20, the two cheapest options you could find in a store. The TI seemed better for basic programming, though the Vic probably had more games available.
- coldtea 8y ago
  > Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100. Besides prices got to rising again... Now $400 is the starting price for a laptop/PC, and people pay over $3000 often...
  - dannypgh 8y ago
    A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s. People pay more because they want more. If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.
matt_morgan 8y ago
The best part here is someone from Salomon Brothers (RIP) talking about how the computer industry isn't living up to its promise.
bookofjoe 8y ago
>Coleco's Adam, which will sell for $600, includes 80,000 characters of internal memory, a daisy-wheel printer, a tape storage device, game joysticks, a word-processing program and a game. The package will allow people at home to use the computer in place of a typewriter as well as for playing games. $600 in 1983 = $1,520.72 in 2018. iPhone XS Max w 512GB: $1,449.
- lagadu 8y ago
  So a well specced but not top-end personal computer in 1983 costs about the same as a simililarly specced computer today and the same as high end phone that effectively replaces computers for many people? It's kind of underwhelming.
  - chrisco255 8y ago
    Suppose you could teleport an iPhone XS back to 1983...I doubt that anyone would find it underwhelming.
    - nkozyra 8y ago
      That isn't the parent's point, though. It says relatively comparable computer at relatively comparable price.
      - fjsolwmv 8y ago
        They are only "comparable" on the relative scale. That aan interesting economic observation of consumers' willingness to spend on "technology". The progress in computing is not "underwhelming" -- a modern smartphone is not just a computer, it's also a telephone, a camera, a movie decoder, a video screen, an audio video recorder, an audio player, a GPS, an accelerometer, a local wireless communicator, and host incredibly advances applications, while also being battery powered, pocket-portable, water resistant, shock resistant, with near 0 electricity cost, noise emissions and heat emissions.
        8y ago
neonscribe 8y ago
IBM's "Peanut" became the PCjr, one of the great flops of the early PC era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr
- julianz 8y ago
  Oh yes I remember these. A family friend bought one to run his business on, clearly happy that he'd got a bargain. It was a piece of shit and he was forever running into compatibility problems with software.
foxhop 8y ago
Although the prices of the computers and the extreme price reductions seems interesting, I think even more so is the companies and brand names that have disappeared from the "consumer market" due to saturating the market (Texas Instrument and Atari). I think it is very interesting that the desktop (personal computer) exploded over the next couple decades and yet the overages in supply actually sunk these market leaders to the point where they never recovered. I think properly forecasting market size and growing your inventory, surpluses, and work-in-progress properly while pouring extra engineering capacity into research and development is a delicate balancing act which we can all learn from.
- ohiovr 8y ago
  Remember the computer shopper publication from ziff davis? it was a monthly 3 inches thick magazine full of vendors selling beige box computers that have now all been long forgotten.
FullyFunctional 8y ago
The striking part about that article is that there is zero discussion about technical merit. I've never seen nor used a TI 99/9A, but the stories I read weren't too kind. In my neck of the woods (Denmark), in the 1978-ish your choices were expensive pre-built Z-80 machines, like the Luxor ABC-80 or danish niche computers (some which were actually amazing for the time). I went with a British kit, the Z-80 based Nascom 2. Roughly 1 years later, the market had changed and 6502 based options were abundant with the BBC, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 taking the lead (ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum were popular too). Later Amiga arrived with its own following. All this to say that the world was such a mess of an abundance of incompatible computers that when the IBM PC came out, the main attraction was the belief that, because of I.B.M., this would become popular enough that there would be a critical mass of great and actually useful software. I sometimes try to imagine how things would have played differently had IBM abstained from the "hobby market".
ohiovr 8y ago
Dad liked the TI 99/4a so much he bought 2 of them, from service merchandise no less. It had a 16 bit processor and a really swell speech synth module (golly gee it says good shot pilot when you zap an alien!) Personal computer prices were in a meteoric decent just a few years prior radio shack had a catalog of them starting well over $3,000.
WalterBright 8y ago
DEC could have completely owned the PC market. They had the microcomputer (LSI-11), excellent software for it, an upgrade path to more powerful machines, and legions of loyal "DEC-heads" just itching to buy one. DEC fiddly-farted around for years, and finally came up with the Rainbow PC. Not only did it have nothing to do with the 11, its compatibility with the IBM PC was deliberately crippled (you had to do things like buy floppy disks only from DEC). The DEC-heads I knew just laughed in disgust at this, and abandoned their loyalty to DEC. The Rainbow fiasco marked the end of DEC. It's pretty sad, what might have been. The 11 was a fantastic machine. (I owned an H-11, and thinking DEC was the obvious future of microcomputing, rewrote Empire for it: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )
- jhbadger 8y ago
  Bizarrely enough, one of the few home computers available in the Soviet Union was a PDP-11 clone in a C64-style case! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK
  - krasin 8y ago
    For the first two years of my life as a programmer (1996-1998), I only had access to these PDP-11 clones. Jumped straight to Pentium II. Never had a sharper upgrade in performance.
- jdkee 8y ago
  Thanks for creating Empire. I played the heck out of it on the Amiga in my teens. It really opened my eyes to what computers could do w.r.t. visualizing complex systems. I consider it upo with Conway's game of life as an instantiation of complexity.
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Glad you liked it!
sehugg 8y ago
Yes the TI-99/4A was 16 bit, but it only had 256 bytes of (static) RAM connected to the CPU bus! The other 16k of DRAM was behind the video processor, so the CPU had to read/write it sequentially one byte at a time. There was't even a stack for the CPU.
jecel 8y ago
The 1979 TI99/4 included a color monitor as part of its price while the TI99/4A did not, so the 1982 and 1983 price comparisons were a bit flawed.

130 points by indigodaddy 8y ago

Whenever I read things like this I grow sad that this generation threw out all their computers and traded them in for smartphones, which aren’t really computing at all in my opinion. They are more like watching tv, something we already did too much of.

tonyedgecombe 8y ago
Annual Apple Mac sales are about the same as the whole of their Apple II production.
qrbLPHiKpiux 8y ago
There are two types of computing today (2019) - producing and consuming. I can't cite the correct reference, but it's something along the lines that when the masses do more of one thing than the other, something will suffer bad.
Kaveren 8y ago
You know this already, but smartphones are just computers that are small and portable. That's the only difference. Many of the operating systems are similar or based on those you'd use on a desktop or laptop computer. There's a large amount of software available on both mobile and traditional computer operating systems. TV is non-interactive, smartphones allow a great deal of interactivity. Besides, I don't think watching a fair amount of TV is a bad thing in the first place. It's a creative medium, you're consuming art (okay, maybe a lot of it isn't very good, but it's art nonetheless). I think you might just be nostalgic.
- beatgammit 8y ago
  Smartphones aren't nearly as good for being productive as desktops and laptops, though they're pretty good at consuming content. I think this shift away from desktops and laptops indicates a shift away from productivity. Yes, a lot of people watched too much TV, but at least they had the capability of doing things like image editing, building spreadsheets, etc. Smartphones can do those things, but it's so awkward that it's more likely that you're not going to bother, so you're more likely to just consume content instead of create it if you don't own a desktop or a laptop. Personally, I'm not really nostalgic over traditional computers, but I am a little nostalgic for stuff created by hand instead of filled in with a template.
  - bluntfang 8y ago
    >productive That's an interesting word choice and something tells me "productivity" is highly subjective. For example, can you code on a smartphone? Yeah, but not as productively as on a desktop. Can I manage my sales team's day to day from my smart phone? Absolutely and that might be a great choice as managing sales probably doesn't lend to being in one place for very long.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Smartphone no, but I’ve written thousands of lines of code and hundreds of thousands of words of material on an iPad, because it’s what I have with me on the train. Context is everything. I have written a few small programs on my phone too. Google Docs makes writing seamless with the desktop, and I can ftp my code out of Pythonista. Probably not a typical setup, but I find it very productive. They’re just tools.
  - meuk 8y ago
    This. If we'd have a smartphone with a proper USB connection (one that doesn't stop working after a few years), and the possibility to connect it to a keyboard, screen, and mouse, I'd do pretty much everything on my phone. Instead, I can't even browser normally: I get a dumbed down version of most sites.
    - windows_tips 8y ago
      It's possible to 'dock' a phone with a keyboard, monitor, and mouse. I'm not sure many easily support that setup though.
- scandox 8y ago
  A keyboard connected to nothing is a more creative device than a smart phone.
  - 14 8y ago
    I agree. To me a computer is a machine under a persons control and I believe if you own something you should have full control. This is why we have a jailbreak scene. People want control.
  - thenanyu 8y ago
    Can a keyboard shoot video, take a photo, record a podcast? Definition of “creative” seems narrow here.
- simonh 8y ago
  I’m reading this thread and replying from my phone while on the bus. Try that with a desktop or even a laptop. I consume a huge amount of educational and special interest material from YouTube that wouldn’t exist let alone be accessible in the age of TV. Mobile devices do have some negative consequences, sure, but they also enable engagement, contribution, self improvement and creativity. My kids watch a lot of YouTube, but also use their iPads to do homework and sketch and draw. These are fantastic tools. How we use them is up to us.
pjmlp 8y ago
Using Swift Playgrounds, Pythonista, Continuous and similar apps is not much different than booting up my Timex 2068 and coding away in the realm of Timex Basic.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  No - for two reasons. The first is that those old systems were so limited you could either write BASIC or machine code. There were no distractions, no other apps, and no social media - except paper magazines. So 100% of your computer time was devoted to typing in code, learning about code, or writing your own code. The other reason is that in the UK at least, a lot of one-man-shops produced an entire games industry around the Sinclair (Timex) Z81, Spectrum, and other 8-bits of the day. The business had all of the magic characteristics of an open market: minimal cost of entry, minimal cost of marketing (through cheap ads in paper magazines), low-cost distribution, and an enthusiastic and largely untapped potential customer base. No platform today has those characteristics. Web "apps" probably come closest, which is why we're talking about this on HN. But a lot of 8-bit businesses and careers were started without the corporate and financial cruft that surrounds modern start-ups.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    The large majority of those UK professional shops were using 16 bit machines for coding those 8 bit games, while deploying them over connection cables. Coding on the machines themselves was more of an indie kind of thing. Plenty of stories about it on the Retro Gaming Magazine. Most of my friends back on the 8 bit days never learned to code anything beyond LOAD "", as they had plenty of games to choose from at the local bootleg shop.
  - jfoutz 8y ago
    Also, you had to memorize everything. No search. You either knew the solution or you spent a lot of time looking at manuals.
pmorici 8y ago
This generation didn't throw out their equivalent to the TI home computer. The same kind of people who were inclined to buy a TI in '83 are buying the RaspberryPi today. More computers are sold today to a wider variety of people that were ever sold in 1983.
- gbin 8y ago
  The big difference is that in 1980s, we had no choice. If I wanted to play games I had to learn how to use this new TI99/4A. Back to those cartridges were in limited number and my time was kind of infinite (it seemed looking back ;) ). So I started to borrow books and copy listings, then started to understand basic and finally tried to adapt the gameplay etc... I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined! He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it. But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!
  - ido 8y ago
    I don't buy it - your kid may just not be into programming as much as you were. I was born in '83 and in the 90s (when I got into computers) QBasic was already well buried in some obscure directory inside DOS (or later the windows 95 installation CD) & with all the piracy there was no shortage of games around. I still got into programming as a kid & have been doing it for a living since I was 18. And I had plenty of friends (most!) who just wanted to play the games, as well as those that got into programming to make their own.
    - dorkwood 8y ago
      Did someone give you a book, or something? I’m curious about people who learned to program as children. I was an intensely curious kid too, and would quite happily dig around the Windows 3.1 OS hoping to uncover something cool. All I really got out of it was a knowledge of the computer’s file system, though. In my early teens I had access to the internet, and managed to find a C++ tutorial online. I learned to print text to the command line, but not much more than that. It took until my late 20s that I finally had the resources and mental stamina to start learning it for real.
fit2rule 8y ago
Removing the expectation that a computer would ship with a compiler onboard, ready for use, was a big mistake. We lost so much control over our devices when we passively allowed the computer companies to take that power from our devices ..
- whyenot 8y ago
  The TI-99/4A didn't ship with a compiler. Neither did the Atari 400 or 800, the Commodore VIC-20 & 64, or for that matter, the Apple II. Sure, the Apple came with a BASIC interpreter, as did several of the others, but not a compiler and you could usually purchase an assembler. This isn't something we "lost," it's something we didn't have.
  - nosecrets 8y ago
    There was a very expensive compiler for the Apple ][. Apple Pascal, based on UCSD Pascal, had its own operating system, released in 1979. I ran into it in 1983 in my very first computer class (8th grade). https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01 https://apple2history.org/history/ah17/#01
    - walshemj 8y ago
      I recall supporting our companies scientific software on apple ]['s that used UCSD - don't suppose any on remembers "Tec Pack" I had to recompile the programs to hard code the security dongles key into it.
  - fit2rule 8y ago
    Yes, those things did come with the means onboard by which software could be created. It wasn't a compiler, if you want to be pedantic about it, but no computer shipped in the 80's ever survived unless it had the means onboard to support development of software for it. BASIC was a very effective means by which to write software in those days... We do not have that capability with the iDevices. Nor do we really have it with workstation devices (except of course Linux). Manufacturers don't consider it important to breed a generation of users who can be developers with little more than the initial shipment of software - instead the base has been split, such that more profit can be gained, and more control over an elite market, can be applied. Developers are the tip of the spear for OS vendors. There is a great deal of control over this end of things, for no reason other than to make it possible to have a separated distinction between developer and user. I believe this distinction is having a net deleterious effect on computing ..
ido 8y ago
"this generation" is buying a lot more computers (the traditional pc/mac kind) than their 1983 equivalents, even accounting for the greater world population today.
andybp85 8y ago
I borderline take offense to this lol. I first got interested in computers and eventually programming by playing with custom ROMs for my Windows Mobile phone when I was in college, circa 2006. If it wasn't for smartphones, I never would have taken a networking class (I was a radio/TV major) and realized I was very interested in what I could make a computer do (I'm a software engineer now). I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  I got interested in computers because I wanted something to play games on, that's all I cared about... and my cousin wisely told my parents to get me an Amiga 500 instead of what I wanted. It came with a lot of manuals which I devoured, and though I didn't program much on the Amiga, I owe a lot to all that (most importantly a point of comparison -- it's not like I haven't experienced all the stuff that came later, and I know I missed out on an even more "empowered" time in the 80s, I barely just catched the tail end of a golden age). https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals Glorious. Sure, most kids who had an Amiga didn't get that deeply into it, e.g. a friend of mine who also had an Amiga never seems to use his computer for much more than playing games and watching movies to this day. But for anyone interested to dive deeper, the doors were wide open and and as encouraging and honest to newbies as humanly possible. Even my non-technical kid friends knew how to load up a neat module in protracker. None of that focus on quality and openness for the sake of quality and doing the right thing was to the detriment of the "casuals", and a polar opposite of a world of stuff like miniminzed JS that does nothing interesting, smartphone apps that half-ass what a website could do, games that just rehash and dumb down the same shit to keep people consuming. The shift from tools and variety to mere consuming and fads is rather crass, come to think about it.
- chiefalchemist 8y ago
  > "I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past." True. But most people never took the TV to the toilet with them. Yes, It's the same type of person. But today there's no norms to discourage usage (e.g., most people didn't watch TV at work) and thus ever less self-regulation. Note: I'm not longing for the good ol' days. Just wanting to add some clarity to the comparison.
tyingq 8y ago
I don't think it's really that different. I only knew a few other kids in the 80's that had a PC. It seems similar with my kids. They are among a few in their school that have an interest in things like Rpi, Arduino, ESP8266, etc.
jackhack 8y ago
It's the difference between consuming and creating. Smartphones are for consumers of information. Computers are (were?) for creation of information.

rangibaby 8y ago

I wasn’t alive then but always has the impression that “home computers” like those described were much more popular in Europe and Japan while PCs became the dominant platform in the US. Is this why?

ams6110 8y ago
Well, people wanted the same computers at home that they used at work, at least many did. For a while, when businesses were using computers like the TRS-80 line, people would buy them for home also. But when the business world standardized on the intel-based PC, that's what drove a lot of people to buy those for their homes also. So they could do work at home, and use software they were familiar with.
- ghaff 8y ago
  It also just seemed pretty obvious (perhaps modulo even pre-Mac Apple) that the "PC" was just where the puck was headed in terms of software, etc. I was shopping for my first computer ~1982/3 and I started out looking at a whole bunch of different options (mostly various Z80 systems) but by the time I bought one (in probably 1983), it was pretty obvious to then me that an IBM PC clone was the way to go. As you suggest, at least part of the influence was that, although I had used some Apples at work, we had switched to using an IBM PC which probably colored my thinking. Although I used them some in grad school later, I never got into Macs until relatively recently--and that was for basically work related reasons as well. (We basically don't use Windows and I didn't want to use solely Linux for presentations, etc.)
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    > IBM PC clone was the way to go. It was also many times as expensive, I think.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      As I recall, it varied. There were certainly relatively cheap Z80 and other machines like the Commodore 64. But I don't remember systems like the Apple III, Epson's machines, etc. being vastly different in price given the same floppy-only configuration.

ontouchstart 8y ago

> The history of the personal computer business, brief as it is, has shown that the successful machines are the ones that have the most and best software available for them. It has also shown that no single company can write all the software itself. It must take advantage of the cottage industry of programmers.

emmelaich 8y ago

Classic NYT. Falling prices is a "crisis"

FiveSquared 8y ago
Sounds like Trump. And yes, TI was falling and have you read the article?

dwheeler 8y ago

That was not really a crisis, that was a shake out. The article really focuses on the Texas instrument computer. They basically bungled it, everybody knew that software was key for having a popular computer, and yet they do not take steps to make sure there was lots of software available for it... indeed, they discouraged it.

tzs 8y ago
Amazingly, years later IBM made the same mistake with OS/2, but more so. Some well known computer columnist, I think it was Jerry Pournelle in his BYTE column, wrote of attending a trade show when Windows 3 was still king where IBM was showing OS/2 Warp and Microsoft was showing Windows 95. OS/2 was out at the point, but Windows 95 was still in beta. He went to the IBM booth, told them he was interested in programming for OS/2 Warp, and asked what he had to do. They gave him a bunch of forms to fill out to apply for the developer program. The forms asked for details of his business and analysis of why he thinks it will make money with OS/2. If they were satisfied with this, they would allow him to buy the SDK. Then he went to the Microsoft booth and asked the same question about Windows 95. They handed him the SDK right there, no charge and no strings attached. That was when, he said in his column, he knew Windows 95 would be the successor to Windows 3, and OS/2 Warp would be at best a niche OS. I said IBM made the same mistake as TI, but more so. The more so is because IBM also neglected promoting OS/2 to consumers, and they neglected hardware support, so even if it had all the software that you cared about, it was hard to discover that OS/2 was an option, and if you did it could be a nightmare getting it to work with readily available hardware. By 1996, Linux was easier to get working than OS/2 with most hardware sold at the major retail computer stores (CompUSA, Computer City).
- Renaud 8y ago
  Developers, developers, developers! [1] That has always been Microsoft's strength: their ability to bring developers to their ecosystem. It doesn't matter if your OS is the best, most modern and revolutionary: it means nothing if you can't do anything with it. The same mistake almost bit the iPhone when it was launched.[2] [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs [2]:https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st...

shubhamjain 8y ago

> Referring to the $100 rebate that had helped make the T.I. home computer popular, Mr. Cosby joked about how easy it was to get people to buy computers if you paid them $100 to do it. It makes sense for Sony, Nintendo, and Amazon to sell their devices at a loss, making up for it later in selling digital games and books. The loss is an acceptable cost for a bigger distribution platform. But what reasons T.I. had to pursue the strategy without having any footprint in software? Can anyone help me understand this?

83457 8y ago
May not have been that was the strategy they wanted to take initially but they were undercut severely on price my commodore's vic-20 and may have been seen as the only option.
- russfink 8y ago
  I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, and then bought a Commodore 64. I used a vic-20, and for the life of me, I cannot see how a vic-20 compares to a Texas Instruments 99 / 4A. I honestly would have preferred my Timex over a vic-20 just because the 20 character screen with was super annoying. How did you live with it?
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    I used to feel the same way. But it’s importamt to remember that the VIC 20 wasn’t so much a contemporary of the 99/4A as it was its predecessor. The VIC was somewhat out of phase with the rest of the computer industry at the time. It was more akin to being a step between CP/M machines and the full-on 1980’s home computer scene. Amazingly, people are still producing new VIC 20 carts today. And the quality of the games is quite impressive.
pmorici 8y ago
The article implies they were doing it to clear out over stock not as part of some plan to dominate the market.
8y ago

code_duck 8y ago

I have one of the original TI PCs, with an 8086. My father purchased it around 81-82. We did have a Commodore 64 as well, and indeed it was far more capable, convenient and user friendly.

russfink 8y ago
I was about 14 at the time and had to save my own money to buy a computer. I bought a Timex, and then a Commodore 64. I often wished for the Texas Instruments, because it looked more like a grown up or professional computer, while the Commodore 64 seemed to emphasize games. In particular, I liked the Texas Instruments keyboard a lot better than the Commodore. What was your experience and perceptions? Did you like the Commodore more because it had better games?
- code_duck 8y ago
  First off I found the BASIC environment of the Commodore 64 much more enticing and then MS-DOS 2. It was my initial hacking environment. Then, we did have a lot better software on the C64 such as logo and indeed many games, and all of the hardware capabilities were far superior such as the graphics and sound. The TI had an ASCII display only… I don’t even think it had CGA, which is far inferior to the Commodore and all the PC world had to offer for years. Even EGA was not as good as the Commodore (one year my friend got a PCjr for Christmas...). It wasn’t until the PS/2 came out that I was excited about having a PC.
UncleSlacky 8y ago
When I worked at TI in the UK (circa 1991) they were still using their not-quite-PC-compatible "TI Professional Computer" as dumb terminals.

baus 8y ago

I learned to program in BASIC on T.I. 99/4A. The computers themselves were not expensive, but the peripherals were. It seems insane now, but we used them by hooking them to a TV. Even back then it was a niche compared to the Commodore vic-20/64. I think the real loser from the that time frame wasn't TI, but Commodore who was in a market leading position, but ultimately lost to the PC and Mac.

ezconnect 8y ago

Spectravideo was my first hone computer

bsenftner 8y ago

In '83 I was a 17 year old wise-ass with a dippity-doo mohawk and video games I'd authored in every Sears and K-Mart nation-wide. My best friend did the contacting of computer stores, and one of them turned us onto his brother - a distributed of games and toys to Sears and K-Mart. Our best seller was a Vic-20 game called "GraveCave". Through that experience I became a beta tester for the original pre-release Mac and backdoored by way into Harvard, working with Mandelbrot and quite a bit more. Ah, the risks of youth...

FiveSquared 8y ago
r/humblebrag. BTW, it was you who made GraveCave? Hello!
- bsenftner 8y ago
  Hi! :)
nighthawk1 8y ago
A classic humblebrag. I shall post on reddit.

grigjd3 8y ago

With hindsight, this article has all the pieces for understanding what happened with home computers but didn't quite put it together. The article is correct that software was going to drive computer sales and that you had to depend on what at the time was a cottage industry. They even mention IBM being about to enter the market, but the article doesn't seem to be aware of or recognize the importance of the PC architecture in providing a common platform for software creators to target.

reaperducer 8y ago
Maybe because it wasn’t the first to do so. There were thousands of pieces of software available that would run on all different CP/M machines from lots of different manufacturers. Usually the only difference was the disk format, and in those cases you could often order the software on the disk type of your choice. If you had a real outlier of a system, there were often equivalent packages written in BASIC or LISP or PASCAL that you could buy the source code for to run on your machine. People today would laugh at the notion of paying $1,500 for an accounting program delivered in BASIC. But that’s how it was.
pjmlp 8y ago
Because PCs were IBM only when they appeared. The clone market only happened thanks to the clean room reverse engineering done by Compaq, which prevented IBM to legally kill the clones. They tried to do it later via the MCA architecture and PS/2 platform, but failed to do so.
davidgay 8y ago
> They even mention IBM being about to enter the market They're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr - a (very much failed) "home computer market" entry. (The IBM PC is 1981, this article is 1983)
- grigjd3 8y ago
  The Wikipedia article you link even has a quote of an analyst saying this machine will establish the operating system for the home computer market.

sys_64738 8y ago

Jack Tramiel truly was a business genius whose legacy is unfortunately being written out from history. Only the winners write history in their narrative but Jack is the forgotten hero who was ruthless with competitors. "Business is war" RIP Jack.

classichasclass 8y ago
I'm glad to have met him before he died. He was at the CHM with Woz and many other luminaries were in the audience like Al Alcorn and Bil Herd. My PET 2001's manual is autographed by him and Leonard.
gnachman 8y ago
How can this be in light of his performance at Atari? I’ve always blamed him for their downfall, but maybe there’s something I don’t know.
- rwallace 8y ago
  He performed well enough at Atari: turned the company around, got a 16-bit machine into production, ran several good years before the PC standard swept the board clear for everyone. Muffed the console side, granted, but I don't think he ever claimed to know consoles.
- jfultz 8y ago
  There's lots to criticize re Tramiel's performance at Atari, especially on the console side where he sat on the already-finished 7800 for two years while letting Nintendo redefine the marketplace. But Atari had been failing in many ways up to that point (mostly management failures), and all of those chickens came home to roost in 1983. What Tramiel took over in 84 was a company that had already fallen, and was on the brink of utter collapse. They drove away many of their best software developers, forming competitive software companies such as Activision and Imagic, and then spent resources trying and failing to sue them out of existence. Also departing were hardware folks like Jay Miner and Joe Decuir, who would be major contributors to the Amiga, an opportunity that Atari would later have in their hands and throw away. They completely muffed the next-gen console release with the Atari 5200, which was basically nothing more than a repackaged Atari home computer (already 3 years old at the time of the 5200's release), crippled by a terrible analog joystick that didn't self-center and was prone to breaking. They rushed VCS games to market assuming they would print money regardless of quality issues. After 9 months of raking in over $300m in profits in 1982, they ineptly handled the warning signs of Christmas 1982, leading to over half a billion in losses in 1983. There was no way the crash of 1983 wasn't going to hurt Atari, but IMO a company which had been better run could have survived. As it was, without somebody that had Tramiel's level of discipline at the helm, Atari probably would have died in 84 or 85.

apo 8y ago

''I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this,'' said Everett Purdy, senior vice president of merchandising for Service Merchandise, which sells home computers through its catalogs and showrooms. Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100. That price plunge turned an unaffordable extravagance into something I could actually buy and start using every day. It wasn't just the computers that became cheaper, but the peripherals (disk drives, modems, printers) and software as well. Suddenly, a home system that was never going to happen could be picked up piecemeal at a fraction of the price. I wonder how many programmers owe their current careers to this early shakeout and price collapse.

femto113 8y ago
I for one learned to program on a TI 99/4A, which I suspect my parents chose based on price. I didn’t really choose a career in software, it just grew out of summer programming jobs I had during college, so reasonable to say I at least partially owe my career to the prices of that time.
- abecedarius 8y ago
  Same: I was offered a choice between the TI and the Vic-20, the two cheapest options you could find in a store. The TI seemed better for basic programming, though the Vic probably had more games available.
coldtea 8y ago
> Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100. Besides prices got to rising again... Now $400 is the starting price for a laptop/PC, and people pay over $3000 often...
- dannypgh 8y ago
  A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s. People pay more because they want more. If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.

matt_morgan 8y ago

The best part here is someone from Salomon Brothers (RIP) talking about how the computer industry isn't living up to its promise.

bookofjoe 8y ago

>Coleco's Adam, which will sell for $600, includes 80,000 characters of internal memory, a daisy-wheel printer, a tape storage device, game joysticks, a word-processing program and a game. The package will allow people at home to use the computer in place of a typewriter as well as for playing games. $600 in 1983 = $1,520.72 in 2018. iPhone XS Max w 512GB: $1,449.

lagadu 8y ago
So a well specced but not top-end personal computer in 1983 costs about the same as a simililarly specced computer today and the same as high end phone that effectively replaces computers for many people? It's kind of underwhelming.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Suppose you could teleport an iPhone XS back to 1983...I doubt that anyone would find it underwhelming.
  - nkozyra 8y ago
    That isn't the parent's point, though. It says relatively comparable computer at relatively comparable price.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      They are only "comparable" on the relative scale. That aan interesting economic observation of consumers' willingness to spend on "technology". The progress in computing is not "underwhelming" -- a modern smartphone is not just a computer, it's also a telephone, a camera, a movie decoder, a video screen, an audio video recorder, an audio player, a GPS, an accelerometer, a local wireless communicator, and host incredibly advances applications, while also being battery powered, pocket-portable, water resistant, shock resistant, with near 0 electricity cost, noise emissions and heat emissions.
      - 8y ago

neonscribe 8y ago

IBM's "Peanut" became the PCjr, one of the great flops of the early PC era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr

julianz 8y ago
Oh yes I remember these. A family friend bought one to run his business on, clearly happy that he'd got a bargain. It was a piece of shit and he was forever running into compatibility problems with software.

foxhop 8y ago

Although the prices of the computers and the extreme price reductions seems interesting, I think even more so is the companies and brand names that have disappeared from the "consumer market" due to saturating the market (Texas Instrument and Atari). I think it is very interesting that the desktop (personal computer) exploded over the next couple decades and yet the overages in supply actually sunk these market leaders to the point where they never recovered. I think properly forecasting market size and growing your inventory, surpluses, and work-in-progress properly while pouring extra engineering capacity into research and development is a delicate balancing act which we can all learn from.

ohiovr 8y ago
Remember the computer shopper publication from ziff davis? it was a monthly 3 inches thick magazine full of vendors selling beige box computers that have now all been long forgotten.

FullyFunctional 8y ago

The striking part about that article is that there is zero discussion about technical merit. I've never seen nor used a TI 99/9A, but the stories I read weren't too kind. In my neck of the woods (Denmark), in the 1978-ish your choices were expensive pre-built Z-80 machines, like the Luxor ABC-80 or danish niche computers (some which were actually amazing for the time). I went with a British kit, the Z-80 based Nascom 2. Roughly 1 years later, the market had changed and 6502 based options were abundant with the BBC, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 taking the lead (ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum were popular too). Later Amiga arrived with its own following. All this to say that the world was such a mess of an abundance of incompatible computers that when the IBM PC came out, the main attraction was the belief that, because of I.B.M., this would become popular enough that there would be a critical mass of great and actually useful software. I sometimes try to imagine how things would have played differently had IBM abstained from the "hobby market".

ohiovr 8y ago

Dad liked the TI 99/4a so much he bought 2 of them, from service merchandise no less. It had a 16 bit processor and a really swell speech synth module (golly gee it says good shot pilot when you zap an alien!) Personal computer prices were in a meteoric decent just a few years prior radio shack had a catalog of them starting well over $3,000.

WalterBright 8y ago

DEC could have completely owned the PC market. They had the microcomputer (LSI-11), excellent software for it, an upgrade path to more powerful machines, and legions of loyal "DEC-heads" just itching to buy one. DEC fiddly-farted around for years, and finally came up with the Rainbow PC. Not only did it have nothing to do with the 11, its compatibility with the IBM PC was deliberately crippled (you had to do things like buy floppy disks only from DEC). The DEC-heads I knew just laughed in disgust at this, and abandoned their loyalty to DEC. The Rainbow fiasco marked the end of DEC. It's pretty sad, what might have been. The 11 was a fantastic machine. (I owned an H-11, and thinking DEC was the obvious future of microcomputing, rewrote Empire for it: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )

jhbadger 8y ago
Bizarrely enough, one of the few home computers available in the Soviet Union was a PDP-11 clone in a C64-style case! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK
- krasin 8y ago
  For the first two years of my life as a programmer (1996-1998), I only had access to these PDP-11 clones. Jumped straight to Pentium II. Never had a sharper upgrade in performance.
jdkee 8y ago
Thanks for creating Empire. I played the heck out of it on the Amiga in my teens. It really opened my eyes to what computers could do w.r.t. visualizing complex systems. I consider it upo with Conway's game of life as an instantiation of complexity.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Glad you liked it!

sehugg 8y ago

Yes the TI-99/4A was 16 bit, but it only had 256 bytes of (static) RAM connected to the CPU bus! The other 16k of DRAM was behind the video processor, so the CPU had to read/write it sequentially one byte at a time. There was't even a stack for the CPU.

jecel 8y ago

The 1979 TI99/4 included a color monitor as part of its price while the TI99/4A did not, so the 1982 and 1983 price comparisons were a bit flawed.