4 ms·
What I took from this quote was that IBM and even DEC were shipping enormous devices that were engineered like digital tanks, with redundant data paths, redunda
by justanother 8y ago
What I took from this quote was that IBM and even DEC were shipping enormous devices that were engineered like digital tanks, with redundant data paths, redundant power supplies, somewhat hot-swappable component cards, and a guarantee of several nines worth of uptime, when combined with their first-party operating systems. Breakthrough home computers, by contrast, tended to emerge from "good enough to play games and play with balancing your bank account," having a strong emphasis on arcade graphics, but not so much on reliability.
- msla 8y ago> Breakthrough home computers, by contrast, tended to emerge from "good enough to play games and play with balancing your bank account," having a strong emphasis on arcade graphics, but not so much on reliability. That was true after 1977, certainly, but going earlier, the S-100 bus computers which ran CP/M had text terminals (and front panels with lights and switches!) and were cheaper than any other kind of real computer, but were more in the mold of the small-scale business machines of the era, called minicomputers, than the Apple II or Commodore-64 were.