3 ms·

> Imagine an alternative 1987. IBM never bothered to enter the microcomputer market. Apple has yet to launch the Macintosh. A new generation of 16-bit computers

by mmoez 7y ago

> Imagine an alternative 1987. IBM never bothered to enter the microcomputer market. Apple has yet to launch the Macintosh. A new generation of 16-bit computers aimed at people who grew up with 8-bit machines is on sale. The IIGS from Apple, the Amiga from Atari, the C65 from Commodore. But the MSX Turbo-R is still in development. There’s a small window of opportunity for another manufacturer to launch a 16-bit, Z80 instruction set compatible machine that can run Microsoft BASIC programs. The Chloe Corporation aims to take 8080 and Z80 users into the 16-bit era with the new Chloe 280SE. I'd pay a fortune for living in such a parallel universe...

bryanlarsen 7y ago
I wouldn't be so quick. Yes, the 90s probably would have been better, but all of those are closed architectures.
- jandrese 7y ago
  I'm imagining a world where PCs evolved like Smartphones, with every company holding onto its stack and only modest amounts of standardization between them. There's no good reason smartphones couldn't support booting generic OS images today, except that all of the manufacturers want to lock you into their platform. I feel like we're being robbed of the chance to have a "Linux for Smartphones" that just boots on everything and has drivers for all common hardware and none of the vendor added garbage. Stuff like LineageOS is kind of a start, but they're constantly fighting to get a toehold on each new smartphone generation.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    > Stuff like LineageOS is kind of a start, but they're constantly fighting to get a toehold on each new smartphone generation. That's because the SoC's themselves have almost zero standardization - and quite unlike the custom platforms of the 1980s and 1990s, they aren't even documented. They can barely run with their hacked-together 'board support packages (BSP's)' and factory-installed OS's. Cleaning up the hardware support for even a single one of these platforms so it passes the standards for mainline kernel inclusion and support is a huge amount of effort, and then only gives you long-term support for that one hardware revision. It's a lot worse of a mess than what we had in the 1990s.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      Exactly, and it seems so unnecessary. These problems were solved on PCs in the 90s and the cell phone manufacturers are absolutely refusing to use the solutions. I can only imagine how many man-years of effort have been wasted because they're so insistent on keeping everything siloed up. It is madness.
  - z3phyr 7y ago
    Are people hacking smartphones like those closed source microcomputers were hacked as described in Hackers: Heroes of Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy?
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    We are are already living in that world, the shrinking "build your desktop" market is the surviving species of PC clones. Everyone that moved into laptops as their main computer are split between Windows/macOS laptops, with a negligible market size for anything else.
randoramax 7y ago
Nit: Amiga was by Commodore, Atari had its own line of computers.
- mwcremer 7y ago
  Amiga was an independent company funded by Atari before being acquired by Commodore.

by mmoez 7y ago

bryanlarsen 7y ago

I wouldn't be so quick. Yes, the 90s probably would have been better, but all of those are closed architectures.

jandrese 7y ago
I'm imagining a world where PCs evolved like Smartphones, with every company holding onto its stack and only modest amounts of standardization between them. There's no good reason smartphones couldn't support booting generic OS images today, except that all of the manufacturers want to lock you into their platform. I feel like we're being robbed of the chance to have a "Linux for Smartphones" that just boots on everything and has drivers for all common hardware and none of the vendor added garbage. Stuff like LineageOS is kind of a start, but they're constantly fighting to get a toehold on each new smartphone generation.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > Stuff like LineageOS is kind of a start, but they're constantly fighting to get a toehold on each new smartphone generation. That's because the SoC's themselves have almost zero standardization - and quite unlike the custom platforms of the 1980s and 1990s, they aren't even documented. They can barely run with their hacked-together 'board support packages (BSP's)' and factory-installed OS's. Cleaning up the hardware support for even a single one of these platforms so it passes the standards for mainline kernel inclusion and support is a huge amount of effort, and then only gives you long-term support for that one hardware revision. It's a lot worse of a mess than what we had in the 1990s.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    Exactly, and it seems so unnecessary. These problems were solved on PCs in the 90s and the cell phone manufacturers are absolutely refusing to use the solutions. I can only imagine how many man-years of effort have been wasted because they're so insistent on keeping everything siloed up. It is madness.
- z3phyr 7y ago
  Are people hacking smartphones like those closed source microcomputers were hacked as described in Hackers: Heroes of Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy?
- pjmlp 7y ago
  We are are already living in that world, the shrinking "build your desktop" market is the surviving species of PC clones. Everyone that moved into laptops as their main computer are split between Windows/macOS laptops, with a negligible market size for anything else.

randoramax 7y ago

Nit: Amiga was by Commodore, Atari had its own line of computers.

mwcremer 7y ago
Amiga was an independent company funded by Atari before being acquired by Commodore.