4 ms·

It's so strange how unevenly the future was distributed back then. You could get a Quadra 900 or a color NeXTstation. The SE/30 was two years old. You could r

It's so strange how unevenly the future was distributed back then. You could get a Quadra 900 or a color NeXTstation. The SE/30 was two years old. You could run Mathematica. Matlab 3.5 was available on DOS and the Mac, and Matlab 4 was a year away. AutoCAD was pretty well established on PCs and Macs for 2D CAD. LabView was five years old. Microsoft Word for the Mac was six years old. Gopher and the rudimentary gopher-with-pictures web already existed. Mosaic was two years away. If you were a hobbyist, you might buy an Amiga 3000 instead of a mid-tier Mac or PC- the Amiga 4000 was a year away. On the PC, Wolfenstein 3D was year away. DOOM was two years away. And yet well into the nineties, PC nerds were amazed to be able to spin up multiple Wordperfect 5 windows, and they may as well have been at the vanguard as far as most people were concerned! Quickbasic! Lotus 1-2-3!

Firehawke 6y ago
After dealing with single-IP-owner computer infrastructures, it was pretty clear that the IBM standard was going to win as long as the industry prevented IBM from taking control again (like they tried with the PS/2) A lot of people didn't want a single point of failure after watching Atari and Commodore blow themselves up spectacularly. Also, the early 90s were when the IBM market started to be commoditized enough to bring prices way down(). The self-implosion of Amiga and a bit later a near-death experience on Apple's side just combined with the relatively cheap hardware on the IBM side enough to kill off nearly every non-Wintel platform for average desktop users. This was also the point where Computer Shopper turned into hundreds of pages of sellers offering hardware at all price points, allowing easy entry into the market for a new owner. The internet sped that up further.
- buescher 6y ago
  We're talking about 1991, when Apple was pretty solid in their niche, and if you wanted to talk other more interesting computers, i.e. someone else's money: - the SGI Indigo was released - the Symbolics XL1200 was a year old, and the MacIvory III was released - the Sparcstation 2 (SunOS!) was a year old University departments were already throwing away old LMI lisp machines. The really big deal was when everyone bought a Windows 95 machine to get on the internet with AOL about five years later.
buescher 6y ago
More antidotes to the memory manager nostalgia: - O'Reilly had been in business for thirteen years, had been publishing X11 manuals with animals on the cover for three years, and had just published the first edition of Programming Perl - Python existed in some form (for two years already!), but no one had ever heard of it until the Grail browser four years later, which no one has heard of now - the Video Toaster for the Amiga was a year old. So was Photoshop (on the Mac). NIH Image (also Mac) was even older. Frame grabbers were already well established in scientific imaging. Array processors were a thing (the one I saw was for the PC), as the kids say, if you had the budget for one - IRC was three years old
TacticalCoder 6y ago
> It's so strange how unevenly the future was distributed back then. Totally! My best friend had an SGI Indy workstation (with a webcam!) at home when they came out... That was in 1993 (?) : ) Can you imagine getting to play on a SGI workstation to then come back home and find my 486 (which I'm pretty sure I got in 1991)? Thankfully Linus releasing Linux wasn't far away.
- buescher 6y ago
  SGI made such nice machines. The out-of-the-box demos were amazing; you'd get hornswoggled into thinking you were going to be doing all that kind of crazy stuff with the computer. Remember Iris Explorer? http://yohanan.org/steve/projects/iris-explorer http://yohanan.org/steve/projects/iris-explorer
- cout 6y ago
  Yes, I can imagine that! I was part of a mentoring program in 1993 where I was a shadow at the local hospital's IT department. They were able to purchase an Indigo for some sort of research and allowed me to explore it. My home computer at the time was a 286, which could barely run Windows 3.0.
cout 6y ago
I assume you are writing about 1991? Quattro Pro had come out a few years prior and blew the doors off 1-2-3. Visual BASIC 1.0 for DOS was a year away, a little sluggish and too late to change the world, but still amazing for those of us who could not afford the RAM to run Windows.
- buescher 6y ago
  Yes - the article is about 1991. Of course there was more than one DOS spreadsheet in 1991. To give you some perspective: Excel for Mac was six years old in 1991, Informix Wingz was three years old, and Lotus Improv was just released. They were already showing Visual Basic for Windows at trade shows and Hypercard on the mac was four years old.

Firehawke 6y ago

After dealing with single-IP-owner computer infrastructures, it was pretty clear that the IBM standard was going to win as long as the industry prevented IBM from taking control again (like they tried with the PS/2) A lot of people didn't want a single point of failure after watching Atari and Commodore blow themselves up spectacularly. Also, the early 90s were when the IBM market started to be commoditized enough to bring prices way down(). The self-implosion of Amiga and a bit later a near-death experience on Apple's side just combined with the relatively cheap hardware on the IBM side enough to kill off nearly every non-Wintel platform for average desktop users. This was also the point where Computer Shopper turned into hundreds of pages of sellers offering hardware at all price points, allowing easy entry into the market for a new owner. The internet sped that up further.

buescher 6y ago
We're talking about 1991, when Apple was pretty solid in their niche, and if you wanted to talk other more interesting computers, i.e. someone else's money: - the SGI Indigo was released - the Symbolics XL1200 was a year old, and the MacIvory III was released - the Sparcstation 2 (SunOS!) was a year old University departments were already throwing away old LMI lisp machines. The really big deal was when everyone bought a Windows 95 machine to get on the internet with AOL about five years later.

buescher 6y ago

More antidotes to the memory manager nostalgia: - O'Reilly had been in business for thirteen years, had been publishing X11 manuals with animals on the cover for three years, and had just published the first edition of Programming Perl - Python existed in some form (for two years already!), but no one had ever heard of it until the Grail browser four years later, which no one has heard of now - the Video Toaster for the Amiga was a year old. So was Photoshop (on the Mac). NIH Image (also Mac) was even older. Frame grabbers were already well established in scientific imaging. Array processors were a thing (the one I saw was for the PC), as the kids say, if you had the budget for one - IRC was three years old

TacticalCoder 6y ago

> It's so strange how unevenly the future was distributed back then. Totally! My best friend had an SGI Indy workstation (with a webcam!) at home when they came out... That was in 1993 (?) : ) Can you imagine getting to play on a SGI workstation to then come back home and find my 486 (which I'm pretty sure I got in 1991)? Thankfully Linus releasing Linux wasn't far away.

buescher 6y ago
SGI made such nice machines. The out-of-the-box demos were amazing; you'd get hornswoggled into thinking you were going to be doing all that kind of crazy stuff with the computer. Remember Iris Explorer? http://yohanan.org/steve/projects/iris-explorer http://yohanan.org/steve/projects/iris-explorer
cout 6y ago
Yes, I can imagine that! I was part of a mentoring program in 1993 where I was a shadow at the local hospital's IT department. They were able to purchase an Indigo for some sort of research and allowed me to explore it. My home computer at the time was a 286, which could barely run Windows 3.0.

cout 6y ago

I assume you are writing about 1991? Quattro Pro had come out a few years prior and blew the doors off 1-2-3. Visual BASIC 1.0 for DOS was a year away, a little sluggish and too late to change the world, but still amazing for those of us who could not afford the RAM to run Windows.

buescher 6y ago
Yes - the article is about 1991. Of course there was more than one DOS spreadsheet in 1991. To give you some perspective: Excel for Mac was six years old in 1991, Informix Wingz was three years old, and Lotus Improv was just released. They were already showing Visual Basic for Windows at trade shows and Hypercard on the mac was four years old.