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Well, sure, I experienced it in a country other than the United States. Only 4% of the current human population lives in the United States. To be precise, I am

by _ph_ 5y ago

Well, sure, I experienced it in a country other than the United States. Only 4% of the current human population lives in the United States. To be precise, I am from Germany and lived through all the times I described. While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some significant home usage. And as far as I know, Apples were very popular in the US at that time. In Europe they were not very common, due to even worse prices than today :p. But my school hat some Apple II, which I eventually used with Pascal. But for home usage, the "home computers" were popular as named before. Universities used Suns till the late 90ies.

justin66 5y ago
> While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some significant home usage That might have been true in Germany. It wasn't true in the United States. IBM PC (and moreso, PC clone) adoption was quite strong in the home from the mid eighties. That's all I meant by the question about nationality - I really do think there's a difference there when it comes to market share. (I probably shouldn't beat the subject to death but it was an interesting discussion)
chipotle_coyote 5y ago
I don't think the US home computer market followed the same path as Germany's. 68K-based machines never became huge sellers over here, for instance, and the Macintosh was the most successful of the bunch -- whereas it's my understanding that in a lot of Europe, the Amiga and the Atari ST were serious contenders even on into the '90s. Conversely, IBM PC clones had taken the lead in US sales by the end of the '80s and just never had any serious competition by the early '90s. It's not an exaggeration to say that Radio Shack was selling more Tandy 1000s than the Amiga and the ST were selling combined over here. (There were games with specific Tandy 1000 "enhanced graphics and sound," so it was actually considered a viable market all on its own!) > Apples were very popular in the US at that time Well, the Apple II line was popular in the US in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s -- at one point it was the best-selling 8-bit computer, taking the throne from the Radio Shack TRS-80 -- but the Mac was absolutely not a big seller in the 1990s; Apple survived because they dominated a few vertical markets like desktop publishing. For home computing, the first really successful Mac was arguably the iMac circa 2000.

by _ph_ 5y ago

justin66 5y ago

> While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some significant home usage That might have been true in Germany. It wasn't true in the United States. IBM PC (and moreso, PC clone) adoption was quite strong in the home from the mid eighties. That's all I meant by the question about nationality - I really do think there's a difference there when it comes to market share. (I probably shouldn't beat the subject to death but it was an interesting discussion)

chipotle_coyote 5y ago

I don't think the US home computer market followed the same path as Germany's. 68K-based machines never became huge sellers over here, for instance, and the Macintosh was the most successful of the bunch -- whereas it's my understanding that in a lot of Europe, the Amiga and the Atari ST were serious contenders even on into the '90s. Conversely, IBM PC clones had taken the lead in US sales by the end of the '80s and just never had any serious competition by the early '90s. It's not an exaggeration to say that Radio Shack was selling more Tandy 1000s than the Amiga and the ST were selling combined over here. (There were games with specific Tandy 1000 "enhanced graphics and sound," so it was actually considered a viable market all on its own!) > Apples were very popular in the US at that time Well, the Apple II line was popular in the US in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s -- at one point it was the best-selling 8-bit computer, taking the throne from the Radio Shack TRS-80 -- but the Mac was absolutely not a big seller in the 1990s; Apple survived because they dominated a few vertical markets like desktop publishing. For home computing, the first really successful Mac was arguably the iMac circa 2000.