5 ms·

> What I find striking about it was a time from 1979 to 1986 when home computers seemed frozen in midair. It seems like that era was quite vibrant for home com

> What I find striking about it was a time from 1979 to 1986 when home computers seemed frozen in midair. It seems like that era was quite vibrant for home computers though. My impression is that many people learned a lot from their Vic-20's/C-64's. I was a bit left out of that scene because we had chosen a TI-99/4A instead, which was less easy to hack around with (no poke statements, for example). There was also a huge price difference between the home computers which you could get for a few hundred dollars and an IBM PC which was thousands. There were a lot of people who could afford the former but not the later.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Right, that's why the economic crossover happened around 1987 for me. I got the Color Computer it cost $149 which was the cheapest computer on the market but I extended the 4K of RAM to 64K, added a disk controller, two disk drives, a disk controller, sound card, speech synthesizer, telephone modem, serial card, multiple printers, tandy-branded tape decks, television sets, etc. The first IBM PC was crazy expensive but not much better than the home computers, in fact, downright inferior when it came to graphics and sound: my Color Computer, the Apple ][, the Atari 400/800, your TI-99/4A and the C-64 were better platforms for games. The ability of the PC to display 80 columns on the screen compared to the 64, 40, or 32 of lesser computers was what made it "suitable for business". In terms of processing power and scale the PC wasn't much better at first because you couldn't fit enough memory cards into the computer to upgrade it to the full 640K. The system for using more than 64K of memory was half-baked but not hard to write efficient programs for. The PC AT was crazy expensive when it came out too, but it was powerful enough to endanger the systems integrators and vendors like Cromeco who advertised in Byte magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine which I've been reading at the Internet Archive to refresh my memory of 1980s computing. These were people who made powerful computers on the S-100 bus that got installed in merchant ships, supermarkets, electronic labs, etc. They advertised heavily in Byte even though their products were infrequently mentioned compared to home computers and the PC. By 1987 there was relentless competition between clones of the PC AT so I got one for about $1200 including a monochrome monitor. Soon people are publishing benchmarks in Dr. Dobb's Journal showing that a $2000 desktop computer beats the VAX-780 minicomputer that we were all in awe of long long ago. IBM and the clone makers did all that and they kept compatibility. EGA graphics was good enough to make games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen by 1992 or 1993 sound and video cards are getting good enough that graphics oriented computers like the Commodore Amiga could not keep up. In 1994 I get my first 32-bit computer, install Linux on it, and it is equal to the Sun workstations I had just been using at college. The CoCo was great. It had me writing assembly language when I was 10, Often I was frustrated that other computers had more software and that the tape storage was unreliable, but once I got the disk I installed an operating system called OS/9 that was multitasking like Unix and even plugged in two serial terminals that I could log into. The 286 couldn't manage that trick because of the "brain damage" that Bill Gates complained of.
- tgflynn 4y ago
  > I installed an operating system called OS/9 that was multitasking like Unix Was that Microware OS 9 ? I replaced a control system that was running that with Linux around 2003. I wasn't aware it was ever used on PC's. Or was there yet another OS 9 (in addition to Microware's and Apple's) ?
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    Yep.

PaulHoule 4y ago

Right, that's why the economic crossover happened around 1987 for me. I got the Color Computer it cost $149 which was the cheapest computer on the market but I extended the 4K of RAM to 64K, added a disk controller, two disk drives, a disk controller, sound card, speech synthesizer, telephone modem, serial card, multiple printers, tandy-branded tape decks, television sets, etc. The first IBM PC was crazy expensive but not much better than the home computers, in fact, downright inferior when it came to graphics and sound: my Color Computer, the Apple ][, the Atari 400/800, your TI-99/4A and the C-64 were better platforms for games. The ability of the PC to display 80 columns on the screen compared to the 64, 40, or 32 of lesser computers was what made it "suitable for business". In terms of processing power and scale the PC wasn't much better at first because you couldn't fit enough memory cards into the computer to upgrade it to the full 640K. The system for using more than 64K of memory was half-baked but not hard to write efficient programs for. The PC AT was crazy expensive when it came out too, but it was powerful enough to endanger the systems integrators and vendors like Cromeco who advertised in Byte magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine which I've been reading at the Internet Archive to refresh my memory of 1980s computing. These were people who made powerful computers on the S-100 bus that got installed in merchant ships, supermarkets, electronic labs, etc. They advertised heavily in Byte even though their products were infrequently mentioned compared to home computers and the PC. By 1987 there was relentless competition between clones of the PC AT so I got one for about $1200 including a monochrome monitor. Soon people are publishing benchmarks in Dr. Dobb's Journal showing that a $2000 desktop computer beats the VAX-780 minicomputer that we were all in awe of long long ago. IBM and the clone makers did all that and they kept compatibility. EGA graphics was good enough to make games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commander_Keen by 1992 or 1993 sound and video cards are getting good enough that graphics oriented computers like the Commodore Amiga could not keep up. In 1994 I get my first 32-bit computer, install Linux on it, and it is equal to the Sun workstations I had just been using at college. The CoCo was great. It had me writing assembly language when I was 10, Often I was frustrated that other computers had more software and that the tape storage was unreliable, but once I got the disk I installed an operating system called OS/9 that was multitasking like Unix and even plugged in two serial terminals that I could log into. The 286 couldn't manage that trick because of the "brain damage" that Bill Gates complained of.

tgflynn 4y ago
> I installed an operating system called OS/9 that was multitasking like Unix Was that Microware OS 9 ? I replaced a control system that was running that with Linux around 2003. I wasn't aware it was ever used on PC's. Or was there yet another OS 9 (in addition to Microware's and Apple's) ?
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Yep.