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They were cheap toys. That's all. They were usefully educational if you wanted to understand the internals, but 95% of the time they were for entertainment. Mo
by TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
They were cheap toys. That's all. They were usefully educational if you wanted to understand the internals, but 95% of the time they were for entertainment.
Modern computing uses the same hardware principles, expanded and speeded up by many orders of magnitude. But a hugely bigger set of affordances.
Mass storage just works without floppy swapping or cassette saving, data and applications are distributed, there's pocket as well as desktop access, and cameras, sound, and video are a given. And that's just the hardware.
It's like comparing a high speed rail network to a skateboard.
- II2II 4y agoYet high speed rail networks are practically useless for transportation within one's community (or even within most cities). In those cases, modes of transportation such as walking, skateboarding, cycling, driving are more effective. Using a C64 or C128 today would be kinda silly, but that wasn't the case in the late 1980's through mid-1990's. They were fine for many smaller tasks, and a great deal better than the alternatives if you could not afford a "real computer". Even as a glorified typewriter, a C64 was orders of magnitude better than an actual typewriter. Even as a calculator, a C64 was order of magnitude better than an actual calculator. Of course cost is the deciding factor here because computers aren't the same as transportation networks. Aside from cost high end computer is going to be better than a high end one in every case. It has physics working for it, rather than against it. Yet cost of replacement is still a factor.