4 ms·
Makes me wonder why we had to put up with DOS for so long.
by forinti 4y ago
Makes me wonder why we had to put up with DOS for so long.
- pjmlp 4y agoWe didn't, Atari ST and Amiga dominated 16 bit home market in Europe until Windows 95 came out. The few of us using PCs during those early days, were booting straight into Windows 3.x straigt out of AUTOEXEC.BAT.
- forinti 4y agoIn my neck of the woods these were very hard to come buy. During the 80s, people mostly had 8-bit micros at home. And Windows 3.1 only appeared in the 90s. ATs and even XTs could have handled a GUI well. It wasn't for lack of memory or processing power. The PC was stuck with a really subpar OS for about a decade.
- mixmastamyk 4y agoApparently there were a lot of options, but the folks building them made the then common mistake of exorbitant pricing. A razor/razorblades model would have been more successful. See Visi-On, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092804 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32092804 There's also the issue that MS would actively sabotage any competitor that gained a toehold.
- noobermin 4y agoIs this really true or was this just true in Europe? I was born in the 90s but even I remember my dad using dos before win 95. It was only later that I learned about amiga and atari st and all the wiki articles and blogs today seem to paint the picture that dos dominated everything from the moment it appeared. Should specify, I'm American.
- pjmlp 4y agoYes, why do you think Demoscene was such a huge phenomenon in Europe? We needed to have those computers around. Outside work, the PC only took off at home around Return to Castle Wolfstein / Doom, with AdLib/SoundBlaster and 3Dfx, Matrix, NVidia,... as standard gear.