4 ms·

that's funny to read being from outside the usa. the pc were the best thing one could get that was not a commodore or a bootlegged import chiclet keyboard from

that's funny to read being from outside the usa. the pc were the best thing one could get that was not a commodore or a bootlegged import chiclet keyboard from the uk. the amigas were considered just expensive game machines. the apples were an extremely expensive status symbol, and the you felt like a fool because there was no compatible peripheral anywhere. and the Ataris were unheard of.

deaddodo 2y ago
> that's funny to read being from outside the usa. Idk where outside the USA you are, but the IBM PC easily had the easiest time taking over the USA. Amiga and Atari were considered hobbyist computers while Macintosh constantly battled DOS until slowly fading to irrelevancy between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, not regaining real steam until Mac OS X 10.2-10.4. The TI series was very common on the super low-end/hobbyist end, and Sinclair/Coco/Dendy/Timex/etc derivatives had negligible marketshare.
- rbanffy 2y ago
  Different places offered vastly different experiences. In Brazil we had mostly Sinclair, Apple II and TRS-80 (Model III and CoCo) clones and compatibles. PC clones were very expensive and only appeared later - and only became popular through smugglers, about the same time MSX 1.0 was introduced. I believe there was only one MSX 2 machine that was actually sold. Brands like Atari, Commodore and Apple were extremely rare. This was all because the military dictatorship reasoned, somewhat correctly, that in order to grow an indigenous industry, it'd need to prevent imports of small computers and heavily tax other segments.
  - jecel 2y ago
    Some more details about Brazil - all imports were banned at the time to deal with the external debt crises. What was special about micro and mini computers was that foreign companies were forbidden from making them locally and selling them (like the did with cars, electronic goods and many other products). So clones dominated the market completely. The Sinclair and TRS-80 clones arrived in 1981, the Apple II in 1982 and the PC XT in 1983 (at the absurd cost of US$15K for a configuration that would be US$5K in the US. This dropped to around US$3K by late 1984 for a configuration of similar price as the US, so not the "many times more expensive" that most people remember). There were very few TRS Color Computer clones, a single Sinclair Spectrum and the single Macintosh clone was not never authorized (every computer launch had to be approved by the government). The two MSX officially arrived in 1985 but sales actually started in 1986. The PC AT clones only started selling in 1987 and 386 machines in 1989 - these were the longest delays of all. An even longer delay was in PC graphics, which were stuck at CGA from 1983 all the way to 1992 (with imports allowed there was a jump to VGA+Multisync). With the exception of the Spectrum and Mac clones by companies that had invested heavily in their predecessors, nobody tried to copy machines with custom chips, so no Ataris, Commodore 64s, Amigas, etc. The Commodore Pet would have been easy to clone, but there was no preexisting market of contraband machines due to the awkwardness of lugging the built-in monitor. After the reserved policy ended in 1991 a company called PCI do Amazonas brought the Amiga to Brazil and was officially still making the A1200 months after Commodore itself had shut down. So we did get one of the three 68000 machines, even if very late.
    - 1oooqooq 2y ago
      those are the "official" model list and figures. almost everyone and most companies bought grey market "imports from Paraguay". which were 1.5~3x the usa price for pc. also there were two prominent cpu fabs (churning 8080 and 68k) that the usa managed to close, further digging there interval market into cheap clone territory with that joke that was the apple ii clone announcement in a fountain.
  - deaddodo 2y ago
    I wasn't arguing any other experiences. The person I responded to offered a perspective on the US computer scene that was inaccurate. I was simply correcting that perspective.
cycomanic 2y ago
Atari and Amiga were equally popular in Germany and much more common than PCs when I grew up. The major difference was that Amigas were much more common for gaming and Ataris were largely work machines (music and DTP). In my experience both were actually much more common in Europe than in the US where Macs and IBM PCs were more common (I did an exchange year and didn't see one Amiga or Atari)
- LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
  Confirm. Got myself an AtariST 520STM with 124SM, that small BW 11inch thingy. Upgraded the RAM by self soldering. The PCs at the time were either much more expensive, or cheap clone trash with many compromises. And in general rather 'unsexy'. That thing lasted until somewhere in the mid-nineties, when I got weak and got a 486DX 25Mhz with 4MB RAM, some HDD, and a 15" Multisync when VOBIS advertised them for only 5000,- Deutschmarks. Which seemed indeed cheap, because anything comparable from the likes of IBM, Compaq, Zenith was between 15.000 to 20.000 at the time. Seemed because 4MB wasn't good enough for early BSD and Linux, so upgrade to 8MB. Oh, the sockets for L2-Cache on the mainboard and Tag-Ram were empty, another 'upgrade', at least no soldering necessary. Came with some cheap Trident SVGA with only 256KB Video Ram. Diamond Speedstar24 with Tseng ET4000 and 2MB please! And a 17" NEC Multisync while I'm at it. Sigh! That still felt like a downgrade from that Atari ST in many aspects. Usability? DOS? Early Windows? Unix clones? UGH! Sure, it had some oomph, but the ride wasn't smooth.

deaddodo 2y ago

> that's funny to read being from outside the usa. Idk where outside the USA you are, but the IBM PC easily had the easiest time taking over the USA. Amiga and Atari were considered hobbyist computers while Macintosh constantly battled DOS until slowly fading to irrelevancy between Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, not regaining real steam until Mac OS X 10.2-10.4. The TI series was very common on the super low-end/hobbyist end, and Sinclair/Coco/Dendy/Timex/etc derivatives had negligible marketshare.

rbanffy 2y ago
Different places offered vastly different experiences. In Brazil we had mostly Sinclair, Apple II and TRS-80 (Model III and CoCo) clones and compatibles. PC clones were very expensive and only appeared later - and only became popular through smugglers, about the same time MSX 1.0 was introduced. I believe there was only one MSX 2 machine that was actually sold. Brands like Atari, Commodore and Apple were extremely rare. This was all because the military dictatorship reasoned, somewhat correctly, that in order to grow an indigenous industry, it'd need to prevent imports of small computers and heavily tax other segments.
- jecel 2y ago
  Some more details about Brazil - all imports were banned at the time to deal with the external debt crises. What was special about micro and mini computers was that foreign companies were forbidden from making them locally and selling them (like the did with cars, electronic goods and many other products). So clones dominated the market completely. The Sinclair and TRS-80 clones arrived in 1981, the Apple II in 1982 and the PC XT in 1983 (at the absurd cost of US$15K for a configuration that would be US$5K in the US. This dropped to around US$3K by late 1984 for a configuration of similar price as the US, so not the "many times more expensive" that most people remember). There were very few TRS Color Computer clones, a single Sinclair Spectrum and the single Macintosh clone was not never authorized (every computer launch had to be approved by the government). The two MSX officially arrived in 1985 but sales actually started in 1986. The PC AT clones only started selling in 1987 and 386 machines in 1989 - these were the longest delays of all. An even longer delay was in PC graphics, which were stuck at CGA from 1983 all the way to 1992 (with imports allowed there was a jump to VGA+Multisync). With the exception of the Spectrum and Mac clones by companies that had invested heavily in their predecessors, nobody tried to copy machines with custom chips, so no Ataris, Commodore 64s, Amigas, etc. The Commodore Pet would have been easy to clone, but there was no preexisting market of contraband machines due to the awkwardness of lugging the built-in monitor. After the reserved policy ended in 1991 a company called PCI do Amazonas brought the Amiga to Brazil and was officially still making the A1200 months after Commodore itself had shut down. So we did get one of the three 68000 machines, even if very late.
  - 1oooqooq 2y ago
    those are the "official" model list and figures. almost everyone and most companies bought grey market "imports from Paraguay". which were 1.5~3x the usa price for pc. also there were two prominent cpu fabs (churning 8080 and 68k) that the usa managed to close, further digging there interval market into cheap clone territory with that joke that was the apple ii clone announcement in a fountain.
- deaddodo 2y ago
  I wasn't arguing any other experiences. The person I responded to offered a perspective on the US computer scene that was inaccurate. I was simply correcting that perspective.

cycomanic 2y ago

Atari and Amiga were equally popular in Germany and much more common than PCs when I grew up. The major difference was that Amigas were much more common for gaming and Ataris were largely work machines (music and DTP). In my experience both were actually much more common in Europe than in the US where Macs and IBM PCs were more common (I did an exchange year and didn't see one Amiga or Atari)

LargoLasskhyfv 2y ago
Confirm. Got myself an AtariST 520STM with 124SM, that small BW 11inch thingy. Upgraded the RAM by self soldering. The PCs at the time were either much more expensive, or cheap clone trash with many compromises. And in general rather 'unsexy'. That thing lasted until somewhere in the mid-nineties, when I got weak and got a 486DX 25Mhz with 4MB RAM, some HDD, and a 15" Multisync when VOBIS advertised them for only 5000,- Deutschmarks. Which seemed indeed cheap, because anything comparable from the likes of IBM, Compaq, Zenith was between 15.000 to 20.000 at the time. Seemed because 4MB wasn't good enough for early BSD and Linux, so upgrade to 8MB. Oh, the sockets for L2-Cache on the mainboard and Tag-Ram were empty, another 'upgrade', at least no soldering necessary. Came with some cheap Trident SVGA with only 256KB Video Ram. Diamond Speedstar24 with Tseng ET4000 and 2MB please! And a 17" NEC Multisync while I'm at it. Sigh! That still felt like a downgrade from that Atari ST in many aspects. Usability? DOS? Early Windows? Unix clones? UGH! Sure, it had some oomph, but the ride wasn't smooth.