4 ms·

To be fair, everything about PCs back then sucked. DOS was crap, when you had tGEM and Amiga OS. Windows 1 and 2 was beyond terrible. They were shit for game

To be fair, everything about PCs back then sucked. DOS was crap, when you had tGEM and Amiga OS. Windows 1 and 2 was beyond terrible. They were shit for games They were bulky They were slow They crashed all the time. They were ugly They were noisy. They were hard to manage (autoexec.bat, no OS in ROM, stupidly tricky partitioning tools, incompatible drivers for the same hardware but in different applications, etc) But IBM lost control of the hardware market so they became cheap, ubiquitous crap. And that’s literally the only reason we got stuck with PCs.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
The PC industry of the late 80s was a disaster. We had affordable windowing and GUIs on the Atari and the Amiga, with instant boot from ROM and tons of RAM. The Amiga had the beginnings of multitasking and hardware acceleration for graphics and sound. Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, with insanely unaffordable prices, crippled specs, bizarre semi-manual memory management, ugly hardware, and a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good. Infuriating.
- microtonal 1y ago
  My cousin had an Amiga in the late 80s/early 90s. As a kid, I was so incredibly jelous. Everything was better, sound, graphics, the OS, the hardware itself. Even well into halfway the nineties we were messing with tire fires like VESA Local Bus on the PC side.
- hulitu 1y ago
  > Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, Just like today's GUIs. They all look like Windows 1.0
- hnlmorg 1y ago
  Not just Atari and Amiga. Apple and Acorn had excellent machines too. It was basically just the old 8-bit micros that kept IBM compatibles looking good.
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  > a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good. I hate to go to bat for MS-DOS, but it had at least one real advantage over CP/M: a single disk format. As doomed to failure as the various non-PC DOS machines (e.g. Tandy 2000 and DEC Rainbow) were, they could at least share disks.
  - badc0ffee 1y ago
    I just remembered that the Rainbow only supported single sided disks. While a PC could format and use those, people normally used double sided disks. So, kind of technically compatible but not completely.
- rjsw 1y ago
  You could have a GUI on a PC as well. I developed GEM applications on an Olivetti M24 before I got my first Atari ST. The Olivetti had a B&W 640x400 monitor and a Logitech mouse that plugged into the back of the keyboard. You could replace the 8086 CPU with an NEC V30 for a bit more speed.
- os2warpman 1y ago
  > with instant boot from ROM This was a mistake. It slowed upgrades. The several second's worth of speed increase was irrelevant when to upgrade an Amiga you had to ship out 2x 40-pin DIPs and floppy disks as opposed to just floppies. And due to incompatibilities it was common to install a ROM switcher in your system, especially in Amigaland when kickstart 2.0 came out and you wanted to keep 1.3 so your games would still run. So you had to buy and install a switcher like a MultiStart AND buy and install new ROMs and manage two sets of floppies. This led to a schism in the market where normal people were stuck with an A500 running 1.2/1.3 and its 1980s featureset and power users who wanted space-age luxuries like IDE hard drives were running 2.0. Practically every word uttered or printed by Commodore about compatibility between the two was an outright lie. Microsoft had an obsessive focus on backwards compatibility so MS-DOS 5.0 was adopted by practically everybody: just insert the disk, switch to a:, type "install". Done. There were compatibility issues, but they were on a scale that was irrelevant compared to the Kickstart disaster. Could you imagine in 1992 having a PC and having to install a PCB in the BIOS sockets so you could have both versions 3.02.111 and 4.84.1932 of your BIOS and keep DOS 3.3 and 5.0 boot disks on hand so that you could run Commander Keen and use the newest version of WordPerfect? I did all of that on the non-PC side of the house, and many others did too. I had (and still have) an A2000 with hard card, flicker fixer, accelerator, ram expansion, rom switcher, and other upgrades. I spent thousands of hours tinkering and having fun with the system. Tinkerers don't make for successful ecosystems. Fun, yes. Sustainable, no.
spankibalt 1y ago
I hope someone will write an entertaining satire about the sometimes almost PTSD-like bitterness and bizarre selective perceptions of the "anti-PC" crowd, especially in the Amiga space. :D Please don't take it too harshly, but your list of grievances is almost radically different to my experiences of personal computing in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties... to me somewhat of a faszinosum all on its own. In my litle corner of the world the Amiga was virtually nonexistant [1], largely undesireable, and prophesized to be a corpse already as early as 1991. I'll give you one thing, tho: A mostly non-plastic, compact keyboard computer case (Amiga 600-like) for a suitably powerful IBM compatible would've been awfully nice. Still would be, for a vintage bird that is. We only got "Schneiderplastik", the Euro-PC to be more precise [2], and that one wasn't updated in a satisfying fashion. 1. The only people I knew that had Commodores were two of my best friends, one with a Commodore 64, the other with a 128. The demosceners I grew up with were Atari ST guys, all of them (becoming) musicians. 2. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Euro_PC https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Euro_PC]
- mrandish 1y ago
  Sure, there is clearly some "rose-colored memory" effect going on - how could there not be? As someone who used Amigas, Atari STs, Macs and PCs back in the day - and who still owns over a hundred unique models of vintage 80s and 90s computers, they ALL suck in many annoying ways AND most had some unique strengths. We all learned to live with what we had and how to make it do what we needed done. People got accustomed to whatever personal computer they used every day and many grew fond of it. After all, the power and capability of a desktop computer in the 80s was unprecedented and, for many, revelatory. That said, in the mid-to-late 80s, the PC platform was generally under-powered dollar for dollar compared to most of its leading competitors, most of which were based on Motorola 680x0 CPUs. The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards (something which Apple had with the Apple II but abandoned for a while with the Mac, the Atari ST never really had and only the "professional" series Amiga's had (A2000, A3000, A4000). Being underpowered per dollar doesn't mean the PC couldn't be extremely useful or the best platform for a given scenario and it certainly doesn't mean there weren't hobbyists who used and loved their late 80s PCs as dearly as any other 80s personal computer owner. Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac.
tom_ 1y ago
Cheap and ubiquitous is what people want, and if PCs became successful because people other than IBM started producing the same hardware, then perhaps Commodore should have done that too. Software seems to have proven itself the better moat, and so maybe AmigaOS could have been the thing that would tie this hypothetical Amiga-compatible market together, keeping Commodore alive. They'd have to have been a bit more careful about it than IBM were. I am confident it would still feel like everything is terrible.
- crq-yml 1y ago
  The thing that really drove the PC era was that the commodity desktop spec was rapidly gaining capability, compilers for them were getting good enough to depend on high-level languages, and the most affordable way to meet the market where it was, was not to build custom(as had been the case in the 80's when looking at stuff like video editing systems, CGI, digital audio, etc.) but to use Microsoft as a go-between. All the heralded architectures of the 80's were doing things more custom, but it amounted to a few years of advantage before that convergence machinery came along and stripped away both customers and developers. Apple did survive in that era, though not unassisted, and the differentiation they landed on(particularly after Jobs came back) was to market a premium experience as an entry point. I think that is probably going to be the exit from today's slop. In this era, spec is not a barrier - and you can make <$100 integrated boards that are competent small computers, albeit light on I/O - and that means that there's a lot more leeway to return to the kinds of specialty, task-specific boxes that the PC had converged. There's demand for them, at least at a hobbyist level. For example, instead of an ST and outboard synths for music, you could now get an open-source device like the Shorepine Tulip - an ESP32 touchscreen board set up with Micropython and some polished DSP code for synths and effects. It's not powerful enough to compete with a DAW for recording, but as an instrument for live use, it smashes the PC and its nefarious complexities.

TheOtherHobbes 1y ago

The PC industry of the late 80s was a disaster. We had affordable windowing and GUIs on the Atari and the Amiga, with instant boot from ROM and tons of RAM. The Amiga had the beginnings of multitasking and hardware acceleration for graphics and sound. Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, with insanely unaffordable prices, crippled specs, bizarre semi-manual memory management, ugly hardware, and a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good. Infuriating.

microtonal 1y ago
My cousin had an Amiga in the late 80s/early 90s. As a kid, I was so incredibly jelous. Everything was better, sound, graphics, the OS, the hardware itself. Even well into halfway the nineties we were messing with tire fires like VESA Local Bus on the PC side.
hulitu 1y ago
> Then suddenly the industry decided to go back to a cut-down version of late 70s S-100 computing, Just like today's GUIs. They all look like Windows 1.0
hnlmorg 1y ago
Not just Atari and Amiga. Apple and Acorn had excellent machines too. It was basically just the old 8-bit micros that kept IBM compatibles looking good.
badc0ffee 1y ago
> a command line interface that was basically CP/M but not as good. I hate to go to bat for MS-DOS, but it had at least one real advantage over CP/M: a single disk format. As doomed to failure as the various non-PC DOS machines (e.g. Tandy 2000 and DEC Rainbow) were, they could at least share disks.
- badc0ffee 1y ago
  I just remembered that the Rainbow only supported single sided disks. While a PC could format and use those, people normally used double sided disks. So, kind of technically compatible but not completely.
rjsw 1y ago
You could have a GUI on a PC as well. I developed GEM applications on an Olivetti M24 before I got my first Atari ST. The Olivetti had a B&W 640x400 monitor and a Logitech mouse that plugged into the back of the keyboard. You could replace the 8086 CPU with an NEC V30 for a bit more speed.
os2warpman 1y ago
> with instant boot from ROM This was a mistake. It slowed upgrades. The several second's worth of speed increase was irrelevant when to upgrade an Amiga you had to ship out 2x 40-pin DIPs and floppy disks as opposed to just floppies. And due to incompatibilities it was common to install a ROM switcher in your system, especially in Amigaland when kickstart 2.0 came out and you wanted to keep 1.3 so your games would still run. So you had to buy and install a switcher like a MultiStart AND buy and install new ROMs and manage two sets of floppies. This led to a schism in the market where normal people were stuck with an A500 running 1.2/1.3 and its 1980s featureset and power users who wanted space-age luxuries like IDE hard drives were running 2.0. Practically every word uttered or printed by Commodore about compatibility between the two was an outright lie. Microsoft had an obsessive focus on backwards compatibility so MS-DOS 5.0 was adopted by practically everybody: just insert the disk, switch to a:, type "install". Done. There were compatibility issues, but they were on a scale that was irrelevant compared to the Kickstart disaster. Could you imagine in 1992 having a PC and having to install a PCB in the BIOS sockets so you could have both versions 3.02.111 and 4.84.1932 of your BIOS and keep DOS 3.3 and 5.0 boot disks on hand so that you could run Commander Keen and use the newest version of WordPerfect? I did all of that on the non-PC side of the house, and many others did too. I had (and still have) an A2000 with hard card, flicker fixer, accelerator, ram expansion, rom switcher, and other upgrades. I spent thousands of hours tinkering and having fun with the system. Tinkerers don't make for successful ecosystems. Fun, yes. Sustainable, no.

spankibalt 1y ago

I hope someone will write an entertaining satire about the sometimes almost PTSD-like bitterness and bizarre selective perceptions of the "anti-PC" crowd, especially in the Amiga space. :D Please don't take it too harshly, but your list of grievances is almost radically different to my experiences of personal computing in the late Eighties to mid-Nineties... to me somewhat of a faszinosum all on its own. In my litle corner of the world the Amiga was virtually nonexistant [1], largely undesireable, and prophesized to be a corpse already as early as 1991. I'll give you one thing, tho: A mostly non-plastic, compact keyboard computer case (Amiga 600-like) for a suitably powerful IBM compatible would've been awfully nice. Still would be, for a vintage bird that is. We only got "Schneiderplastik", the Euro-PC to be more precise [2], and that one wasn't updated in a satisfying fashion. 1. The only people I knew that had Commodores were two of my best friends, one with a Commodore 64, the other with a 128. The demosceners I grew up with were Atari ST guys, all of them (becoming) musicians. 2. [https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Euro_PC https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schneider_Euro_PC]

mrandish 1y ago
Sure, there is clearly some "rose-colored memory" effect going on - how could there not be? As someone who used Amigas, Atari STs, Macs and PCs back in the day - and who still owns over a hundred unique models of vintage 80s and 90s computers, they ALL suck in many annoying ways AND most had some unique strengths. We all learned to live with what we had and how to make it do what we needed done. People got accustomed to whatever personal computer they used every day and many grew fond of it. After all, the power and capability of a desktop computer in the 80s was unprecedented and, for many, revelatory. That said, in the mid-to-late 80s, the PC platform was generally under-powered dollar for dollar compared to most of its leading competitors, most of which were based on Motorola 680x0 CPUs. The strength of the PC during this time was it's rapidly expanding library of business software applications and hardware expansion options in the form of add-in cards (something which Apple had with the Apple II but abandoned for a while with the Mac, the Atari ST never really had and only the "professional" series Amiga's had (A2000, A3000, A4000). Being underpowered per dollar doesn't mean the PC couldn't be extremely useful or the best platform for a given scenario and it certainly doesn't mean there weren't hobbyists who used and loved their late 80s PCs as dearly as any other 80s personal computer owner. Of course, this power balance was largely addressed by the mid-90s - which is why the PC juggernaut then extinguished the Amiga, Atari and (very nearly) the Mac.

tom_ 1y ago

Cheap and ubiquitous is what people want, and if PCs became successful because people other than IBM started producing the same hardware, then perhaps Commodore should have done that too. Software seems to have proven itself the better moat, and so maybe AmigaOS could have been the thing that would tie this hypothetical Amiga-compatible market together, keeping Commodore alive. They'd have to have been a bit more careful about it than IBM were. I am confident it would still feel like everything is terrible.

crq-yml 1y ago
The thing that really drove the PC era was that the commodity desktop spec was rapidly gaining capability, compilers for them were getting good enough to depend on high-level languages, and the most affordable way to meet the market where it was, was not to build custom(as had been the case in the 80's when looking at stuff like video editing systems, CGI, digital audio, etc.) but to use Microsoft as a go-between. All the heralded architectures of the 80's were doing things more custom, but it amounted to a few years of advantage before that convergence machinery came along and stripped away both customers and developers. Apple did survive in that era, though not unassisted, and the differentiation they landed on(particularly after Jobs came back) was to market a premium experience as an entry point. I think that is probably going to be the exit from today's slop. In this era, spec is not a barrier - and you can make <$100 integrated boards that are competent small computers, albeit light on I/O - and that means that there's a lot more leeway to return to the kinds of specialty, task-specific boxes that the PC had converged. There's demand for them, at least at a hobbyist level. For example, instead of an ST and outboard synths for music, you could now get an open-source device like the Shorepine Tulip - an ESP32 touchscreen board set up with Micropython and some polished DSP code for synths and effects. It's not powerful enough to compete with a DAW for recording, but as an instrument for live use, it smashes the PC and its nefarious complexities.