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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. Th

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.

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.