8 ms·

Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the

by damian2000 13y ago

Incredible that companies like Apple (Mac), Atari (ST) and Commodore (Amiga) weren't able to fully capitalise on their leading position in GUI based OSes of the time, which were miles ahead of both MS and IBM.

nl 13y ago
Those of us around then know exactly why this was: PC Clones were too cheap and got better too quickly for other platforms to compete. Back then we all thought "computers" was a hardware game. Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. And yes, I realise we have swung back to the "integrated hardware/software platform" thing being important again. Picking winning strategies in platform wars is hard.
- kickingvegas 13y ago
  To add to what nl said: Not only were MS-DOS compatible PCs cheaper, but also MS-DOS apps had a significant install base by the time OS/2 came out. The concerns of running legacy software on the then new 286 and the "just over the horizon" 386 CPUs was heavily weighted. Also, GUIs on all platforms then took up enough system resources (memory and CPU) that made enough folks pause in thinking that they could get better performance/cost running console-based apps.
- laureny 13y ago
  > Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. Yes. This was one of Bill Gates' many strokes of genius. After just one year of Traf'o'Data (Microsoft's precursor), Gates saw that the future was in software, not hardware, and he created Microsoft centered around this very vision (while Apple bet the farm on hardware).
  - ams6110 13y ago
    Apple tried allowing cloners to copy the hardware and being software for a while, it nearly killed them. I don't recall if the clones were ever price-competitve with x86 clones though.
    - nl 13y ago
      TO be fair, almost everything Apple did at that time "almost killed them". The clones did expand the Mac market, but Apple was so incompetent at that point that it didn't know how to handle that.
- kabdib 13y ago
  Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer computer company. And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.
  - nl 13y ago
    Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). I know that is the conventional story (and pretty similar for the Amiga). I'm not convinced. I think that both the Amiga & the Atari ST were too far ahead of their time. They were multimedia workstations, without anywhere to play that multimedia (except on other Ataris and Amigas). Like you said, the Mac managed to hit the desktop publishing wave, which was exactly right for the the paper-centric late 80's and early 90's.
    - _delirium 13y ago
      Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.
      - Keyframe 13y ago
        Huh, Amiga (1000 onwards) was big in video. Especially smaller TV stations that couldn't afford SGIs. Amiga (and SGIs) were light years ahead of Macs in graphics. People often forget this fact.
        bnastic 13y ago
        Amiga 2000 (mostly) + NewTek Video Toaster[1] were the driving force behind the TV graphics back then. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
- damian2000 13y ago
  Around 1989 I traded my Amiga 500 for an IBM AT clone running DOS. Each was worth around AUD$1000 at the time. It felt like I was going back in time 10 years - a mono screen and no mouse. The reason was that I needed it for uni.study purposes (Turbo pascal, Turbo C++, etc.) ...
dhughes 13y ago
One reason: stigma. All I recall from childhood/teen years is "IBM compatible PC" a mantra on every TV commercial IBM or others produced. A PC was for business and you were rich or a fool to spend thousands on something so useless to a regular Joe. Apple was even more expensive and even less common than a PC and even so Apple was quirky and drew pictures, ATARI and Commodore were for games. They were in totally different worlds. Back then I wouldn't have even thought to have one computer that did everything.
- smacktoward 13y ago
  I dunno about that. At least where I grew up, if your family had a Mac or an Amiga, it was like you had domesticated a unicorn. Everybody wanted to see it, play with it. It marked you out as a member of a family possessed of either great sophistication or enormous wealth, either of which translates easily to status. If there was any stigma, it was for being on the opposite end of the spectrum -- having a computer whose primary selling point was that it was cheap, like a Commodore 64. The C64 was a fine machine for the price, but nobody was going to ooooh and aaah over it they way they would if you took them into your Dad's study and showed them MacPaint.
  - pjmlp 13y ago
    Yeah. I was the only one, among my circle of friends owning computers, that had a PC instead of an Amiga. My dad thought the Amiga were only good for playing games, for anyone serious about computers, PC was the way to go. So I was left reading 68000 Assembly manuals, some Amiga reference books, and playing with them on computer parties we used to organize. In any case, the only way to buy any of them in my home country was on credit.
- damian2000 13y ago
  Agreed, Atari ST and Amiga especially never caught on much with businesses ... they were definitely seen as games machines, even though their capabilities were certainly on par with the IBM clones.
- djKianoosh 13y ago
InclinedPlane 13y ago
This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest. The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac. This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing). At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.
- npsimons 13y ago
  Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what you will about how IBM fumbled the marketing, licensing, etc, or how the upstarts(!) won against the Evil Empire, but OS/2 was the better operating system, and Microsoft honed it's FUD by attacking IBM and OS/2, whilst offering a truly awful alternative.
  - InclinedPlane 13y ago
    Oh god. I remember setting up X back in the dark days of the early linux era. Peeing ones pants would have been preferable, it's astounding how far we've come. As for Windows vs. OS/2 it's at best complicated. It's a bit like a micro-cosm of the PC vs mainframe debate. The raison d'etre of Windows 95 was backward compatability with a low memory footprint. That may seem like a small thing, or at best not a thing to make so many enormous compromises over, but back then it was everything. The problem with doing multi-tasking "right" was that it imposed a ~4mb RAM requirement per 16-bit application being run at the same time. That is nothing today but back then 4mb was the minimum requirement for installing Windows 95, and it represented a cost of around $100 in 1995. Owning a computer powerful enough to run even a handful of 16-bit apps while running OS/2 or NT was simply above the economic means of a lot of people. And by the time technology caught up and RAM became cheap enough to make proper multi-tasking cost effective there was too much Windows 9x network effect for competitors to make much headway.
gaius 13y ago
An excellent book that studies that is The Future Was Here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-ebook/dp/B007V5BVJG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385368350&sr=8-1&keywords=the+future+was+here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-e...

nl 13y ago

Those of us around then know exactly why this was: PC Clones were too cheap and got better too quickly for other platforms to compete. Back then we all thought "computers" was a hardware game. Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. And yes, I realise we have swung back to the "integrated hardware/software platform" thing being important again. Picking winning strategies in platform wars is hard.

kickingvegas 13y ago
To add to what nl said: Not only were MS-DOS compatible PCs cheaper, but also MS-DOS apps had a significant install base by the time OS/2 came out. The concerns of running legacy software on the then new 286 and the "just over the horizon" 386 CPUs was heavily weighted. Also, GUIs on all platforms then took up enough system resources (memory and CPU) that made enough folks pause in thinking that they could get better performance/cost running console-based apps.
laureny 13y ago
> Only Microsoft realised the hardware didn't matter, software was the main game. Yes. This was one of Bill Gates' many strokes of genius. After just one year of Traf'o'Data (Microsoft's precursor), Gates saw that the future was in software, not hardware, and he created Microsoft centered around this very vision (while Apple bet the farm on hardware).
- ams6110 13y ago
  Apple tried allowing cloners to copy the hardware and being software for a while, it nearly killed them. I don't recall if the clones were ever price-competitve with x86 clones though.
  - nl 13y ago
    TO be fair, almost everything Apple did at that time "almost killed them". The clones did expand the Mac market, but Apple was so incompetent at that point that it didn't know how to handle that.
kabdib 13y ago
Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). Atari really didn't get systems software, either, and never hired to the extent needed to make a good impact there. The world was basically safe from Atari being anything other than a low-end consumer computer company. And the thing that probably saved Apple in the late 80s was the desktop publishing business.
- nl 13y ago
  Also, Atari didn't get marketing (Jack Tramiel was very reluctant to spend money there). I know that is the conventional story (and pretty similar for the Amiga). I'm not convinced. I think that both the Amiga & the Atari ST were too far ahead of their time. They were multimedia workstations, without anywhere to play that multimedia (except on other Ataris and Amigas). Like you said, the Mac managed to hit the desktop publishing wave, which was exactly right for the the paper-centric late 80's and early 90's.
  - _delirium 13y ago
    Yeah, the Amiga seems like it completely dominated the multimedia niche, but the multimedia niche of the time essentially consisted of the demoscene. Which was great, except that the demoscene was not that large.
    - Keyframe 13y ago
      Huh, Amiga (1000 onwards) was big in video. Especially smaller TV stations that couldn't afford SGIs. Amiga (and SGIs) were light years ahead of Macs in graphics. People often forget this fact.
      - bnastic 13y ago
        Amiga 2000 (mostly) + NewTek Video Toaster[1] were the driving force behind the TV graphics back then. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Toaster
damian2000 13y ago
Around 1989 I traded my Amiga 500 for an IBM AT clone running DOS. Each was worth around AUD$1000 at the time. It felt like I was going back in time 10 years - a mono screen and no mouse. The reason was that I needed it for uni.study purposes (Turbo pascal, Turbo C++, etc.) ...

dhughes 13y ago

One reason: stigma. All I recall from childhood/teen years is "IBM compatible PC" a mantra on every TV commercial IBM or others produced. A PC was for business and you were rich or a fool to spend thousands on something so useless to a regular Joe. Apple was even more expensive and even less common than a PC and even so Apple was quirky and drew pictures, ATARI and Commodore were for games. They were in totally different worlds. Back then I wouldn't have even thought to have one computer that did everything.

smacktoward 13y ago
I dunno about that. At least where I grew up, if your family had a Mac or an Amiga, it was like you had domesticated a unicorn. Everybody wanted to see it, play with it. It marked you out as a member of a family possessed of either great sophistication or enormous wealth, either of which translates easily to status. If there was any stigma, it was for being on the opposite end of the spectrum -- having a computer whose primary selling point was that it was cheap, like a Commodore 64. The C64 was a fine machine for the price, but nobody was going to ooooh and aaah over it they way they would if you took them into your Dad's study and showed them MacPaint.
- pjmlp 13y ago
  Yeah. I was the only one, among my circle of friends owning computers, that had a PC instead of an Amiga. My dad thought the Amiga were only good for playing games, for anyone serious about computers, PC was the way to go. So I was left reading 68000 Assembly manuals, some Amiga reference books, and playing with them on computer parties we used to organize. In any case, the only way to buy any of them in my home country was on credit.
damian2000 13y ago
Agreed, Atari ST and Amiga especially never caught on much with businesses ... they were definitely seen as games machines, even though their capabilities were certainly on par with the IBM clones.
djKianoosh 13y ago

InclinedPlane 13y ago

This is slightly counterfactual. The Mac today has a solid unix heart and runs on the best processors and technology out there, but that was not always so, and they were weakest precisely when PCs grew strongest. The internals of pre OS X Mac OS are horrific and disturbing. They are in no way superior to the internals of Windows 95 and are at best only perceived superior due to a different user experience peppered with a healthy dose of self-delusion, certainly not through stability or performance. They are infantile compared to OS/2. Moreover, over the next few years after Windows 95 was released the PC improved greatly while the Mac mostly stagnated. Around the Power Mac era things were roughly even in terms of capabilities and performance though the Mac was significantly more expensive, by the Pentium and especially Pentium II era the PC began to become objectively more powerful than the Mac. This put Apple into a freefall that they were only rescued from by the return of Steve Jobs who established style as a foundation the company rested on and pushed them into digital media and mobile devices, as well as forcing a hardware architecture migration (to the formerly hated x86 from the PowerPC architecture developed by a consortium of which Apple was a huge part of) and a complete OS rewrite (transforming Mac OS from an antiquated bucket of kludges into NeXTSTEP in Apple clothing). At the time in question though Apple was pushing old, slow hardware at a price premium in a market that was rapidly passing them by.

npsimons 13y ago
Very spot on! Not many seem to remember, but OS/2 truly was technically superior to just about everything else out there in consumer computer land, excepting maybe things like 386BSD (which many of us didn't know about at the time, and probably would have peed our pants at setting up X ;). OS/2 had pre-emptive multitasking and memory protection; Apple and Microsoft didn't even come close in their offerings. Say what you will about how IBM fumbled the marketing, licensing, etc, or how the upstarts(!) won against the Evil Empire, but OS/2 was the better operating system, and Microsoft honed it's FUD by attacking IBM and OS/2, whilst offering a truly awful alternative.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Oh god. I remember setting up X back in the dark days of the early linux era. Peeing ones pants would have been preferable, it's astounding how far we've come. As for Windows vs. OS/2 it's at best complicated. It's a bit like a micro-cosm of the PC vs mainframe debate. The raison d'etre of Windows 95 was backward compatability with a low memory footprint. That may seem like a small thing, or at best not a thing to make so many enormous compromises over, but back then it was everything. The problem with doing multi-tasking "right" was that it imposed a ~4mb RAM requirement per 16-bit application being run at the same time. That is nothing today but back then 4mb was the minimum requirement for installing Windows 95, and it represented a cost of around $100 in 1995. Owning a computer powerful enough to run even a handful of 16-bit apps while running OS/2 or NT was simply above the economic means of a lot of people. And by the time technology caught up and RAM became cheap enough to make proper multi-tasking cost effective there was too much Windows 9x network effect for competitors to make much headway.

gaius 13y ago

An excellent book that studies that is The Future Was Here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-ebook/dp/B007V5BVJG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1385368350&sr=8-1&keywords=the+future+was+here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Future-Was-Here-Commodore-Platform-e...