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by bitwize
3080 days ago
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Yeah, those tray-like expansion cards were neat. Too bad that idea never caught on, and there were only a few expansion cards (all by Tandy) available for the machine. PC compatibility basically steamrolled over all that. Maybe it was seeing what happened with the 2000 that convinced me from an early age that PCs were going to conquer the world, and Macintosh and Amiga fanboys were next on the chopping block. I couldn't even guess then how right I'd be; not even game consoles avoided turning into cut-down, purpose-built PCs. At the time, I was just disappointed that the only graphical game that actually worked with the 2000 was a specially ported Flight Simulator 1.0. |
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Compatibility has been great in some ways. But with standards in flux back then, there was more variety (and maybe fun) than there is now. Besides experiments like the 2000, there were things like machines with 2 different CPUs (the Commodore SuperPet had a 6502 and a 6809, and I think the DEC Rainbow had a Z80 and and 8088). There were so many 5.25" floppy formats you needed utilities like Xenocopy to convert among them (I think it fiddled with the drive controller to manipulate the drive heads).
With machines being simpler, you could fiddle a lot more. Many magazines published assembly language code for little games and utilities; for that matter, the computer section of a typical bookstore carried lots of books on assembly language. There were books on microcomputer system design, stuff about how things worked at the chip level. All gone.
I remember Flight Simulator. I couldn't believe it the first time I played it. Crashed the plane over and over ... There was a graphical paint program, and other graphical stuff which worked with the very slow mouse - in fact, I have a copy of an ad featuring Bill Gates in which he describes using the 2000 in designing the early versions of Windows.