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by CountSessine 2237 days ago
Games helped to drive and define the Apple II and Macintosh successes

Apple II, but Macintosh? I'm not sure I agree with that.

I think a lot of Jobs' opinions about personal computers gelled in the 80's. Back then, with the various Sinclair machines, the Ataris, the C64, and the Amiga, there were a lot of people who said that games actually harmed those platforms. In North America at least, having a large library of games made businesses see those platforms as toys and game consoles. Why would you buy an office full of game consoles? You're a serious business man wearing a serious business suit, running a serious business, and you need computers from a serious business computer company that can run serious business software! You need an IBM!
1 comments
wtallis 2237 days ago
> You're a serious business man wearing a serious business suit, running a serious business, and you need computers from a serious business computer company that can run serious business software! You need an IBM!

To be fair, that mindset predates the use of personal computers to do serious graphics business. The Mac is largely responsible for making that mindset obsolete with things like desktop publishing and Photoshop. The same attributes that made the Mac a good platform for those use cases also made it much more suited to gaming than DOS-era PCs.

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aksss 2236 days ago
> much more suited to gaming than DOS-era PCs.

Is that really true? I was alive during DOS-era gaming and still remember kids from Mac families standing out on the sidewalk in the rain crying like Oliver Twist weenies because they couldn’t get their game on. Meanwhile PC - read _intel_ - games we’re writing their own low-level memory managers to eek everything out of the platform possible. I was inside playing Ultima VII or playing Falcon 3.0 with a remote friend _over modem_ drinking hot chocolate. I think any review of the games catalogs would show that the market clearly judged the Mac as less well-suited for gaming.

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pjmlp 2234 days ago
In Europe most serious graphics business during DOS-era PCs, was done in Amiga and Atari STs.
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