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by cmrdporcupine
1660 days ago
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I rode the Atari ST wave back then. Until I bailed and got a 486 and ran Linux in 93. Yes, Atari half-heartedly marketed the TT030 as a Unix workstation, but it never stuck. I still remember the headline of the little snippet in UnixWorld magazine about it "Up from toyland." Not taken seriously in the Unix market, really, and by the time they had a product, that wave (68k based Unix workstations) had crested anyways. The real problem for both Commodore and Atari in that era (apart from moribund sales, small market, bad management, etc) was that Motorola was already working towards killing off the 68000 by the early 90s. I'm not sure what Atari or Commodore would have done if they could have held on another couple years. PowerPC ended up being a dead-end, too. Yeah, I don't like programming the 816, either. But in that era it wasn't the worst. WDC made the 816 just for Apple, really. (And didn't do the greatest job imho, but whatever) If Apple had asked for it, they would have made an 832, added more registers, whatever. It would have been a hack... but so was x86. Apple's problem was that until the LC (93? 94? 95? I forget. My mom bought one at my recommendation) they didn't have a reasonably priced low-end Mac to sell to people or schools who would have gotten something in the Apple II series in the past. They seemed to have lost a big part of the education market when they dropped/failed-to-advance the II line. |
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Even with the heavy discounts Apple gave to the education market (brilliant strategy, BTW) the Apple IIs were not exactly competitively priced. So much, in fact, PC clones ate away the educational market with a product with a much higher perceived value (kids would learn to use the computers that were going into offices).