[lproven]

Not bad. I don't like its tone of approval, TBH.

I much preferred the

« raucous bazaar, teeming with variety. »

I hate the way the PC

« the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that »

I really did not like...

« he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »

That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.

It's a very American viewpoint. I only discovered in recent years that in the rest of the world, the Amiga and ST did much better than at home.

I was a kid when this happened. The Mac launched when I was... 15 I think?

To a rounding error, nobody owned PCs in the UK. They were extremely expensive business machines. Nobody owned Apple II either, and Macs were for the seriously rich.

We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about. We aspired to Camputers and Elan and Memotech.

Nobody _wanted_ office equipment. Would you offer a child a stapler to play with? That's how fun the PC was.

Amigas were huge and very desirable and seen as a gift from the future -- see this article from 2 days ago:

https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-t...

If you couldn't afford an Amiga, then the ST was a worthy competitor.

They were not some flop, some footnote of history. You can still buy new Amiga compatibles today from loads of vendors...

https://www.apollo-computer.com/v4standalone.php

https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/

The ST OS became FOSS and there are multiple modern versions:

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources

And don't neglect the Acorn Archimedes which stomped on both.

Its OS is FOSS now.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

Runs natively on Raspberry Pi. Other compatible new machines are being made and sold:

https://shop.elesar.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&pr...

Sinclair's QL hardware still has compatible machines made today:

https://www.specnext.com/sinclair_ql-qs/

https://sinclairql.net/djw/q68/index.html

This stuff was nothing to be banished to a footnote, dusty unsold boxes with weird names or whatever.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I was horrified by the IBM PC. It was clearly a POS cut-down design being sold at an insanely inflated price, hidden behind an entirely fake base price invented for marketing only. The keyboard was good, but the rest of the spec was insulting, and a clear step back from the state of the art S-100 systems and the Apple II which were already handling colour and (for S-100) networking and limited multitasking.

The Amiga came later, and always looked like something from ten years in the future. It genuinely had a mid-90s aesthetic and promise in the late 80s.

The PC and Windows were both triumphs of worse-is-better corporate mediocrity and mass marketing over creative engineering.

It wasn't until the 486 multimedia clones arrived that prices became more reasonable and the hardware started to look competitive. But DOS and Windows always remained poor-to-mediocre - buggy, unreliable, messy, not secure, bizarrely user hostile - apart from a brief period downwind of NT when Windows was tolerable.

[SoftTalker]

If you really want to compare it to something from the future, in the (very) late 1980s we already had NeXTSTEP.

[criddell]

> « he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »

> That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.

It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari. Their relevance hung on in a couple of niche areas (like Atari with musicians), but outside of hobbyists, neither company mattered much and by 1995 they were both essentially dead from a commercial perspective. The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.

[spankibalt]

> It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari.

I got the same impression from the German trade press in 1991, which emphasized the openness, adaptability and standardization of the whole PC platform. I've learned a long time ago that the way to the truth is the way "through the archives"... anecdotes only go so far, and many markets differed wildly, even locally. In my personal circle in big city East Germany, the PC reigned supreme; Amigas were virtually nonexistant, albeit the machines being a huge hit in Germany, especially in the West. For us Easterners most of that can be traced back to accumulated pre-Wende experience with two main general-purpose computing platforms: Z80- as well as x86-machines (clones).

And I've yet to read a thorough, balanced, and clear-eyed comparative analysis of the Amiga and PC (as well as other) platforms, i. e. one that includes some serious market analysis.

[spankibalt]

> The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.

Bit harsh, lol. And you invited agriculture poetry! Albeit I've heard that many an old school Amiga lifer rejects those "Neomigas" (e. g. the Apollos) for one reason or another. Me, I liken these classics to music instruments, with their own specific capabilities and mythos, etc.

I often pondered about getting one of them, but I've just too much x86 poison in my veins. And putting a Vortex86 board or somesuch into an A600 case is just sacrilege. What would I give for a classy 32- bit x86 keyboard case computer...

[lproven]

> the corpses are kept upright as open source projects

I think you are looking at this not merely wrongly, but in reverse.

Gradually the PC compatible has paved over the entirety of desktop/laptop computing. It's like a farm: ripping out hedgerows, blasting with fertiliser and weedkillers and pesticides, trying to kill those pesky things stealing the land.

Those chemicals have turned the innocent IBM PC, a half-8-bit half-16-bit low-end box, into this vasty computing colossus, a mile across, chewing through kilotons of work and emitting heat and work.

And yet, all over that farm, in the wheel-ruts and in the cracks beside the farm buildings, a few of the weeds just keep on growing.

The men in suits have tried SO very hard to exterminate them and they just will not die.

And yet, if you raise your head and look outside the mega-farm, they are everywhere. Outside the farmland, where it's too steep to farm: vast forests of weird twisty weeds turned into trees.

In people's pockets (phones). By the sofa (tablets). In their cars and cookers and hearing aids and pacemakers. Tiny Archimedes, everywhere: Arm chips, outselling all x86 by hundreds to one.

Weird little CPU architectures, weird RTOSes and router OSes.

They cannot kill those weeds, however hard they try, and despite all their efforts, there will always be more weeds than crops.

[stevenwoo]

It doesn’t match my experience either and I’m in the USA. The father of a friend of mine in high school had one of the early IBM PC with 5 1/4 disk drive at home - the father worked at IBM - this was a luxury at the time. I think only one classmate I knew had an Apple II at home. Our high school computer club had to go the community college to get access to DEC minicomputers for our first exposure to computers only a few years prior to that. Things changed quickly as competitors out, I bought a Commodore 64 as soon as I could, the cost difference between a C64 and IBM PC or even the Apple II was quite large. Later I got an Atari which was competing with the first Macintosh and Amiga.

[steve1977]

> We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about.

And now every mobile phone has a little Acorn DNA in it...

[UncleSlacky]

And of course, in the UK, every school had at least one BBC Micro (about the only good thing Thatcher ever did).