Slashdot Mirror
Fire In the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer
In that light, it's not as wide-ranging a book as Steven Levy's Hackers, but Fire does a good job of getting into the details of the sometimes bizarre culture of programmers and hardware gurus who decided that -- however impractical it seemed at the time -- eventually people were going to want computers to communicate, to track their bills, to play games. They knew there was money in that line of thought, even if a few of them though that the real benefit of personal computers would be in a new and lasting sense of community. And some of them wanted machines just to play with, too. In short, it illustrates the wildcat beginnings of the industry which brings you the screen in front of you.
Positive vibrations Many of the names in the pages of this book -- of people, machines and organizations -- are ones that computer history buffs will recognize, whether from a stack of dusty documents in the basement, from old copies of BYTE, or from the covers of Time and Newsweek. Some of them, in fact, are names that you would be hard pressed not to know as a modern computer user -- Gates, Jobs, Ellison. Others are obscure outside of computer-geek circles -- people like John Draper ("Cap'n Crunch"), Lee Felsenstein, David Bunnell (founder of PC Magazine and a host of other computer publications), and Steve Dompier.
After a whirlwind historical introduction to the context in which the personal computer became possible -- including appropriate obligatory mentions of Babbage, ENIAC, and the invention of the integrated circuit -- Freiberger and Swaine land us in a chapter called "Critical Mass" in early 1969. That's when a fateful piece of business landed at then-memory manufacturer Intel: a piece of contract work for a Japanese calculator manufacturer led to the development of 4004 microprocessor, then the 8008, which gave way in turn to ever more complex and capable microprocessors. While Intel did not remain alone in this field for long, the introduction of cheap integrated chips is what set the stage for everything else that happened in the years afterward.
But what did happen afterward? The authors concentrate on the first successful home or hobbiest computers, like the MITS Altair, the Osborne and the Apple I, as well as the generation of corporate fueled projects which emerged once it was clear that people would indeed pay to have a computer on their desk or on the fiddle-with workbench in the basement. They also get into quite a few of the ships that sank as fast as they were launched, and some of these spectacular failures make interesting reading even if you're not thinking about starting a business, but sobering if you are. (Radio Shack, TI, HP, and others probably all regretted not listening sooner to the scruffy hobbiests who swore that people would buy them.)
Unlike certain other techno-hagiographies, most of the action in Fire takes place west of the Missisppi (the Valley in the title is the one you'd think -- Silicon Valley), with only passing references to much of the East Coast action going on at the time at universities and at corporations like DEC. That bias is not accidental, and really doesn't constitute a sin of omission. The boards of big corporations like HP, DEC, and IBM saw little profit in putting many of their precious dollars or engineers on low-margin personal machines: they liked to make big iron (or at least medium iron) that they could sell in hefty chunks to tech-savvy companies to help do large corporate tasks. Selling to individuals, in a world where the necessity for a personal or household computer was not yet established, would have been an odd move. All of those companies later saw the error in their ways and did enter the field of PCs, of course -- ironically (and past the time frame this book primarily addresses) the once-giant DEC was eventually subsumed -- by personal-computer maker Compaq.
But out there in the heady Wild West, when computers were still mostly room-sized beasts which needed constant tending by a full-time staff, grew the makings of The Homebrew Computer Club, which drew people whose names would eventually adorn magazine covers and company letterheads. Right from its start in 1975, the Club started attracting cantankerous circuit designers, switch-flippers and other hackers who wanted to have their very own computer room.
With surprising ease, the story moves among Silicon Valley to Washington State (home of Bill Gates, and eventually, Microsoft -- a whole story in itself, well covered here) and Ed Roberts' operation MITS, creators of the Altair hobbiest computer.
It's a rush to read, and for most of the ride you may forget to stop reading.
A few sour notes For most of the ride, I said. The story telling is crisp and enjoyable for the most part, but in book this size there are bound to be a few dips. I could have done with a lot less information, for instance, about the role of est at once-promising computer maker IMSAI. While it's certainly an interesting influence (hey, this was California in the 70s, what do you expect? Puritanism?), it didn't turn me on for as many pages as it seemed to have the authors. Perhaps in an effort to make each one readable as an independent section, certain of the chapters read almost as if written for separate publication; how many times do we need to be reminded how Bill Gates and Paul Allen started working together, and that both went to Harvard?
Perhaps because as someone who grew up mostly in the 80s and has spent most of the 90s with at least one personal computer at all times, the story of Jobs split from Apple, the development of Windows, and many of the other later developments covered in the last third of the book were all much less enjoyable to me than the "ancient history" portion. While it's interesting to see these things put in the context of the personal computer revolution as a whole, it was much less informative simply because the history is so close.
Likewise, the brief treatment of the World Wide Web, and in particular the conflicts (still ongoing) outlined in the chapter called "The Browser Wars," I could have skipped and enjoyed the book just as much. It's in this chapter that the most mention of Open Source and Free Software is made, and it may be a decent introduction to the topic to someone unfamiliar with it, but I suspect most Slashdot readers will find themselves skimming for information they didn't already know in this portion.
What it's not If you're looking for hard-core information on early circuit designs, or code snippets from the programs which launched the rise of the PC, this is probably the wrong book -- though there is a satisfyingly large reproduction of the circuit board of the Apple I. The infectuous spirit of invention and a strange ort of aggressive computer-based fun comes through clearly, because Freiberger and Swaine concentrate on the personalities and business realities of the early days of the PC more than they do the technological advances which made it possible. Whether you find this more engaging or annoying is of course up to you; I found the stories and interactions of the early PC pioneers fascinating, less so the business machinations of the 80s and 90s.
Bonus Play My favorite aspect of the book is probably all the history of the Altair, the West Coast Computer Faire; I consider these a bonus even though they're a normal part of the book.
This book is labelled a "collectors edition," though (the book was first published in 1984; all the information about the late 80s and 90s is obviously added since then), and it does come with a few nice extras to justify that: For one thing, it's a nice, heftily large book (nearly 450 pages, not counting the massive index); there's a great selection of photos in the middle of the book, too, with some shots that will make you either smile or cringe to see how young these people really were.
A timeline at the beginning of the book is great reading all by itself, and an included CD-ROM contains more audio clips, pictures and history as well.It's well suited to your coffee table or mantle for pleasant evening reading.
You can purchase this book at ThinkGeek.
Accidental Empires(AE) was the name of Cringely's book and was turned into Revenge of the Nerds on PBS.
AE looked more at the business side of SV in the early-mid 80s and 90s. Great focus on why companies prospered, why they died, and how so much of what is now in SV a result of..well..accidents.
Fire In The Valley (FITV) is a much older work, by almost 10 years or more. It's focus is much older, following the development of the PC itself, and less on the entire technology that existed in the SV area. FITV starts its timeline in the early '70s, and issues in a much more technical sense than AE does.
In short, give AE to your parents, read both yourself.
"Fire In The Valley" was the basis of last year's rather fun geek movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley".
Well worth watching. If only for the first scene at the filming of the 1984 commercial...
S.
Apple used the term "personal computer" heavily in it's marketing long before IBM was selling it's "Personal Computer". (IBM never called it a "PC".)
The idea that "PC" == "IBM Personal Computer Compatible" wasn't universal until a few years later.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It would have been funny if the review had 8086 bytes in body.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
and we need new innovation and new, original ideas to speed up and destabilize the computer industry.
That's what Gates and Allchin have been saying! But the DOJ and those pesky "freedom of information" people are fighting against the American Way, trying to stem the tide of innovation, increased disk-space requirements and neato-keen animations for deleting files. Microsoft has been about the innovation of everybody buying at least one license for Microsofts every software package upgrade every few years, as far as Bill Gates has been able to recall.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Although both are focused on specific events and companies, they give good background information on the industry.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
The real danger here is inspiring new, talented creators and inventors to continue to think like the people who originally developed the first PC's. These people were innovative, but the technology is aging... badly... and we need new innovation and new, original ideas to speed up and destabilize the computer industry.
The Computer Revolution was over in the mid 90's. We're more in sort of the Computer Middle Age now. Let's just hope we can avoid a 'Dark Age' by not making religous text out of historical fact.
I think the introduction of personal computers and the profileration of competition was far more radical and desatabilizing than anything that is currently going on!
Think about it - we have gone from a time when the notion of individuals (let alone non-engineers) having any use for computers was absurd, to a time when they are ubiquitous and outselling TV sets!
In the early days there was a mass of creative innovation and competition. Apple I/II vs the Comodore PET, Ratshack TRS-80, Acorn computer in the UK, etc, etc. Compare that to today where it would seem futile to try to compete with the Wintel x86/Windows monopoly or whereever they want to lead us.
In a way the open source movement, and the mindblowingly fast adoptation rate of Linux is a return back to the good old days - a return to the joyous celebration of computer technology without regard to viable business models, and an implicit faith that if you build stuff people find interesting the market will come. A field of dreams. This is what it was like in the early 80's when I worked for Acorn - computers were designed as much by engineers who defined what was possible or cool, as by marketing groups who decided how to one-up the competition with spec. sheet features.
Reminding people of the time of revolution isn't making it into a religious text, but rather reminding people that computers and personal electronics can be as much entertainment as business, and perhaps that's not so bad as a business model going forwards.
Is a book detailing the history of "hobbiest" computing before 1970. In other words, there had to be hobbiests building thier own computers out of junked telephone relays, vacuum (sp?) tubes, homemade punched cards - maybe even a few fortunate ones managed to salvage some transistors, or even a thrown out teletype (or maybe hooked up an electric typewriter, or something.
I tend to pick up nearly any book related to computer history. My favorite books that I own are actually historical in nature, in that they were written as "up-to-date" cutting-edge "about computers"-type books - but are from the 1950's and 60's. I managed to find one book on the building the TV Typewriter (though this is from the 1970's). I also have a strange "homebrew" book (I hesitate to call it this - it is stapled along one edge, typewritten, 30 odd sheets of 8.5 x 11 inch paper - very homebrew) detailing building computers from scratch. I can't remember the publication date, but I believe it was around the early 70's.
Anyhow - I am sure that there were hackers building computers in their garages - not anything like we would call PC's - they weren't portable by any means - but more like homebrew minis or mainframes. Like we have hackers today homebrewing supercomputers from throw away old pentium boxes.
Does anyone have any ideas, info, or anecdotes about this? I would be especially interested in the latter. Any "old-timers" with strange friends? More importantly - do any of these old machines still exist (side note - it is like tracking down old homebrew robots - nearly impossible to find - I know of one still in existance - AROK - one that I have pics of, but nothing else, that I would love to find out if it still exists, was called CHARLIE - about 6 feet tall, white, boxlike humanoid construction)...
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This book, (I've read it) is about the revolution in silicon valley (thus the name) and in Washington.
Best Slashdot Co
IIRC Swaine, who writes for Dr. Dobbs, said that Pirates was partly based on this book.
Best Slashdot Co
When I was in college I did sys admin work on a vax. Learned pascal and c on a vax. Nice machine.
Best Slashdot Co
Hackers by Steve Levy
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
Fire in the Valley by Freiberger and Swaine
The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling
Any more?
The Soul of a New Machine chronicles the design and construction of the first 32-bit minicomputer by Data General, and especially about the hardware hackers who did it. Within a few years minis were completely dead, killed by the PC.
The Hacker Crackdown is about the Secret Service and telcos' going after bbs's and phone phreaks. And, of course, Steve Jackson Games. It came out in 94, I think, and the technology described, bbs's, was completely replaced by the internet within a few years. The issues are still important, though.
Best Slashdot Co
For anybody who dosen't already know, this book was also made into a movie at one point, "Pirates of Silicon Valley". It's a good watch for somebody too lazy to read the book. (or don't have time, etc.)
Were it not for that event, the PC market might still be divided between Commodore, Apple, IBM, and a few other bit-players.
So put that in your DMCA and smoke it!
Karma: Bored. (Thinking about resurrecting the "Anyone else is an imposter" joke.)
The more interesting thing with this is that we ALL grew up with these machines - anyone working in software now, chances are they started programming on a C-64, Spectrum, whatever. With these machines, it was all pretty stripped down, and one person really _could_ make a difference - some of the greatest games then, like Paradroid, really were just written by one person. The limitations of the hardware meant that you had to learn about programming the sound chip, handling sprites and stuff like that, usually in assembler. But the hardware was all pretty simple then, so it wasn't too hard to figure it out. And if you knew that one person, working on their own, could do that, there was the incentive to see if you could too - you knew it was possible.
:-) and all applications, games and other programs are so complex, it's difficult for a newbie to get started. And there's no really successful single-person programs (AFAIK :-) so where's the incentive to try? If you know you can't do something on your own, bcos all programs (even the open-source ones) require vast project teams to do it, where's the spark to make you try?
:-) The point really is that we've been lucky; our learning curve started low, with fairly simple computers, so as the technology involved in those computers has stepped up, it's been easy for us to make the jump to the next computer technology, using what we learnt b4. But today, you have to START on your Pentium, figure out Windows programming, DirectX or whatever, and that learning curve is more like a cliff-face!
Fast-forward 20 years. The hardware is so immensely complex that no one person can figure it all out (although Tom Pabst does a good job!
I'm not advocating that all 16-bit processors and upwards should be ritually slaughtered!
I'd be interested to see how many software ppl we've still got in maybe 10 years time, when the new ppl have only ever known hugely-fast machines. Also, I'd be interested to see what the software's like. Starting on slow machines, we naturally learnt how to optimise for speed when we needed it. But if you've got some serious hardware, where's the incentive? I work on embedded stuff, which is much closer to the older machines and often needs to run fast to control the car engine or whatever - if we get ppl used to writing bloatware, it's going to be difficult to get them out of the habit.
Grab.
One problem I had with the book was that it has too much white space and too many blank pages. The type was fairly large and the margins were big. Reminded me of those papers in college where you make adjustments with your word processor until to just make it to the 10 page length set by the professor. Although these authors were trying to get it to 450 pages.
I read both the original and the updated version. The original had some interesting pictures of a Macintosh with a 5.25 inch floppy drive. This picture doesn't show up in the new edition.
The only other problem I had with this book is the redundancy. Some of the same facts are repeated in different chapters.
an apple II, and two S-100's running CP/M.
i have an altair that i was given laying around in my shed, someday i'll put it online so it can get ceremoniously slashdotted.
maybe even a 68000 based system or two. one runs pascal natively, one runs CP/M 68K.
before all the computers we were getting had-me-down TI calculators that had the little mag strips you could store in the back.
memories....light the corners (of what used to be) my mind...
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
est is the entire word. It mostly consisted of seminars conducted by Werner Erhart to "elevate human potential". The Skeptics Dictionary has a nice article on it. They also have a ton of additional links which I won't reproduce here. The first est seminar was in 1971, and the last was in 1991, and about 700,000 people took the seminars.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
Bill: Well, Andy, I think we have pushed office and internet applications about as far as they need to go. From now on, we'll just fix bugs and work on operating systems stability.
Andy: Ok, Bill. Then we'll stop developing faster processors. Instead, we will work on pushing down the prices of machines with the same performance.
Bill: Yup. That seems the thing to do.
Andy: (Rocking slowly.) Yup.
Bill: Andy, what about games?
Andy: Just a few kids play those. No money in it.
Andy: Bill, do you think there might still be another "next big thing" out there? Do you think you might be able to invent the next Visicalc?
Bill: Huh? Invent? You let me know if someone does, and then I'll embrace it...
Andy: Oh, ok. (Sighs.)
Fadeout.
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
Perhaps not bug free...but close, right?
I really don't see the internet as the end of the road. We still have a lot further to go with integrating computers into every aspect of our lives. Not only will everyone have a computer terminal in their house connected to the internet, but their refridgerator, microwave, car, oven, phone, etc will be connected. One day, we'll be able to walk into a mall and download information about the product that we're standing in front of directly to our mobile computing platform.
I think we have PLENTY of room to expand software and hardware.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
As another poster has observed in the post, West Coast Bias - Rewite History why don't you?, this book misrepresents much of the earliest days of what became personal computers.
The Intel 4004 was not a computer by any stretch of the imagination, but a special purpose controller, and lived on a handful of separate, hard-to-integrate parts. The 8008 was, IIRC, Intel's first computer chip, with what became the infamous x86 instruction set, and slower than molasses in January, even for the time. Motorola (Austin, Texas) developed the first computer-on-a-chip, but marketing believed they would never sell more than 10,000 (or somewhere in that neighborhood) of the things, so the 6800 was put into cold storage. The Commodore, Atari and Apple computers were all based on the 6502, an inexpensive (for the time), stripped-down 8-bit-only 6800, but with two index registers, produced by some malcontents who left Motorola and went to Philadelphia. Motorola eventually won a massive intellectual property suit, but had lost the initiative because of lack of insight into the future of computing.
There is a lot of hype about how the Altair was so innovative also, but it was produced in New Mexico, I believe, at least at first. Neither Altair nor any of the other early Intel-based computers could be cold booted. The bootstrap program had to be toggled in from front panel switches, just as mainframes had for years. Southwest Technical Products, San Antonio, introduced the first boot ROM (Gary Kildall and the Intel-centric community insisted on calling it the BIOS) with their 6800-based computers, and until 1982, had sold more computers, based on the 6800 and 68000 processor families, over 110,000 in all, than all the Intel-based boxes together to that time.
Zilog darned near killed Intel by bringing out a better 8085 than the 8085. The Zilog Z80 had index registers! And some neat extensions to the instruction set. And ate Intel's lunch, technologically speaking, as well as market share. If you read publications from the 1981-1983 period, you will see a lot of hype about how the 4 MHz Z80 was so much superior to Motorola's 2 MHz 6809, just like you see people moaning G4's being outdated by PIII's with twice the rated clock speed. It ain't how fast the clock ticks, li'l buddies, it's what you do each time the clock ticks. A 2 MHz 6809 is about 20% faster than a 4 MHz Z80 because the 6809 used an internal clock doubler to minimize problems with having the processor clock on the motherboard, which only needed the half-speed memory clock. Altair put the processor clock, and a number of dumb Intel hand-shaking signals, on the S100 bus and early S100 motherboard designs had massive signal problems as a result.
The bottom line is that all the Silicon Valley stuff was based on stolen intellectual property (the 6502) and a piece of crap (Intel 8080), but succeeded because they were afordable by the public. Hell, even the infamous GUI is stolen property. Apple stole it from Xerox PARC and Microsoft stole it from Apple. At least Gates had the insight (and ethics) to buy DOS from Seattle Software and a Unix license from Bell Labs.
The development of computing over the last 20 years has been all about widening the franchise of users. Now the most computer illiterate of people can do much the same as what an expert could some 20 years ago, and with considerably more ease.
But what will happen now? The franchise is as big as is needed, and we can already do all the major tasks we could want to - word processing, spread sheets, etc. These are the meat and drink of computing, and they aren't going to get any better or any easier to use now.
So what will be the driving force of computer development over the next 20 years? I think that computers will cease to increase in power in about 5 years time. Instead terminals will become common, and everyone will have an internet connected terminal in the home. We are approaching the end game of software development in almost all arenas except AI and games. The software of the future will do the same things that it does today, in the same way. It will just be bug free, faster and a tiny little bit easier to use.
Jon Erikson, IT guru
I'm so *freaking* tired of books that rewrite history to say that the entire PC revolution happened on the West Coast.
Does anybody remember Commodore? The CBM PET was the first home machine with an integrated screen and keyboard, AND could save your programs on a cassette. All in one machine.
During the height of the Commodore 64, CBM owned over 33% of the home computer market, a percentage that to this day, no other single box-maker has ever had.
And then there's the Amiga, a machine so far ahead of it's time that a decade later, some of the features it had still aren't available on modern equipment.
There was a point where Commodore was kicking Apple's butt, but everyone forgets that and just talks about the Two Steves and Bill, like they alone invented personal computing. Don't get me wrong, I think WOZ is a god, but sheesh!, can't someone write a book that has facts in it, and tells the history truthfully, without cutting out huge chunks of history for the sake of drama?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
While I cannot personally comment on this book's contents as I have not read it, it seems that the market is being glutted with various biographies, histories, and 'Pirates of Silicon Valley' type stories.
Think about it folks, the 1970's, when most of the initial development of the PC took place was 30 years ago! These events are becoming a lot less relevant to modern PC design and more like... well... History.
The real danger here is inspiring new, talented creators and inventors to continue to think like the people who originally developed the first PC's. These people were innovative, but the technology is aging... badly... and we need new innovation and new, original ideas to speed up and destabilize the computer industry.
The Computer Revolution was over in the mid 90's. We're more in sort of the Computer Middle Age now. Let's just hope we can avoid a 'Dark Age' by not making religous text out of historical fact.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
I find it more disturbing that there are people out there with little intellectual curiousity about the development of a piece of technology that has revolutionized the world.
The Internet and the personal computer are the greatest threat to totatlitarian, oppressive governments. They are a much better tool for overthrowing dictatorial governments than do a bunch of bearded guys in fatigues wielding AK47s in the jungle.
Besides, this is not a book about rich guys. It's a book about computer hobbyists, geeks, and the shaping of an industry. That they later became rich is just an aside.
Another popular science compu-worship tome.
What it's not
If you're looking for hard-core information on early circuit designs, or code snippets from the programs which launched the rise of the PC, this is probably the wrong book -- though there is a satisfyingly large reproduction of the circuit board of the Apple I. The infectuous spirit of invention and a strange ort of aggressive computer-based fun comes through clearly, because Freiberger and Swaine concentrate on the personalities and business realities of the early days of the PC more than they do the technological advances which made it possible. Whether you find this more engaging or annoying is of course up to you; I found the stories and interactions of the early PC pioneers fascinating, less so the business machinations of the 80s and 90s.
I think that the stories of the 1950s, when science was very important to nearly everybody in the government and intellectual life for the purpose of competint with the Societs, will only be tantalizing and painful to modern inventors who battle in todays world of tanking dot-coms.
I do however think that it would be instructive to see how people write code on machines with the limitations these machines had... what kind of code is written for machines which were, for all their great size and expense, orders of magnitude less powerful than today's machines?
Furthermore, any real tale of Silicon Valley should be as much a tale of poverty as a tale of success and prosperity. The place changed from a place of farms to a place of silicon factories to a place of dot coms, and the descendants of the "original" inhabitants of Silicon Valley (well, the original inhabitants were Indians but never mind that), Mexican-American families that settled there in the 16th and 17th centuries, now have jobs as janitors, gardeners, mainentance people and construction workers in the new economy buildings, and they live in converted U-Stor garages 'cause they can't afford the rent.
In fact, the dot com economy is now beginning to displace people in San Francisco, as the high rent spiral they created further south forces growth north, where dot-coms have begun to gentrify the Mission District.
Goat sex free since 2001
Timothy, I'm sure you're a great guy and everything, but I swear... sometimes you write the most opaque intros. I understand that that's part of your schtick and all, but please don't undervalue the importance of a clear, precise presentation in some cases. I know this is a fairly off-topic nitpick, but it's a point I felt deserves to be made. Spend a little more time in the submission queue, a little less time with the thesaurus, maybe?
Please don't even consider this criticism. I mean no offense whatsoever, it's just my point of view... Please don't take this the wrong way, like michael is wont to do (at least in my personal experience) when constructive advice is offered.
-tf
Hi, I'm a pretentious cock who will make some gay comment about ignoring AC posts here.
Perhaps the 64k limitation is one area where it was beat, but it wasn't much of a limitation, apparently, because of all the games that were created for it. And a well-written program could fit in 64k, and whatever disk space was necessary. I challange anyone to write some of those games in C for an x86 (DOS, Windows, whatever) and have the exe be less than 64k. Or even write it in assembly, I don't think it can easily be done. And if you know about the architcture of the Commodore 64, with the ROM in place, there's 48k available (8k BASIC, and 8k Kernel), though BASIC wasn't necessary for writing stuff in assembly. Also, the high resolution graphics screen took another 8k. Even if a game flipped out both BASIC and the Kernel, it still leaves 56k, and not all of that can be used. You still have the zero page, and the i/o locations, which further reduce the available RAM. The point being that a lot of good games were made with less available RAM, because programmers wrote games in low-level languages and optimized them well rather than in high-level languages which are optimized by the compiler. Sure, the Commodore 64 was slow by the standards of the past decade, but any of the good games for it were well optimized and were very well written. A lot can be done, and was done, that wasn't done on other platforms, because the Commodore 64 had a much more versatile architecture and because the programmers had good skill.
It was in my computer science course last year in high school, we watched a video on the history of computers, from Babbage's mechanical computers, through ENIAC and it's successors, and systems produced by IBM, and Xerox PARC, and when it came to the 1980s, there was no mention at all of Commodore and the effect any of its computers had on the industry. It's rather disappointing of PBS to produce something like this that is so historically inaccurate.
The fact is, IBM supported an inferior product in the 1960s and won out because of a better marketing staff, which was accurately portrayed in the video. They also won out in the 1980s for the same reason, which was again accurately described by the video, except for a few details. It only described their dominance over Apple and no mention was made of the many other systems available at the time such as the PET, VIC-20, Commodore 64/128 (all of which were produced by Commodore), the TRS-80, Atare, etc.
It's arguable the effect of the Commodore on computers today simply because they've been gone for so long (the 64 stopped being produced in 1992), but they were a major player in the 1980s, and it's sad that it's been so quickly forgotten.
I demand a manual recount of my karma!
Sounds like a laxative right?? Well, that's what I thought it was the first time I heard its name.
Once, in college, I was assigned the task of creating (in homage to the old days) a virtual VAX machine written in ASM for MIPS chips. What a great combination eh?
Needless to say, the variable length instructions made me want to scream and hurt people.
Does anyone still have their Atari 8600 with cassette tape drive? What a great machine =)