Clones. The open architecture that IBM released into the wild flattened the market and brought cheap hardware to everyone. No propritary hardware could compete and very little of it survived, even if it had superior features. 'Good enough' won out over 'better.'
An IBM 5150 PC in the carton from IBM was much more expensive. The waves of cheap no-name taiwanese clones that followed were quite competetive. And had the same build quality as the cheap plastic case Commodore hardware.
Competetive with brand name PC machines. They couldn't touch the price of the waves of cheap Taiwanese clone hardware flowing into the booming mom & pop PC stores in neighborhoods across the country.
Right. So you spend again about the same amount as a cheap XT clone on a pricey color RGB monitor to get the readable characters that a herc card and cheap mono monitor got you on a PC.
If you're going to spring big bux for that color tube for graphics, yes, finally getting text without eye strain is some consolation. The stiff investment for color graphics, not needed in many applications, was a big roadblock.
If you are the salesman at the electronics store it's a nice chained upgrade trap. Sell them an entry level Amiga on their first trip that they can plug into their teevee set. The next time they come into the store, with reddened sore eyes, sell them the $700 display.
I remember a guy with an Amiga 500 who 'added a hard drive' that consisted of a PC-XT clone plugged onto the side of the Amiga. A servicible and cost effective alternative to the small market propritary designs.
There are legions of morons who set 5-1/4 disks down outside the tyvek sleeve. So be it. Those of us with a fucking clue never did that, and experienced the greater reliability of the larger disk.
So 3-1/2" disks were safer and more reliable for morons. I would never contest that.
Anybody nuts enough to buy a brand name Hercules graphic card deserves our accolades and sympathy for financing the revolution in cheap PC graphics. The rest of us followed along with the ubiquitous 'herc compatible' card at $20-70.
It was always about the clones, and the base price of the least expensive Amiga eventually greatly dwarfed the price of an XT clone.
Then, later on, the flattened landscape of the PC clone environment fostered Linux, and here we are. Proprietary consumer grade systems and mucho-$$ proprietary UNIX hardware all run over by defacto-standard clones. Not as prissy, less performant, but truly open.
So you plainly admit that 'high graphical performance' on the Amiga depended on manipulating various quirks in it's architecture. That sounds cool and all. Truly a hacker's paradise. But not something that will scale out to make a full robust system.
So dude makes atones for having his big event on top of an environmentally sensitive area by rolling out changes and new features to make it easier for even more people to tromp in and "take advantage of" said environmentally sensitive area. To me it sounds like a new and greater way to increase harm while paying off critics.
Your comic book style characterization of those you dislike is very comic-booky. Why not go out onto the sidewalk and go get a latte to calm down with. Careful not to step on a panhandler or in any human shit.
"Historical development" sounds like chowderhead thinking. No, I really mean it. History looks back, at big trends, and usually long after events have happened. History doesn't "develop" because some company decides to deploy a bunch of hardware into a community.
The idea of "advancement" itself is usually the province of some mean bossy fuck saying things are going to go HIS way becaust the plan is committed to ink. The communists tried to pull that shit. The NAZIs tried to pull that shit. Intellectuals try it again and again with "urban renewal" fascism.
Freedom means letting things wander in their way, and giving people control over their lives and their communities. Yeah, weird, I know.
My first hard drive was a full height 5-1/4" Shugart drive. It was a 5megabyte drive. I paid $60 for it at an electronics surplus store at the same time that people were buying Seagate 20mb drives for over $200 each.
I mean, what the hell do you mean 'small' hard drives and what does it have to do with the discussion? There was a ton of need still for floppy drives, obviously. My point was that 3-1/2" drives on clone hardware didn't happen 'right away' after a few of the proprietary-hardware companies adopted them. I have one of the first IBM machines with 3-1/2" floppies, an IBM PC Convertible, in my collection. They were still low density, i.e. 720K drives. It was sort of an anomaly machine, being a heavy slow laptop (4.77 MHz 8088). And IBM wasn't really in the PC clone business by that point. They abandoned the behemoth they had spawned and started making the proprietary PS/2 hardware in the 3-1/2" floppy era.
IBM was putting hard drives in their PCs long before 3-1/2" floppies. But what 'IBM' computers were doing back then is a mish-mash because only 'alternative platform' people called them 'IBM.' The rest of us just called them clones.
To be fair, there were specialized uses like the Video Toaster that an Amiga could be embedded i to that made it useful. Still very closed hardware and single sourced up the wazoo, but useful as a turnkey device.
All the makings for an elite cult style product: small market of self-declared experts, limited use device, and most importantly DEAD so that very few onlookers can have any point of reference.
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Clones. The open architecture that IBM released into the wild flattened the market and brought cheap hardware to everyone. No propritary hardware could compete and very little of it survived, even if it had superior features. 'Good enough' won out over 'better.'
An IBM 5150 PC in the carton from IBM was much more expensive. The waves of cheap no-name taiwanese clones that followed were quite competetive. And had the same build quality as the cheap plastic case Commodore hardware.
Competetive with brand name PC machines. They couldn't touch the price of the waves of cheap Taiwanese clone hardware flowing into the booming mom & pop PC stores in neighborhoods across the country.
Middle era 360k drives were cast aluminum. The contemporary 3" drives were stamped out of sheet metal.
Right. So you spend again about the same amount as a cheap XT clone on a pricey color RGB monitor to get the readable characters that a herc card and cheap mono monitor got you on a PC.
If you're going to spring big bux for that color tube for graphics, yes, finally getting text without eye strain is some consolation. The stiff investment for color graphics, not needed in many applications, was a big roadblock.
If you are the salesman at the electronics store it's a nice chained upgrade trap. Sell them an entry level Amiga on their first trip that they can plug into their teevee set. The next time they come into the store, with reddened sore eyes, sell them the $700 display.
I remember a guy with an Amiga 500 who 'added a hard drive' that consisted of a PC-XT clone plugged onto the side of the Amiga. A servicible and cost effective alternative to the small market propritary designs.
Not for cultists. It was only just then beginning.
There are legions of morons who set 5-1/4 disks down outside the tyvek sleeve. So be it. Those of us with a fucking clue never did that, and experienced the greater reliability of the larger disk.
So 3-1/2" disks were safer and more reliable for morons. I would never contest that.
Anybody nuts enough to buy a brand name Hercules graphic card deserves our accolades and sympathy for financing the revolution in cheap PC graphics. The rest of us followed along with the ubiquitous 'herc compatible' card at $20-70.
It was always about the clones, and the base price of the least expensive Amiga eventually greatly dwarfed the price of an XT clone.
Then, later on, the flattened landscape of the PC clone environment fostered Linux, and here we are. Proprietary consumer grade systems and mucho-$$ proprietary UNIX hardware all run over by defacto-standard clones. Not as prissy, less performant, but truly open.
So you plainly admit that 'high graphical performance' on the Amiga depended on manipulating various quirks in it's architecture. That sounds cool and all. Truly a hacker's paradise. But not something that will scale out to make a full robust system.
So dude makes atones for having his big event on top of an environmentally sensitive area by rolling out changes and new features to make it easier for even more people to tromp in and "take advantage of" said environmentally sensitive area. To me it sounds like a new and greater way to increase harm while paying off critics.
I would say that 'the first' would be whatever was your first toy with an embedded controller in it.
Journalist airhead alert, though. Did the writer only recently discover there are computers everywhere?
Google aren't stupid. They are just a bit cut off from reality. Reality will eventually get to them. We see that in this whole set of instances.
Your comic book style characterization of those you dislike is very comic-booky. Why not go out onto the sidewalk and go get a latte to calm down with. Careful not to step on a panhandler or in any human shit.
"Historical development" sounds like chowderhead thinking. No, I really mean it. History looks back, at big trends, and usually long after events have happened. History doesn't "develop" because some company decides to deploy a bunch of hardware into a community.
The idea of "advancement" itself is usually the province of some mean bossy fuck saying things are going to go HIS way becaust the plan is committed to ink. The communists tried to pull that shit. The NAZIs tried to pull that shit. Intellectuals try it again and again with "urban renewal" fascism.
Freedom means letting things wander in their way, and giving people control over their lives and their communities. Yeah, weird, I know.
No need to prepend or append anything onto "a car with no human driving it," Just regular existing laws should suffice.
Instead of a roadblock they should have put a playground there. Or a swimming pool, or a police station.
My first hard drive was a full height 5-1/4" Shugart drive. It was a 5megabyte drive. I paid $60 for it at an electronics surplus store at the same time that people were buying Seagate 20mb drives for over $200 each.
I mean, what the hell do you mean 'small' hard drives and what does it have to do with the discussion? There was a ton of need still for floppy drives, obviously. My point was that 3-1/2" drives on clone hardware didn't happen 'right away' after a few of the proprietary-hardware companies adopted them. I have one of the first IBM machines with 3-1/2" floppies, an IBM PC Convertible, in my collection. They were still low density, i.e. 720K drives. It was sort of an anomaly machine, being a heavy slow laptop (4.77 MHz 8088). And IBM wasn't really in the PC clone business by that point. They abandoned the behemoth they had spawned and started making the proprietary PS/2 hardware in the 3-1/2" floppy era.
Ted and Brett would have had a hell of a party together, that's for certain. As long as they stayed away from politics.
We can quibble about roles. The bugs have mixed value.
IBM was putting hard drives in their PCs long before 3-1/2" floppies. But what 'IBM' computers were doing back then is a mish-mash because only 'alternative platform' people called them 'IBM.' The rest of us just called them clones.
Yep. So good you could ignore that there was an Amiga embedded inside.
Let's compare it to the Mattel Aquarius, too. That's another brand of propritary computer that almost nobody has heard of.
To be fair, there were specialized uses like the Video Toaster that an Amiga could be embedded i to that made it useful. Still very closed hardware and single sourced up the wazoo, but useful as a turnkey device.
All the makings for an elite cult style product: small market of self-declared experts, limited use device, and most importantly DEAD so that very few onlookers can have any point of reference.
Yes, a wonderful nostalgia device.