The Coming Crisis in Home Computers (1983)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That price plunge turned an unaffordable extravagance into something I could actually buy and start using every day. It wasn't just the computers that became cheaper, but the peripherals (disk drives, modems, printers) and software as well. Suddenly, a home system that was never going to happen could be picked up piecemeal at a fraction of the price.
I wonder how many programmers owe their current careers to this early shakeout and price collapse.
Besides prices got to rising again... Now $400 is the starting price for a laptop/PC, and people pay over $3000 often...
People pay more because they want more. If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.
That would be relevant if the metric was "cpu power of computer sold in the 80s".
There were some $100 (or even $25) pieces of hardware far more powerful than ENIAC in 1980 as well.
But the relevant metric is "cpu power appropriate for contemporary uses and programs" -- and in 2018 it means what people in 2018 consider a home computer.
>If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.
Why would that be your goal? That's only of interest to programmers and tinkerers, not 95% of the population.
The 6502 (available even earlier than 1980) cost $25 -- and was used (e.g. in C64 well into the mid-80s and even today).
ENIAC 0.00289 MIPS
Commodore 64 0.02 MIPS
The pi is a whole computer built around a SoC. The 6502 is a CPU only. This $25 claim seems questionable.
But what Moore's law giveth, web developers taketh away. If you want to use a computer to participate in the modern society, you need much more than a Raspberry Pi, due to web bloat.
Although, I think a rPI is capable, even if it would be frustratingly slow.
The World Wide Web would be a much better place if web developers/designers showed even the slightest bit of restraint when it comes to shoving arbitrary Turing-complete code down my throat. Statistically-speaking, 95+% of it doesn't benefit me in the slightest, and there's a special place in hell for those who write websites such that I have to put up with that 95% that's garbage just to use the site at all.
Loading 10 or 20 or even 1000 140-character tweets should be possible even on an old DOS PC with dialup, and yet even 10-year-old PCs with multiple orders of magnitude more processing power and network speed/bandwidth struggle with that.
Most of those sites are incredibly bloated. Even bank dashboards have become increasingly heavy (for near zero value added).
There are many things consumers are willing to pay for with their time and patience, but not their cash. As it turns out many of those things are web "services". If they were truly valuable on the same level as say, food, people would gladly pay cash for the service.
YouTube is a great example for me personally. If you told me I had to pay a monthly subscription of $10, I'd stop watching YouTube instantly. But since it's "free" I'll sit through a few ads. I don't mind paying with my time.
Plenty of people still write travel blogs and think pieces without getting a salary for it. The thing that drives me crazy is twitter / facebook etc showing me content produced for free and STILL put it next to an ad.
It's free to produce -- but it costs to run a huge network of Twitter scale to post it
That said, I think I'd be perfectly happy if most websites went under. What we're getting out of it (novelty, entertainment) isn't worth the cost (attention span, loss of privacy) in most cases.
" If your goal is just to work on computers, you have far cheaper options today. "
1 of my 2 desktops at work is a 2006 mac mini g-7450. it can email. and view pdfs and edit office documents. it has ten-four fox. and it can ssh. yeah. mostly email and ssh...
I don't understand why it's so hard for companies to build 4k dumb TVs. If anything it should be easier and cheaper to not include a bunch of smarts, right?
Composite (and, later on, S-video) outputs were common on third-party CGA, EGA, and (S)VGA cards (not sure if official IBM ones did, but third party were more common.) Also, I think that Tandy’s quite popular proprietary graphics did. And VGA to composite, component, and S-Video adapters were all readily available, too.
And later, this shifted to HDMI being common for both video cards and TVs; the ability to use your TV as a PC display never went away, though TVs couldn't handle (until the HD era) the higher resolution modes used for text and later graphics (though it wasn't until SVGA that that became an issue for most games, which tends to favor higher color offer higher resolution modes.)
Before that, you could either get a "scan converter" which would convert VGA into composite video, or a specialty monitor which was typically a 27" or 32" CRT TB capable of synching to 640x480 VGA.
When flat-panel TVs started coming out they typically had a VGA or DVI port, and shortly thereafter HDMI, so it became moot.
$100 in 1983 is $253.90 in 2018[0]. Here's a chromebook with 2GB RAM and 16GB storage for $116[1]. You can probably get a used one on craigslist for less.
$400 in 1983 is $1,015.60 in 2018. You can buy the lowest spec'd version of the older macbook air for $1000, or the lowest spec'd version of the new one for $1200[2].
[0] http://www.in2013dollars.com/1983-dollars-in-2018?amount=100
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720p-2625-Touchscreen-ChromeBoo... it probably sucks but it's the cheapest one I saw in the search results
Neither would have been possible if the prize had been as high as it was back in the day.
(I got C-64 first. Then later a tape drive and eventually the floppy drive and a printer).
DEC fiddly-farted around for years, and finally came up with the Rainbow PC. Not only did it have nothing to do with the 11, its compatibility with the IBM PC was deliberately crippled (you had to do things like buy floppy disks only from DEC). The DEC-heads I knew just laughed in disgust at this, and abandoned their loyalty to DEC.
The Rainbow fiasco marked the end of DEC. It's pretty sad, what might have been. The 11 was a fantastic machine.
(I owned an H-11, and thinking DEC was the obvious future of microcomputing, rewrote Empire for it: https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11 )
Some well known computer columnist, I think it was Jerry Pournelle in his BYTE column, wrote of attending a trade show when Windows 3 was still king where IBM was showing OS/2 Warp and Microsoft was showing Windows 95. OS/2 was out at the point, but Windows 95 was still in beta.
He went to the IBM booth, told them he was interested in programming for OS/2 Warp, and asked what he had to do. They gave him a bunch of forms to fill out to apply for the developer program. The forms asked for details of his business and analysis of why he thinks it will make money with OS/2. If they were satisfied with this, they would allow him to buy the SDK.
Then he went to the Microsoft booth and asked the same question about Windows 95. They handed him the SDK right there, no charge and no strings attached.
That was when, he said in his column, he knew Windows 95 would be the successor to Windows 3, and OS/2 Warp would be at best a niche OS.
I said IBM made the same mistake as TI, but more so. The more so is because IBM also neglected promoting OS/2 to consumers, and they neglected hardware support, so even if it had all the software that you cared about, it was hard to discover that OS/2 was an option, and if you did it could be a nightmare getting it to work with readily available hardware. By 1996, Linux was easier to get working than OS/2 with most hardware sold at the major retail computer stores (CompUSA, Computer City).
That has always been Microsoft's strength: their ability to bring developers to their ecosystem.
It doesn't matter if your OS is the best, most modern and revolutionary: it means nothing if you can't do anything with it.
The same mistake almost bit the iPhone when it was launched.[2]
[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs [2]:https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-st...
"Business is war"
RIP Jack.
They drove away many of their best software developers, forming competitive software companies such as Activision and Imagic, and then spent resources trying and failing to sue them out of existence. Also departing were hardware folks like Jay Miner and Joe Decuir, who would be major contributors to the Amiga, an opportunity that Atari would later have in their hands and throw away. They completely muffed the next-gen console release with the Atari 5200, which was basically nothing more than a repackaged Atari home computer (already 3 years old at the time of the 5200's release), crippled by a terrible analog joystick that didn't self-center and was prone to breaking. They rushed VCS games to market assuming they would print money regardless of quality issues. After 9 months of raking in over $300m in profits in 1982, they ineptly handled the warning signs of Christmas 1982, leading to over half a billion in losses in 1983.
There was no way the crash of 1983 wasn't going to hurt Atari, but IMO a company which had been better run could have survived. As it was, without somebody that had Tramiel's level of discipline at the helm, Atari probably would have died in 84 or 85.
In my neck of the woods (Denmark), in the 1978-ish your choices were expensive pre-built Z-80 machines, like the Luxor ABC-80 or danish niche computers (some which were actually amazing for the time). I went with a British kit, the Z-80 based Nascom 2.
Roughly 1 years later, the market had changed and 6502 based options were abundant with the BBC, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 taking the lead (ZX80, ZX81, and ZX Spectrum were popular too). Later Amiga arrived with its own following.
All this to say that the world was such a mess of an abundance of incompatible computers that when the IBM PC came out, the main attraction was the belief that, because of I.B.M., this would become popular enough that there would be a critical mass of great and actually useful software.
I sometimes try to imagine how things would have played differently had IBM abstained from the "hobby market".
$600 in 1983 = $1,520.72 in 2018. iPhone XS Max w 512GB: $1,449.
Again, that's not the claim.
As you suggest, at least part of the influence was that, although I had used some Apples at work, we had switched to using an IBM PC which probably colored my thinking. Although I used them some in grad school later, I never got into Macs until relatively recently--and that was for basically work related reasons as well. (We basically don't use Windows and I didn't want to use solely Linux for presentations, etc.)
It was also many times as expensive, I think.
Clive wasn't focused on building the best computer, he was focused on building the cheapest. He made home computers mass market. The C64 was more than twice as expensive as the Spectrum. _Anyone_ could own a Spectrum.
1. prices for computers were lower in the US than in the UK
2. wealthier Americans were than europeans in the 70s and early 80s (the gap closed the further from WW2 we got)
That "double" priced c64 in the UK probably set an American family back as much as a spectrum did in the UK in terms of their respective disposable income.
For the Eastern European markets it really varies greatly by country. Commodore dumped hundreds of thousands of C16/C116 and Plus/4's in the Eastern European markets in '86 onwards for example (largely because they'd totally flopped) - especially in Hungary where many Plus/4's ended up in schools for example, and a substantial proportion of software (quite likely a majority of titles) for those machines came out of Eastern Europe. This was a point where most of the Spectrum clones didn't even exist yet.
The Spectrum clones longevity in Eastern Europe with new models appearing well into the 90's was remarkable, though, and certainly served to bridge a gap when Western computer company had largely ditched their lowest end 8-bit machines.
Your impression is wrong.
8 bit home computers were massive in the U.S. the main differences between the U.S. and Europe were:
. Europe was big into Acorn and Sinclair. In the U.S., Sinclair was an also-ran under the Timex brand, and was widely seen as a toy; Acorn was unknown.
. Tape drives were more common in Europe, while U.S. consumers almost always had a disk drive or both.
IBM becoming big in the home computer space didn’t happen until the 8-bit Commodore and early Apple machines were already long in the tooth. When it came time for people who owned Commodore 64’s and TI99/4A’s to upgrade, the choices were often Amiga, Mac, or IBM.
IBM was an easy decision for many because they were familiar with the machines from work, and because the notion of doing more office-like things at home was becoming popular. It was about this time that the home “computer room” evolved into the “home office.”
Eastern Europe was either ZX Spectrum clones, or "domestic designs", mostly based on Z80 CPU clones, but also some 6502 based machines (e.g. an Apple II clone) in Bulgaria.
And in Britain and other european countries as well...
Growing up in Norway I never saw an Acorn machine in person until someone brought some RiscOS machine to a party in '92. One unfortunate kid in my class had a Spectrum. Other than that I rarely saw non-Commodore machines outside of computer stores until PCs started being common, though Atari STs did also gain a foothold.
Interestingly I also never saw an Apple machine in person until the Macintosh - the pre-Mac Apple machines were virtually unheard of in most of Europe.
Most UK accounts of the era at most mention the Apple II in passing among wider coverage of the "second tier" machines like Amstrad CPC, Dragon, and even Oric.
Apple II over its lifetime sold about as much as the ZX Spectrum did worldwide, but the vast majority of Apple II sales appears to have been in North America.
Huh. The word I learned for this room was the "study".
Library → Study → Den → Play room → Computer room → Home office
Though play room was sometimes a different space entirely, like in an attic. Den → Computer room came naturally because the computer enthusiasts were often men, for whom the den was intended.
Usually the only difference was the disk format, and in those cases you could often order the software on the disk type of your choice.
If you had a real outlier of a system, there were often equivalent packages written in BASIC or LISP or PASCAL that you could buy the source code for to run on your machine.
People today would laugh at the notion of paying $1,500 for an accounting program delivered in BASIC. But that’s how it was.
The clone market only happened thanks to the clean room reverse engineering done by Compaq, which prevented IBM to legally kill the clones.
They tried to do it later via the MCA architecture and PS/2 platform, but failed to do so.
They're referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr - a (very much failed) "home computer market" entry.
(The IBM PC is 1981, this article is 1983)
Even back then it was a niche compared to the Commodore vic-20/64.
I think the real loser from the that time frame wasn't TI, but Commodore who was in a market leading position, but ultimately lost to the PC and Mac.
I think properly forecasting market size and growing your inventory, surpluses, and work-in-progress properly while pouring extra engineering capacity into research and development is a delicate balancing act which we can all learn from.
It makes sense for Sony, Nintendo, and Amazon to sell their devices at a loss, making up for it later in selling digital games and books. The loss is an acceptable cost for a bigger distribution platform. But what reasons T.I. had to pursue the strategy without having any footprint in software? Can anyone help me understand this?
The VIC was somewhat out of phase with the rest of the computer industry at the time. It was more akin to being a step between CP/M machines and the full-on 1980’s home computer scene.
Amazingly, people are still producing new VIC 20 carts today. And the quality of the games is quite impressive.
Your question is clear in an abstract sense but AFAIK Nintendo has never sold a console at a loss even on launch day and Amazon tablet product sell for more than the profitable price of imported semi-legit Chinese tablets. A kindle fire hd 10 (which I'm considering getting to use as a big screen kindle appliance) is well over $100 from amazon and a seemingly identical NeuTab is $70, so Amazon is likely making about $50 off each kindle. Sony does sell at a loss which makes them go insane over unlicensed homebrew software displacing their profitable software.
Personal computer prices were in a meteoric decent just a few years prior radio shack had a catalog of them starting well over $3,000.
Then, we did have a lot better software on the C64 such as logo and indeed many games, and all of the hardware capabilities were far superior such as the graphics and sound. The TI had an ASCII display only… I don’t even think it had CGA, which is far inferior to the Commodore and all the PC world had to offer for years. Even EGA was not as good as the Commodore (one year my friend got a PCjr for Christmas...). It wasn’t until the PS/2 came out that I was excited about having a PC.
I can't cite the correct reference, but it's something along the lines that when the masses do more of one thing than the other, something will suffer bad.
TV is non-interactive, smartphones allow a great deal of interactivity.
Besides, I don't think watching a fair amount of TV is a bad thing in the first place. It's a creative medium, you're consuming art (okay, maybe a lot of it isn't very good, but it's art nonetheless).
I think you might just be nostalgic.
Yes, a lot of people watched too much TV, but at least they had the capability of doing things like image editing, building spreadsheets, etc. Smartphones can do those things, but it's so awkward that it's more likely that you're not going to bother, so you're more likely to just consume content instead of create it if you don't own a desktop or a laptop.
Personally, I'm not really nostalgic over traditional computers, but I am a little nostalgic for stuff created by hand instead of filled in with a template.
That's an interesting word choice and something tells me "productivity" is highly subjective.
For example, can you code on a smartphone? Yeah, but not as productively as on a desktop.
Can I manage my sales team's day to day from my smart phone? Absolutely and that might be a great choice as managing sales probably doesn't lend to being in one place for very long.
Definition of “creative” seems narrow here.
Mobile devices do have some negative consequences, sure, but they also enable engagement, contribution, self improvement and creativity. My kids watch a lot of YouTube, but also use their iPads to do homework and sketch and draw.
These are fantastic tools. How we use them is up to us.
The first is that those old systems were so limited you could either write BASIC or machine code. There were no distractions, no other apps, and no social media - except paper magazines. So 100% of your computer time was devoted to typing in code, learning about code, or writing your own code.
The other reason is that in the UK at least, a lot of one-man-shops produced an entire games industry around the Sinclair (Timex) Z81, Spectrum, and other 8-bits of the day.
The business had all of the magic characteristics of an open market: minimal cost of entry, minimal cost of marketing (through cheap ads in paper magazines), low-cost distribution, and an enthusiastic and largely untapped potential customer base.
No platform today has those characteristics. Web "apps" probably come closest, which is why we're talking about this on HN. But a lot of 8-bit businesses and careers were started without the corporate and financial cruft that surrounds modern start-ups.
Coding on the machines themselves was more of an indie kind of thing.
Plenty of stories about it on the Retro Gaming Magazine.
Most of my friends back on the 8 bit days never learned to code anything beyond LOAD "", as they had plenty of games to choose from at the local bootleg shop.
I see my kid today, he is absolutely hooked to videogames. Minecraft and Fornite, they are already richer in variety than all of the games of my childhood combined!
He does some stuff on scratch and loves it so I tried python with the super simple 2d game engines... This has been a repeated failure. He has 0 patience left to try out stuff, learn the syntax or tinker with it.
But I understand, it is really easy to get instant satisfaction from the baked in stuff, oh look a new challenge to do on fornite!
I still got into programming as a kid & have been doing it for a living since I was 18. And I had plenty of friends (most!) who just wanted to play the games, as well as those that got into programming to make their own.
I’m curious about people who learned to program as children. I was an intensely curious kid too, and would quite happily dig around the Windows 3.1 OS hoping to uncover something cool. All I really got out of it was a knowledge of the computer’s file system, though.
In my early teens I had access to the internet, and managed to find a C++ tutorial online. I learned to print text to the command line, but not much more than that.
It took until my late 20s that I finally had the resources and mental stamina to start learning it for real.
We also had Logo classes at primary school but I never "got" that you can actually program with logo, it seemed like a silly drawing program to me at the time.
I had to recompile the programs to hard code the security dongles key into it.
We do not have that capability with the iDevices. Nor do we really have it with workstation devices (except of course Linux). Manufacturers don't consider it important to breed a generation of users who can be developers with little more than the initial shipment of software - instead the base has been split, such that more profit can be gained, and more control over an elite market, can be applied.
Developers are the tip of the spear for OS vendors. There is a great deal of control over this end of things, for no reason other than to make it possible to have a separated distinction between developer and user. I believe this distinction is having a net deleterious effect on computing ..
I first got interested in computers and eventually programming by playing with custom ROMs for my Windows Mobile phone when I was in college, circa 2006. If it wasn't for smartphones, I never would have taken a networking class (I was a radio/TV major) and realized I was very interested in what I could make a computer do (I'm a software engineer now).
I think that the kids-these-days who aren't hacking their smartphones are the same kind of people who didn't do much more than watch TV in years past.
https://archive.org/details/commodoreamigamanuals
Glorious.
Sure, most kids who had an Amiga didn't get that deeply into it, e.g. a friend of mine who also had an Amiga never seems to use his computer for much more than playing games and watching movies to this day. But for anyone interested to dive deeper, the doors were wide open and and as encouraging and honest to newbies as humanly possible. Even my non-technical kid friends knew how to load up a neat module in protracker. None of that focus on quality and openness for the sake of quality and doing the right thing was to the detriment of the "casuals", and a polar opposite of a world of stuff like miniminzed JS that does nothing interesting, smartphone apps that half-ass what a website could do, games that just rehash and dumb down the same shit to keep people consuming.
The shift from tools and variety to mere consuming and fads is rather crass, come to think about it.
True. But most people never took the TV to the toilet with them. Yes, It's the same type of person. But today there's no norms to discourage usage (e.g., most people didn't watch TV at work) and thus ever less self-regulation.
Note: I'm not longing for the good ol' days. Just wanting to add some clarity to the comparison.
Well, that would have avoided those everybody-flushing-during-breaks troubles said to have existed in TV's golden days ...
Smartphones are for consumers of information. Computers are (were?) for creation of information.