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Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

The Amiga in 1985 had amazing custom graphics and sound chips, a preemptive multitasking OS, double the RAM of the Mac 128k at 1/2 the price (Mac 128 MSRP is $6000 in 2018 dollars)

It’s really sad how much public hagiography is made over the Mac when almost no middle class family I knew of could afford it, certainly not with a LaserWriter.

The Commodore 64 was way more affordable and got a legion of kids interested in computing and coding, who later went on to adopt Amigas.

Even today if you look at the home brew, hacker, and demo scenes, Commodore dominates. Hardly anyone is doing stuff on old Apple 2s or Macs.

Commodore gets the short shrift in the Twitterati retelling of the personal computer evolution, and today’s millennials completely fixated on Jobs and Apple and ignore most of what was really happening in the 80s with home users.

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> how much public hagiography is made over the Mac when almost no middle class family I knew of could afford it,

Part of the late '80s/early '90s revenue strategy for Apple was to sell into the educational market. The people who fondly remember the Apple computers of this period do so not because they had one at home, but because many of them were young children at this time, playing games on those Apples in school computer labs.

We had an Apple II in the classroom, we were allowed to play with it in pairs for maybe an hour every fortnight.

Our teacher had almost no idea how it worked and there was no manual or instructions, so basically we sat in front of that green screen confused. I managed to make a star in logo, that was about it.

I still loved playing with it anyway, this machine that you had control of through arcane commands. It felt like you could make it do anything if you only knew the magic command.

That might have been the case in US, but Apple was nowhere to be seen around most of the rest of the world.

So the "Twitterati retelling" critic still applies.

Well before there were Twitterati, the Silicon Valley glitterati fell in love with the Mac as a concept: a computer designed from the ground up to be easy to use, present a single, consistent interface, and be an appliance with minimal cognitive engagement from the user. Like a Yoko Ono piece, the vision was the product -- even if the actual hardware was lacking and expensive. And in the Mac conceptual world of the time, generating interest in computers and programming was seen as an anti-feature. You shouldn't have to be interested in those things to leverage the full power of the Mac, and if large numbers of people were getting interested in those things, the wrong things were being optimized for. Programming is just a job, and computers are just a tool to enable you to do your real work. Such was the thinking of the day.

The Amiga was an entirely different class of machine, designed by and for engineers, and it was a bit rougher around the edges UI-wise but it did far more in terms of real, concrete advancements in the state of the art.

For early '90's, there was nothing rough around the edges of AmigaOS 3.1. It was a fast, elegant and highly extensible operating system via DataTypes and shared libraries.

AmigaOS was tremendously powerful, but Macintosh System (as it was called then) had much more UI polish and could be operated with one mouse button (this was important!). The official programmer's reference manual, Inside Macintosh, contained strict rules for how an application should look and behave. By contrast, on the Amiga, some great UI frameworks existed but they looked rougher and a lot of people seemed to roll their own UI and play by their own rules anyway. To me this was part of the Amiga charm, but it was inimical to the vision of computing Apple was selling.

I didn't realize just how weak the Mac APIs were for building actual applications until I tried writing one. You NEED a framework like PowerPlant in order to contend with the very primitive primitives Apple supplied. And even then, you don't get nice things like preemptive MT.

Applications on the Amiga all had different interfaces because intuition.library had infinite possibilities since it only implemented graphic primitives on top of graphics.library.

I'm an Apple guy now but I will never get used to a one button mouse - it's too retarded, especially when one comes from UNIX where three buttons are simply phenomenally super awesomely useful: I love the mark with the mouse and paste with the middle mouse button - it's the best. I cannot figure out why others haven't implemented that - it's so natural and intuitive - I love that I don't have to explicitly cut and paste - marking is enough.

Apple ][ was the school computer and the upper middle class computer. Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, Radio Shack and TI (when the TI-99/4A went on sale) were the computers that introduce computing to a whole generation of families without the income to afford Apple. Its telling that both Atari and Commodore sold more computers than Apple for a lot of years.

Its a shame that both Commodore and Atari forgot what their niche was.

You nailed the description. At my school they had one Apple ][ and this infuriating rule that only kids who had an Apple computer at home could use it. Us poor kids had to use TRS-80 model 3s. I carried an anti-Apple grudge for years and years because of that policy.

That is really a horrible policy. What were they thinking?

The kids not familiar with it would mess it up?

I mean good? I learned a lot by messing up stuff. School is a great place to make plenty of mistakes.

But they are expensive and the teachers didn't know how to fix them. At my school it was a similar setup, getting access to the computer lab was guarded like the crown jewels and the one guy who could program never said a word to me. I got a 486 the year after and at that point couldn't care less about the old boxes we had to school. Pity they didn't even brush on programming, it was all word processing making and bad computer art (easy to mark, the winner got to print theirs out in colour!).

Especially on those machines: You could simply press the reset button and it would go back to a pristine state. There was no hard drive or other state that persisted across reboots.

The worst you could possibly do was destroy a program stored on disk or a cassette.

At my UK state school in the 80s, they had a similar policy for musical instruments. They only gave music lessons to those that already were having private lessons (!)

UK is a very class based society. You must stick to your class.

I get the feeling my school age self would have been filled with a bit of rage at the teacher and the students who got to use the Apple computers. The TRS-80 Model 3 wasn't bad, but it wasn't exactly the funnest machine.

Well, I would guess that would teach a lesson, but probably not the one they wanted.

I'm also saddened when people omit the mention of the Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX Spectrum, another affordable little wonder that was responsible for bringing the other half of the world into computing. :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum

My first computer, and something that is often referenced in the UK, or amongst people of the right kind of age.

The Spectrum was insanely popular, though the development of a new machine also coincided with difficult times. (The Sam Coupe.)

Sam Coupe was a technical marvel, pity it had some issues with the first models and it was already at the end of the 8 bit generation.

That's because the ZX Sinclair Spectrum's only claim to fame is the rock bottom cheap pricing: it did not have any revolutionary hardware or operating system like the Amiga. It couldn't do things competition wasn't capable of. The only thing Spectrum competed on was price.

Keep in mind that the Amiga in 1985 was hard to get, due to production problems.

Reading the specs doesn’t give you much of a story. As the article talks, around 1986, software availability became the prime driver of platform sales. That meant taking a different approach to designing hardware. It takes a long time to figure out how to work with custom chips well, which is why the Amiga is still popular in the demoscene, but also a contributing factor for why there was not as much software available when it came out.

Macs and PCs are pretty boring by comparison. A CPU, some memory, interrupt controllers. But they had software. Macs had educational discounts back then (and still do, but not quite as dramatic).

I actually had a hand-me-down C64 as a kid, so I couldn't agree more. It's a bit bizarre; the C64 and Apple II were around at about the same time, but the C64 had more of, well, everything, for a cheaper price. It sort of baffles the mind to me that Apple even stood a chance to them.

The Apple II came out 5 years earlier, an eternity in tech-time.

Ah, looks like you're right. I knew I should have looked it up before I made that comment. My bad!

You aren't wrong, though the Apple ][ came out earlier, it had an extremely long lifespan, and coexisted with the C64 for many years. I remember playground debates about which was better.

Really I guess that the Apple ][ was a platform rather than just a single machine.

So you've got the original Apple ][ which a C64 would have been a much better machine than with the benefit of 5 years and super aggressive cost cutting. However you've also got the Apple iigs in that family.

I think I'd see that as a much better machine than the C64 (but obviously much more expensive too).

Eh, your memory isn't as wrong as you may think. The C=64 was released during the Apple II+/Apple IIe era, and frankly, both of those machines were barely improvements. To give you an idea, the biggest improvement offered by the IIe was... support for lower-case characters.

The Commodores genuinely were something special for the era.

> Commodore gets the short shrift in the Twitterati retelling of the personal computer evolution

Isn't that just because they had no actual impact on the industry? The Apple II was first as a mass consumer microcomputer (they even showed a prototype to it to Commodore years before the PET, when Tramiel still thought calculators were the thing). The Mac inspired every popular GUI that came after it (they all look more like the Mac than Xerox).

You could say that Commodore inspired a generation since they were so cheap and everyone had one, but you could also say that about Dell and Gateway 2000. The Amiga had amazing hardware, but so did the Sharp X68000 - still the whole concept of proprietary chips that software had to be written exclusively for has never had a long-lasting impact on the PC space.

Of the PCs and smartphones we're using today - how much of it can be traced to Commodore? The price? The method of vertical integration maybe?

As Apple fans like to say, being first isn’t always important is it? The Apple 2 may have been first, but the Commodore 64 was both more affordable, and more widely adopted.

Apple computers weren’t Personal Computers because precious few people owned them at Home, they were time share systems you got to use at school labs or the office.

What impact did Commodore have? An entire generation of engineers who went on to work on graphics software and hardware you use today were hacking C64s and Amigas as kids.

Do you think Linus Torvalds got started on Commodore hardware or Apple? You can directly trace a lot of the modern hacker ethos of the internet to the kids who grew up in the 80s on non-Apple hardware.

If you want to credit long lasting inventions that are part of software and hardware today, you can look at Alan Kay, and thank him for Smalltalk (which Brad Cox based Objective-C on)

Or you can look at Kerrigan/Richie/Pike.

Much of what makes modern PCs and smartphones what they are is invisible. There would be no iPhone without them no matter how important and revolutionary you think capacitive touch interfaces are, they stand at the top of a deep deep pyramid of inventions and innovations that did not come from Apple, and annoyingly, often isn’t credited by the historical retelling and hagiography.

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