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This was the time of the Turbo-button. Programs were made for 4.77 MHz IBM PC, so you had to slowdown the 30 MHz by default. The Turbo speed was mostly useless, and so it seemed to be the ultimate end of computer development.

Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix.

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> Achually for 10 years nothing exciting happened. Until maybe 1992 when you could install your very own Unix.

What was happening in the span 1982-1992 was that everything imaginable was coming out as a peripheral for the IBM PC. It wasn't just stuff like disks and printers and graphics cards. Month after month you'd see something new, and realize "Yeah, I guess you could do that as a computer peripheral", but it would be something that you never dreamed of that way before.

And all that stuff enabled a ton of software. It was an explosion of new capabilities.

Its crazy to me that a tech forum poster would consider the incredibly innovative years of 1982-1992 as nothing because his preferred OS didn't exist yet.

1982: Commodore 64

1983: Apple //e

1984: Macintosh

1985: Amiga

1986: 386-based PCs

1987: Hypercard and Acorn Archimedes

1988: NeXT cube

1989: 486 released. Deep Thought defeats its first master, WorldWideWeb released

1990: Power Processor, Gopher, EFF founded

1991: PGP, AM386, Python

and that ignores the incredible BBS and shareware scene that blossomed at that time. A lot was going on in the mid to late 80s in the PC world.

It was a different time, when most of those new things came out, they were more expensive than whatever proceeded them (in a sense). Individuals weren't buying $10,000 Macintoshes, $20,000 NeXTCubes, and $30,000 UNIX/RISC workstations. My communist professor was bragging his SPARCstation was more expensive than a Mercedes!

The low-end got cheaper only very slowly. In 1990 you could go into a computer store and drop a couple grand on a slightly better version of a PC-XT or original Mac, ancient tech at that point.

This all changed very fast in the early 90s with 386/486 and Windows got cheap fast and crashed into the consumer market. Most of the above died or almost died in the process.

Home computers in the eighties weren't that expensive. That was the whole point – you could actually have a computer in your home now. Kids got them for Christmas.

Yes and no. "Computers are the future", so middle class parents felt like they HAD to buy their kids a cheap Commodore or something. I think 80% of them ended up in the closet, most of them were used like game consoles and maybe 1% of them created assembly language programmers. I know successful engineering people who had no interest in atari/commodore video game stuff.

Meanwhile, college students needed real work computers which were still quite expensive then. PC-XT/Mac Plus computers were not cheap in the late 1980s.

I remember looking longingly at thick color catalogs of computers I could never afford.

Like $4999 for a mid-priced Wang PC compatible. In the 1980s.

A lot of money back then. An unimaginable amount for a poor, inner-city kid growing up during that time.

It convinced my parent to buy a C64, as they must have felt sorry for me.

So like today

Do the math. They really were that expensive in today's money. Of course you had cheaper alternatives for the home like the C64 and even more so the ZX Spectrum, but that flimsy toy would still set you back several hundred dollars in inflation-adjusted prices.

Amiga was £399 in 1989 in the UK, which is about £1000 in today's money. I expect they were cheaper in the US, but £1000 is fairly reasonable for a computer.

Good deal from a company obviously swirling around the bowl who sold computers through the mall ninja store. Great games! Meanwhile, their university presence was just about nil.

If you weren't a gamer, you probably didn't know Amiga existed.

For some reason (perhaps affordability?), Amigas were much bigger in Europe than in the US.

IMHO you knew, but you scoffed that it couldn't do serious computing like an IBM. It could only handle games.

Some didn't realise that games are pretty taxing on the hardware, but I need to let that go, it's been three decades now. :)

And even a bit earlier, 1977 was the year of the "holy trinity" of early home computers -- the initial Apple II, the TRS-80 Model I, and the Commodore Pet. There were even earlier machines, like the Altair, but those were generally sold as kits and assumed knowledge of electronics, but the 1977 machines were consumer products that you could just buy and use.

I would add the AtariST to your list. It could use workstation compilers and had a flat address space, you could port software to it a lot easier than to a pre-386 PC.

Back in '87, we're talking 386 territory for cutting edge compute, so I think we were limited to 25Mhz. As has been pointed out, those machines were expensive.

Pulling out an old PC World magazine from '89 I see that a 386/25Mhz based IBM PS2 was selling for over £4k, and that was with a mono screen. More typical home machines were the clones, like Amstrads which were typically 512k 286/10Mhz machines were either dual 5 1/4 floppy or if you really rolled out the boat, a floppy/hd combo.

I stuck to home computers rather than business machines due to the prohibitive expense of the above, and only saw decent machines which would in any way reflect modern computers when I got to university in '89. When you've been struggling with an Amiga with a floppy drive, a room full of Sun 3s was a thing of wonder!

30MHz in 1987? Not many people had such luxury. My family bought a ~12MHz 286 brand new in ~1992, and our 25MHz 486 was still years away (but yes, they had turbo buttons, and the 486 even had an LCD display showing the current frequency).

I always wondered why the desktop revolution didn't really take off until the 90s after seeing that the Mac was released in the early 80s.

Windows for Workgroups/NT.

Cheap IBM PC clones running pirated videogames on Windows sparked the "real" boom of PCs in homes. Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake etc.

Some of that code is till being parroted by Copilot!

https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1410886329924194309

In 1988 I watched when they tried to use the Smalltalk environment with its windowing system in software production. It was very robust and well for a week, but then it just choked up. Not enough memory and virtual too slow.

In 1988 I developed a production planning / scheduling tool with Smalltalk/V 286 on a PC/AT with 1MB of extended memory.

iirc Still being used on a daily basis, 5 years later.

http://sdmeta.gforge.inria.fr/FreeBooks/SmalltalkVTutorial/S...

https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA25&lpg=P...

One reason was the rise of the Internet. While there were a lot of neat things you could do with a personal computer, it wasn’t until you could connect easily to others that it really became fun and useful for most people.

I got my first computer, a Mac, in 1986. That was exciting for me, but I really felt that the revolution had happened when I got a modem in 1992 and connected first to a local BBS and then, a couple of years later, to the Internet itself.

Yes, before that the only reason normal people bought a computer was to run Quicken.

The Mac was really, really expensive in the 80s.

For me it was Amigas instead of Macs but it seemed I could get another computer cheaper than I could a C compiler. Then there was this new BBS in town called "www" or something and it had this free C compiler ...

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