Hacker News Reader

Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

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. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com