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Comment by bluedino | Hacker News Reader

The early 1980's were an amazing (yet strange) time in computing.

On one hand you have these $10,000 UNIX workstations that almost seem futuristic.

Then you have the IBM PC for 1/4 the price. 16-bit CPU, DOS, enough memory to be usable.

And at the bottom for 1/4 of that price, you had the Commodore 64. Minimal memory and storage, 8 bit CPU, almost a game console on steroids.

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Agreed. In my mind, the M1 Mac I'm typing this on is a direct descendent of the NeXT workstation that launched while I was still a student with no hope of ever owning. As much as I love the progress, it does make me wonder where/how the next true breakthrough will come from, or will we just continue to evolve what we have for another few decades?

And with C/64 there as also some business application (Geos, VisiCalc...).

The 8BitGuy noted usually business computers have 80-columns, whereas "home" compueters 40-colums.

Neverless C/64 could run a small database for a 'VHS Store' without troubles (I made it in basic... :)

The 40 columns limit derives ultimately from most video output in home computers being low-quality RF to a TV screen. You can try to output 80-column text to a TV, but you'll get tons of arfifacts that make it barely usable. Especially if you also insist on color output.

You forgot the Amiga and the Atari, in between, except the Amiga was superior to the IBM PC at a much cheaper price.

You both forgot the Apple II, which did all that stuff much earlier. Any history that writes out Woz is missing the point. Fundamentally the Atari 800 was an attempt to make a better Apple and target it at the home market. The C64 was a better Atari and won the fight. But the paradigm for how both those systems work was settled in the summer of 1978 when the Disk II shipped. That was four and a half years before the Commodore reached market. (Four and a half years after the C64 release we could buy 32 bit PCs and Macs. It's a long, long time in this context.)

Plus the Apple //e (January 1993) had 80 columns and lower case, which coupled with the disk drive made it useful for business. But I guess the IBM PC (August, 1991) already had all that by then (and the Apple ///, November 1990).

Actually 80 column cards[1] were a pretty routine thing in II+ machines from early 1980 on. Those and the Microsoft Z80 CP/M card were more or less the standard "business computer" until the IBM arrived. These got you full ASCII and lower case support, and ran things like WordStar and VisiCalc as well as anything on the market.

It wasn't until 83 or 84 that the XT/AT "lots of memory and hard drive as standard" configuration drove DOS software (c.f. Wordperfect, Lotus, Turbo Pascal) farther than the IIe could reach. The Apple spent an absolutely shocking amount of time as "the best computer to buy" for a working professional. It really was way ahead of its time.

[1] The Videx Videoterm was most popular, but there were many clones. These were all based on the MC6845 controller with their own framebuffer RAM. In essence they were mostly identical to the IBM MDA card, though without the special character attributes and high-bit graphics characters.

I didn't mention a lot of computers

There was a lot of other stuff going on that wasn’t microcomputing.

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