Reflections on the Home Computer Golden Age

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The traditional home computer market died when PCs became so powerful that they could do anything 'effortlessly', but became inaccessible to hobbyists due to their complexity and emphasis on commercial products. But the demand for a hobbyist computer is still there. Now could actually be the right time to re-release the classic home computer concept to an audience who has never experienced it.

PC was never home market as there was huge variety of expansions with no standard and at the same documentation for advanced functionality was close to zero.
In PC you could only consume work of others or try to do some things using generic knowledge but nothing more advanced...
That's why PC was not so popular choice for home hobbyists...

[lmimmfn]

PCs were relatively cheap in the US vs Europe in the 80's, its probably why cheaper home computers were prominent.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I think the continuity aspect is overstatated, because going from a 1985 DOS EGA 286 with memory managers and boot disks to a 1995 Win95 SVGA internet-ready Pentium with DirectX was nearly as big a jump in concept and usage style as going from Spectrum or C64 to Amiga or ST, and not that much bigger than A500 from floppies to A4000 with a big hard drive.

In a way Windows 95 was a much bigger jump than going from an A500 to an A4000. It opened up a whole new world of computer users who weren't 'computer literate' and never would be. It turned the PC into an appliance in the same way that gaming consoles did.

The Amiga did this many years before, though unfortunately not well enough to capture the market that Windows 95 did. When I got my A1000 I was surprised to find that some operations required use of the CLI. They did the right thing by hiding it by default though, and I figured that soon they would make it unnecessary. However this didn't happen. Instead they extended the CLI and forced you to use it even more.

This was backwards. I bought an Amiga to get away from having to learn archaic commands and wear my fingers down typing. I wasn't afraid of a CLI environment. But the Amiga was supposed to be the first of a new generation of home computers so powerful that you didn't have to pore over operating manuals before using it. It should have been so intuitive that I could teach my dad how to use it in 2 minutes.

Trouble was, Amiga OS wasn't designed by people who had an interest in bringing computing to the masses. It was designed by computer geeks putting in the stuff they wanted, and they never thought about why this was bad. To make matters worse the CLI was clunky and hard to use, without either a hard disk (yeah right) or two floppy drives.

Workbench was better than the CLI, but they still managed to screw it up. One of the first things they tell you to do in the manual is make backups of your system disks. So you open the system folder and there's a nice icon saying 'diskcopy'. You double-click on it, the drive whirs, and a message comes up saying I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. Why not? Oh I see - you have to select the disk you want to copy, then go to the Workbench menu and select 'copy disk'. And if the disk in question isn't the Workbench disk guess what - you have to swap disks twice to get started!

That's the kind of thing that puts non-computer literate people off. Commodore should have play-tested the Amiga on the people they hoped to sell it to, and tuned it until a random stranger who never used a computer before could say "This is so easy. I want one!".

Admittedly they got pretty close with Workbench 3.0, and even closer with 3.1. But by then it was too late. The Amiga was already losing what little market share it had. Most prospective computer buyers had never heard of it, and those who did knew it was just a fancy gaming console - the one role it managed to get right.

Going from an A500 to A4000 wasn't much of jump in 'concept and usage style'. It was about the same as going from Windows 95 to Windows 98, ie. the same familiar UI with a few more convenient features. So I would say going from the A500 to A4000 was a much smaller jump than DOS to Windows 95. Ironically of course, being late to the party turned in the PC's favor. While PC magazines were plastered with colorful screen shots and tutorials on how to use Windows 95, the Amiga's WB 3.1 was old hat and not worth going to press with. Not that PC magazines were going have anything about the Amiga in them anyway - even if Commodore hadn't gone bankrupt in 1994.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

PCs were relatively cheap in the US vs Europe in the 80's, its probably why cheaper home computers were prominent.

I don't think that PCs were that much cheaper in the US in the 80s. (Quick look on Wiki says the original 5150 model sold for 3000$ in the US and for 8500 DM in Germany. That's 1000 DM more expensive, but in relation to the price not that significant). I'd say the main difference was that in the 80s businesses in the US adopted computers much quicker and the IBM PC became the de-facto standard pretty quick.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by lmimmfn

PCs were relatively cheap in the US vs Europe in the 80's, its probably why cheaper home computers were prominent.

And? You could play games (bought or pirated? - honestly have no clue about PC home software market) or you could start coding - MS-DOS provided debug command (i recall my first x86 ASM prog to create border rasterbars by changing RAMDAC color 0 value - this will be something like banging $dff180 on Amiga) or some BASIC dialect - GWBASIC later turned to Quick BASIC - i recall that people if coded something then it was Turbo Pascal, rarely Turbo C and that's all - rather small programs... or commercial like financial stuff, some databases - definitely not home fun, nothing like demos or utilities - on PC practically nobody use assembler - quite opposite to Amiga.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by pandy71

on PC practically nobody use assembler - quite opposite to Amiga.

I'm so stumped by that patently false statement that I need to CTRL+ALT+DELETE my brain.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by gimbal

I'm so stumped by that patently false statement that I need to CTRL+ALT+DELETE my brain.

You don't understand. What he meant by 'practically nobody' is that practically only 'nobodies' programmed the PC in assembler.

And it's largely true if you are comparing the proportion of programs written in assembler vs high level languages, especially once the PC got faster and more sophisticated. OTOH the same goes for the Amiga too for everything but games, except not quite to the same extent.

I'm a diehard asm coder but I still baulked at writing a Win32 app in assembly language. I did write some small utilities for DOS in assembler (on my A3000 with PC Task). I also made a paint program for the IBM PCjr which was a mixture of BASIC and machine code. But in the PC world I was a nobody, so none of that counted.

[pandy71]

Originally Posted by gimbal

I'm so stumped by that patently false statement that I need to CTRL+ALT+DELETE my brain.

Nope, almost nobody represent average home use - most home users was consumers of software, more than people in Amiga. This is not general statement that PC developers didn't use asm as it was and it is still used. Most home users if developed something usually use some higher level language and rely on BIOS calls if forced to deal with HW.
Also it was plenty of HW where documentation was not so easily available - especially for graphic cards other than CGA, MDA, HGC, EGA and VGA.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by pandy71

Also it was plenty of HW where documentation was not so easily available - especially for graphic cards other than CGA, MDA, HGC, EGA and VGA.

Which other graphic cards do you mean?