Why did the home computer die out?

[MaDDuck]

Opps!

 

Double post.

Edited July 1, 2007 by MaDDuck

[MaDDuck]

You want to know what killed the Home Computer market?

 

Two words:

Jack

and

Tramiel

 

He started and then killed Commodore, and cheapened Atari.

 

I believe he was the focal point of the entire thing.

 

He IS the grassy knoll!

 

Explain this, please. Exactly how did Tramiel kill Commodore? Did he sneak back into Commodore head offices and blow up the blueprints and chipsets for the C65 in 1992? Did he engineer Commodore's ill-thought out foray into console gaming? Was he the mind behind Commodore's "business line" of PC clones? He's certainly not my favourite computer pioneer, but I just don't get the hate for him.

 

 

Sorry it took so long to reply!

 

The way he killed Commodore was (and I may misspell the names! And I had a lot more active brain cells at the time so I may miss it a bit, but this is as close as I remember!) was letting Mehdi Ali (the CFO is memory serves) run the thing when he left. Irving Gould had a successor lined up to fill Jacks shoes, his name escapes me, but when Jack left, he played his final trump card and put Ali in charge! He once said Commodore makes the most money making cheap calculators! great attitude, I'll butter you up and squirt you through the board of directors and put you in charg=e on my way out.

 

I believe the only good he did was:

1. survived the Holocaust.

2. the settlement with MOS technologies that streamlined chip design and production, without it, there would be no SID!

3. Bought a stagnant Atari and did as much good as he did bad for it.

4. Eventually released the 7800, but blew just about everything else with it.

5. Gave a priceless quote about the Playstation. When Sony announced a price drop, he said that it was dumping and that's illegal! How about be competitive and make a product people actually want instead of crying to your Uncle Sam about it?

 

Anyway, enough of the rant!

 

In this day and age, we have our Ballmers, and Jobs, and Nintendoes to wow us. The Tramiel generation and way of doing business is thankfully gone! I miss that age, but honestly, I love my iPhone and wouldn't trade my wii or Mac mini in for anything! I love my video game consoles from the 5200 to the Neo Geo, 360, and wii. Heck I even still have a Pippin. All of those were not created in a vacuum! The market has evolved. With few exceptions, there are no villains! I have no love for the Tramiels, and Trip Hawkins has more than outlived his usefullness!

 

It's a brave new world!

[jbanes]

The way he killed Commodore was (and I may misspell the names! And I had a lot more active brain cells at the time so I may miss it a bit, but this is as close as I remember!) was letting Mehdi Ali (the CFO is memory serves) run the thing when he left.

That sounds like Jack. He always had a trump card in place. Especially when he was off to start a competitor.

[Curt Vendel]

Most non-pc based computer companies died out due to PC proliferation. The death knell truly was Windows as it finally made PC's easier, with task switching and other features.

 

Atari

Amiga

and dozens of other PC companies just couldn't compete with PC's as they were in the mainstream business environments and people wanted the same systems at home to continue work and productivity.

 

Look at Apple and its near-demise in the 90's, with a convoluted line of overlapping products, an aging OS and indecisive management Big Red nearly kicked the bucket too.

 

Its the same in the networking field, look in the 80's you have Novell, Banyan, Lantastic, 3COM 3plus Open, StarLAN, Microsoft, Unix, and a few others. Windows and Unix (thanks to Linux) became the dominate players, Novell - the king of networking is no relegated to a back corner in the networking field due to Windows 98 and Windows NT creating a massive blow against the need for File/Print services and gateways, as NT just destroyed Novells place in the industry and Linux helped to put the nail into the coffin on them.

 

Its a real shame, as you look at each computer system and see some truly unique and advantageous features inherent in each design of hardware and software, all of which hit partial or full deadends and are not scene in todays PC's.

 

It would be interesting to have seen how say the Atari 8bit line may have evolved, but honestly it did evolve, the Amiga is all based on the design aspects of the 400/800 as the Amiga was the brainchild of the architect of the Atari 400/800 chipset.

 

So to see the Amiga to have continued to evolve into today, we can see glimmers of that in the AmigaOS and also when looking at the Coldfire ST's and other modernized versions of the ST with updated TOS compatible desktops we can still see a glimmer of the might've been's of the ST line as well.

 

 

Curt

 

 

 

Well, the obvious answer is Windows. It's standardized the industry to such a degree that one computer is exactly like the next. You're literally just paying for a brand name, rather than any clear distinctions. It's a mixed blessing to be sure, but I think the industry was bound to head in that direction, if only for the convenience of the average computer user.

 

I just wish that it had been the Amiga that had come out on top in the hardware wars of the 1980's. The x86 PC was always a lackluster gaming computer, having been designed for home office applications, and it's only recently caught up to its competitors in performance. As early as ten years ago, Amigas were still the way to go for video editing.

 

JR

[AtticGamer]

Because Sinclair and Commodore fell down due to mistakes (C5 and CD32) and the rise of Windows and its DOS.

 

If Commodore stayed, they could compete with MS and have a modern OS.

Edited July 9, 2007 by Atari_kid

[mos6507]

I also think that operating systems matter less and less now than they used to because people tend to use computers more as just a way of running a web-browser. Anything that can run full-blown firefox is a viable OS, pretty much. If you don't play games the only non-internet stuff you'll probably do is play media files and run a word processor. It's in areas like content creation (digital audio workstations, image manipulation, cgi, video editing) that operating systems matter the most because these are heavy-lifting applications that can never be substituted by a web app.

[Shannon]

One thing I have not really seen anyone mention outside of multi-tasking). Which the Amiga did do btw, as well as linux.

 

But other important things that windows brought (and I'm mostly referring to 98 cause WFWG had some issues) was a standard interface where apps could.... Share data (cut -n- paste), print to any printer (universal printer drivers), share fonts (before that I think there were like two different font standards), screen drivers for drawing to the screen. For games you had directX which provided sound control as well as an interface for certain graphic functions and access to gaming devices (like joysticks).

 

Actually the networking/novell thing was already covered by Curt. Then there is the internet explorer which was made a standard part of the operating system.

 

The amiga didn't have alot of that until kickstart/wb 2.0. The Atari ST never really got there. I suppose the mac may have had a fair amount of that already but no-one really seemed to care.

[Bill Brasky]

Those old 8 bit computers died out because you can't do shit with them in terms of programming unless you're a master of assembly. Assembly is too hard for the average person. People realized BASIC is near useless for doing the kind of things they wanted.

[mos6507]

Those old 8 bit computers died out because you can't do shit with them in terms of programming unless you're a master of assembly. Assembly is too hard for the average person. People realized BASIC is near useless for doing the kind of things they wanted.

 

That might be true--for developers. But by the time 8-bit machines died out, the average user was doing the kinds of things they wanted by BUYING commercial software, not writing it themselves.

[mos6507]

For games you had directX which provided sound control as well as an interface for certain graphic functions and access to gaming devices (like joysticks).

 

It took an excrutiatingly long time before DirectX arrived onto the scene and games switched over to use it. I don't think it came out until around the Windows98 era. Some of the oldest games I have that still run on XP were some of the earliest DirectX stuff (like Atari Arcade Classics which came out around 1999). For a long while after Windows came out games were still accessing graphics via direct DOS calls, tons of 16-bit legacy. I don't care what anyone says, the PC was not a great game architecture for a long-long time. You had to have just the right graphics card and audio card and tweak your settings almost like a Linux user has to do today. The PC got a lot of games for it because of its ubiquitousness and the fact that PC users at that time were geeky enough to put up with all that. Today the average computer user doesn't have close to as much patience, which is a big reason why PC gaming has declined in favor of consoles.

[Shannon]

Yeah... that's why I said "and I'm mostly referring to 98" as in Windows 98.

 

I know what you mean by configuration hassles. That is another thing that windows killed, although there was a long period where if you wanted the best 3d performance in windows you were best of getting a voodoo card.

 

If some people only knew the configuration nightmares PC's were for a looooong time. Despite this, as you said, it received many games.

Edited July 10, 2007 by Shannon

[carmel_andrews]

The 'home computer' did not die, the companies behind them did

 

bad marketing and decision making killed the companies as well as a lack of vision and investment in the products and technology that they were developing/manufacturing and selling

 

After all, these days on a 800xl/130xe and c64/128, you can moddy it with 3.5 and 2.5 inch pc/lt hard disks, high density (1.4meg) floppies, high speedy mass storage devises (i.e Zip/Jazz/CF and USB Mem sticks etc), CD and DVD writers and Drives, stick upwards of 1-4meg bank switched memory internally, Gui based o/s's like GOE/GOS/Diamond and GEOS (if your'e a c64 user) and going by recent developments esp. on the A8 front like turbo 816 (or super cpu is your'e a c64 user), upgraded sound/gfx hardware like videoboard xe amonst others including the so called 'secret' hardware project Kjmann (from the a8 forum) is working on...and you got something that is fairly similar to a PC

 

If hardware manufacturers and developers did then what freelance developers and 3rd party enthusiasts are doing now the computer and videogame market place would be vastly more competitive...as well as offering REAL CHOICE

[kisrael]

I also think that operating systems matter less and less now than they used to because people tend to use computers more as just a way of running a web-browser. Anything that can run full-blown firefox is a viable OS, pretty much. If you don't play games the only non-internet stuff you'll probably do is play media files and run a word processor.

Very big agreement here.

 

But other important things that windows brought (and I'm mostly referring to 98 cause WFWG had some issues) was a standard interface where apps could.... Share data (cut -n- paste), print to any printer (universal printer drivers), share fonts (before that I think there were like two different font standards), screen drivers for drawing to the screen. .

Well, Mac did a lot of this obviously, but for the PC side you're right on. I was so blown away when I realized what the clipboard was doing. Another thing they brought was standardized, across-app keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl-c/x/v, alt-f4 (which is kind of odd), and using alt- kbd accelerators for menus.

 

At the risk of going off on a tangent, I think Win95 got a ton of things right, UI-wise, with the dual taskbar/startbutton setup. For my money it's much more how people think, in terms of seperate tasks, not seperate apps, than say Mac's Dock.

[Retro Rogue]

Most non-pc based computer companies died out due to PC proliferation.

 

 

I think that's the main argument I have with the original topic. The home computer did not die out, everybody here is using one right now to read this. What did die out more specifically was the non-PC compat based pc (personal computer) market, with its sole survivor being Apple.

 

That's another humorous gripe I have as well though - the use of "PC". Unfortunately to the modern (unknowing public) there's two useages of this: 1) The shortened slang to refer to IBM-PC and compatibles, and 2) The original meaning (and what the PC in IBM-PC means), Personal Computer. There's a lot of people out there who actually don't understand this, you'd be surprised. I was talking to some teen twit the other day trying to help them when I asked what type of pc (personal computer) they have.

 

"Oh, I don't have a pc, I have a mac."

 

No, pc as in personal computer. So your pc is a Mac....

 

*dumbfounded look* "No, I don't have a pc, I have a Mac"

 

 

Of course, even then pc (personal computer) is a marketing term developed during the initial push of microcomputers (the original name) in to the home and office markets. Just like "home computer".

Edited July 14, 2007 by wgungfu

[kisrael]

That's another humorous gripe I have as well though - the use of "PC". Unfortunately to the modern (unknowing public) there's two useages of this: 1) The shortened slang to refer to IBM-PC and compatibles, and 2) The original meaning (and what the PC in IBM-PC means), Personal Computer. There's a lot of people out there who actually don't understand this, you'd be surprised. I was talking to some teen twit the other day trying to help them when I asked what type of pc (personal computer) they have.

 

"Oh, I don't have a pc, I have a mac."

 

No, pc as in personal computer. So your pc is a Mac....

 

*dumbfounded look* "No, I don't have a pc, I have a Mac"

Well, "computer" is only one extra syllable (and I think most people will realize you're not talking about a mainframe), and these days "desktop" and "laptop" are more useful distinctions, so "PC vs Mac" is a completely reasonable use of terms.

 

I remember in fourth grade, 1984, or so, reading about the PC and thinking it was wrong, because the P was supposed to stand for "portable". So arguably, PC wasn't really strongly in use when IBM kind of grabbed the initials.