When PC's were young...

[morelenmir]

I have been looking at PC assembler in a very superficial way just lately, but I found the work I have done on 6502 ASM helps me massively in understanding the base concepts. I especially see the things which the x86 introduced that were amazing improvements to the 6502 way of doing things. Not least data,code and stack segments along with a proper hardware stack. It suddenly struck me how much of a culture shock it must have been back in the mid eighties when the first 1/286's and so forth came on the scene. I wondered what you chaps thought who were more heavily involved in hardware modding and software programming than I was at the time?

 

Probably it seemed a bit distant as PC's were unthinkably expensive and focussed on business. Still it must have been a fascinating time. Did you mentally write-off the threat the PC posed to Atari or could you tell there was a new world opening up? I am particularly interested to know what programmers thought of the opportunities offered by the new 16bit hardware?

[atarian63]

totally discounted the boring old pc

[José Pereira]

I had the oportunity to buy my 1st P.C., that Schneider Euro P.C., that came with the drive and keyboard in same case.

Only thing I remember is that it came with a large book the same 'almost' the same size as the Bibble of its GW_Basic (very, very comprehensive with lots of things like its adresses,...).

It was just chips memory and some beeps, keyboard and the 3 1/2 drive.

All have to be 'booted' (there wasn't a hard-disc) so at some part I deciced to display "Hello, my name is José Pereira" after the DOS load but to have this I had to save my text in the DOS disc.

I wanted that it had constantly writing it all over the screen. Maybe it was disabled by pressing a key, I don't remember now and why but something around FOR/NEXT and return to top in a constant loop got me without way to do anything more on the computer.

On that time and no Web it taked me weeks untill I found someone that also had the same machine to get a copy of the DOS.

That when I thought: How great and simple to use Atari 800XL!

 

But was a nice machine because it had a Gfxs Mode other than the old Hercules that in a 'type of CGA' I think, I could load some EGA colour games like California Games, Speeball, Xenon,... that other low quality but higher price 'shit' IBM P.C. clones couldn't .

 

Just to share.

[Rybags]

6502 is actually more of a de-evolution rather than the other way around.

 

Mainframe vs small computers is a little like Indy/F1 vs road cars. New ideas and enhancements usually get introduced at the high end and work their way down.

 

The concepts that x86 evolved to embrace like storage protection, virtual memory, supervisor modes existed long before on enterprise class hardware, and even into the 1990s mainframes still had their "CPU" contained on a number of boards rather than single bit of silicon.

 

6502 from the onset was intended as a cheap clone alternative to the 6800 series - a $25 chip in times when much of the competition's offerings were $200+ And of course remembering that alone was more than a week's pay for lots of people.

 

68000 in a sense is an evolution of the 6502 (given that Motorola developed the particular architecture in the first place) and for a time was more advanced than the x86 series.

[morelenmir]

FASCINATING stuff guys!!! I wish I had been a bit more aware of these things as a child. I think I knew the PC existed, but it was so far over my head and pocket that it was almost a myth.

 

'Oh, that's a business machine.' said my father.

 

My uncle worked for IBM at Havant near Portsmouth - the huge (for the local area) tower with the weird air conditioning exhaust on top, in case anyone lives down there. However he was in charge of mainframe education and teaching new employees and clients hoe to use their new installations. To him the PC was an amusing novelty, nothing to be taken seriously. He liked his games on the Atari, especially the boulderdashes! He had a lot of friend in the Atari hacker/cracker scene and they all though of the PC more as a word processor than a real computer.they thought he 520 and 1040ST were the future.

[Rybags]

Funny how even the "expert" predictions were way off reality.

You can expand that to IBM as well. Of course they had the home market in mind to a point with the PC but IBM in those days and probably into the mid 90s was a dinosaur old-school company that changed direction very slowly at times.

 

Sort of funny that they were by far the computer company with the most resources and of the large players at the time, about the only one that used practically entirely off-the-shelf components which just left the door wide open for imitators.

 

That said, they unintentially created many industry standards where others like Atari managed to create a standardised joystick interface and little more.

 

And yes, by the mid 1980s it almost seemed like it'd be a 3-horse race with ST, Amiga, Mac but as it happened the fist 2 died, Mac almost died and the PC soldiered through it all, albeit with IBM losing control and eventually pulling out of it's manufacturing.

[morelenmir]

One problem with PC;s was obviously the graphics and sound. The VGA, EGA, CGA, etc... All seem very different to programme at the assembler level. I don't think there are any equivalents to P/MG or sprites at all.

 

I am currently using a text editor and NASM to produce PC compatible .COM files and then running them in DOSBox - in much the same workflow as WUDSN->Altirra. I do not have a linker yet as ALink seems to have died way back in 2000. It is actually quite exciting to be finally poking around in the guts of the x86. Which is why I find it so interesting so many folks seem to have written of the PC when it appeared. 16Bit MUST have been enticing surely? Not to mention the coolness with processor segment registers to address beyond 64k rather than buggering around with PORTB and so forth seems incredibly clever to me.

[Rybags]

There's various legacy graphics modes that modern cards still support - in a sense it's a little like Atari but there's evolutionary change as it went along, e.g. small fixed palette followed by larger ones and eventually the full 24/32-bit RGB system.

 

Before 3D, there was sprite capability and blitter. AFAIK a sprite is still used for the mouse pointer

[Frankie]

I was in college when I saw my first PC. It was 1985. It had a hard drive and a monochrome monitor. I didn't think too much of it at the time. Windows 1.0 hit and I saw it on another PC and I knew Atari, Commodore 64, etc where done.

 

PC's came on so fast and strong nothing was going to be able to catch up. I think that was the last time I used a 6502 assembler. I'm not a PC person, I went over to Unix. .... And now I came back to Arari.

[Keatah]

Once I recognized the professionalism in the PC platform I knew all the 8 & 16 bit toy companies were "Doomed". Too bad the PC became an advertising appliance these past 2 years.

[morelenmir]

I actually came to PC via the ARM A4/5000's you saw in most British schools during the late eighties and early nineties. RISCOS was and still is a fantastic operating system, in those days entirely based in ROM which made it lightning fast. Compared to this my first experience of the Windows 3.1/DOS combo in 1994 was a sludgy slow, illogical nightmare.

 

What aspects of the PC did you chaps find most interesting and exciting? At first glance the system doesn't have much to recommend it - no POKEY-quality audio without ADLIB/SoundBlaster, very bare-bones graphics before VGA/SVGA... In almost every department that was likely to matter to most Atari fans the PC loses out... Not least of all price!

 

There must have been a lot of kids - or at least those with wealthy enough parents - who were offered a PC or an ST/Amiga and to them it seemed an easy choice for the latter.

Edited February 1, 2014 by morelenmir

[+Ripdubski]

I found nothing fascinating about them at the time. My mother tried to get me to get a PC, even took me down to a pre-arranged sales pitch. It was a PC Jr. At the end of the day it couldnt play games, and yes that was a big part of my Atari usage. The pressure from her to get a "real" computer drove me harder to prove the Atari could hold its own. So I found good Word Processors an spreadsheets to do homework on, with a "see, the Atari is fine" attitude. I am so glad I didnt buy that PC, which was something like $1200 and instead got a new 130XE.

 

I cant speak to the assembler, other than it was something I dabbled in, and was confounded by the complexity/number of instructions of the 486 several years later when I started playing with it on compuetsr at work. Maybe I should go back and learn 6502 to say I did it.

Edited February 2, 2014 by Ripdubski

[Nebulon]

My first PC was a 8086 XT.

 

I was interested in graphics and audio, so I got the best video card I could (an 'enhanced' EGA card). As for sound -- well, there weren't any options at the time. Just annoying beeping.

 

Wanting to do CAD work, I added a math coprocessor to it. That was probably the only time I was ever impressed by the early PCs. The coprocessor really did speed up vector graphics to a very significant degree.

 

Later on I did computer tech and retail. I recall Windows 2.0 on our shelves. It just sat there. It didn't even qualify as an operating system, and people knew it. Then there was all the horrible crap we dealt with in DOS (like the 640K barrier, utils to try to use high memory, and the awful experience of low-level formatting hard drives using Debug).

 

As for the 80286, take a closer look at this chip. It has horrible issues from a programmer's perspective.

 

It wasn't until the 80386sx came out that the PC looked to have some potential. Windows 3.1 was pretty awful though. More of a cosmetic overlay than a real GUI O/S.

 

Then there was Windows 95. That seemed to change everything. It was a bloated program, but it sold like mad.

 

The AdLib sound card was garbage. So was the first Sound Blaster (monophonic with poor sampling capabilities).

 

Finally when Windows 98se arrived and the Pentium II appeared on the scene, I had to finally recognize the PC as a force to be reckoned with. Still though, they're inefficient machines with odd quirks. Of course, most computing platforms seem to have their own unique quirks.

 

I use the PC a lot these days, but I can't help but wonder how things would have evolved had Atari or the Amiga won. The PC seems to need vast resources to get things done (and task manager isn't exactly the most elegant way to handle multiple apps).

 

The early years of the PC were a bit of a joke from a gaming and audio/video standpoint. The first PCs were fine for crunching raw data, but not much else. Between their association with the professional reputation of IBM and their sharp displays, they gained respect in the business field. Line graphics and number crunching was pretty much all they were good for back in the early to mid-80s. Clones made it possible for lower prices and tons of peripherals. And the rest is history...