If you could change one thing about the 520ST/STM/STFM......

[zzip]

9 hours ago, oracle_jedi said:

We are expected to believe that Jack and his hand picked team went from a blank page to a fully finished, mostly debugged system replete with a functional DOS, GUI, two choices of floppy disk drive, two monitor choices and a smattering of software in just 9 months.   I've always been dubious of that claim, suspecting that the ST started as an off-the-books skunk works project at Commodore, but I have no evidence to support my crazy conspiracy claims.  All that said, the original ST standard should have been retired and replaced with the STE in 1987, not 1989.

If it was in development at Commodore, they could never admit to that or Commodore could have claimed ownership.   On the other hand there should be some documentation that came to light by now if true.    I don't think such a computer could have existed much sooner than it did.   It was heavily inspired by the Mac, which was unveiled in Jan 1984, same month that Jack left Commodore.   It used a lot of off the shelf components and an OS in development at another time to save development time.

 

There was definitely a slowdown in development at Atari after the ST released.    But I think this is due to Jack scaling back the R&D to save money.   I agree STe should have been earlier and Falcon.   Speeds needed to ramp up.   But neither Atari nor Commodore could keep up with the pace of the PC scene.

 

 

[zzip]

30 minutes ago, oky2000 said:

The ST was better than the crapfest IBM PC EGA spec of home machine yanks kept buying in the mid 80s for a hell of a lot more money. Everything about the ST is superior to the EGA PC XT spec those idiots went ga-ga for. Leonard Tramiel talks about this 'sickness' affecting the US consumers in that time frame post video games crash of USA. 

Only if you judge a machine solely on it's audio/visual

 

That's not what PC buyers were looking for.   They wanted a machine that could run the apps they were familar with.   Not cheap knockoffs,  not fiddle with a slow PC emulator.   Largely these were non-technical people trained in a few business apps.

 

With PCs you got

1. kick-ass keyboard (well you could always a shitty clone keyboard, but largely PC keyboards were much more comfortable to type on, and they detached, you could put them on your lap.

2.Dos apps were still largely ran in character-based modes,  ST and Amiga lacked character-based modes, they had to send 8 or 16-bytes to the screen to display a single letter, while PC only had to send one byte, that meant anything character-based felt  much faster and more solid on PC

3. Dual floppies were pretty standard increasing productivity

4. Internal hard disks soon became standard on PCs in the late 80s.  Adding a hard drive to ST or Amiga was more trouble than it needed to be (extra hardware in many cases)

5. Huge software library with well known software

6. optional math coprocessers could cut through spreadsheets like butter.

7. Networking such as Novell.   I don't know about Amiga, but Atari barely had an offering here.

8. PC build quality was usually much much higher,  you could understand why it costs more.

 

Yes Mega STs and TTs existed to address some of these things, but not all.

 

PC buyers would laugh at ST/Amiga buyers just as much as ST/Amiga buyers laughed at PC buyers, both groups had completely different sets of priorities

[Megalomaniac]

I accept that mid-1980s PCs had advantages for non-technical business users - buying a PC that ran standard familiar programs was a lot easier to justify to shareholders, even if it cost a bit more than even a top-end ST / Amiga / Mac and the actual performance was (other than spreadsheets maybe) no better. Maybe there was value to having one at home if you really needed to be able to take your work home with you. But even that doesn't explain why people used them for games, let alone upgrading them specifically for games, which would cost more than an ST or Amiga, before VGA and Soundblaster established themselves. EGA was somewhere between C64 and ST, and PC speaker was probably inferior to the Spectrum, let alone most other home systems. Even the Tandy 1000 range which had EGA-equivalent graphics and the first specialist PC sound hardware cost more than an ST or A500 with inferior performance. And you were still stuck with DOS commands and the 640k memory limit.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Megalomaniac
elaboration

[zzip]

30 minutes ago, Megalomaniac said:

But even that doesn't explain why people used them for games, let alone upgrading them specifically for games, which would cost more than an ST or Amiga, before VGA and Soundblaster established themselves. EGA was somewhere between C64 and ST, and PC speaker was probably inferior to the Spectrum, let alone most other home systems. Even the Tandy 1000 range which had EGA-equivalent graphics and the first specialist PC sound hardware cost more than an ST or A500 with inferior performance. And you were still stuck with DOS commands and the 640k memory limit.

Remember this is a process that took years.

In the beginning people would play games on PC rather than buying another expensive piece of hardware, and maybe that was good enough for popular games like King's Quest, Monkey Island, Battle Chess.   People didn't always upgrade their own PCs, but when they bought a new one EGA or VGA might have been standard.  In the late 80s,  EGA games looked almost as good as the ST/Amiga versions,  but the limited color palette made it look worse.    VGA could outdo ST/Amiga in most cases.  Also clock speeds were ever increasing on the PC side while they were slow to increase on the ST/Amiga side, soon PC performance was better.

 

Eventually in the early 90s there was a tipping point where PC games were no longer inferor to the ST/Amiga counterparts, but outclassing them.   The other thing that flipped was while Atari advertised "Power Without the Price" in 85, by the early 90s it was cheaper and easier to upgrade a PC because of the economies of scale in the PC market.

 

[blakespot]

The crappy keyboard's key switches. I had and have an STm and they keyfeel is terrible. I had a Mega ST2, and am told it had a mechanical keyboard that felt nice, but I don't recall. I didn't have it long and I was not a keyboard geek as I am now. I have a room full of computers and the STm's feels the worst, easily. 

 

 

bp

[Sporny Kun]

The only thing I regret, is that at that time I did not know enough in computer science to make the most of it. And that the language disk did not provided a compiler with the basic.

[oky2000]

As a home/family computing device the PC was indeed horrible in every way, a real "Home P[rick's]C[hoice]". I can't really believe all those people who bought a PC for so much money went home and just used DOS business packages or took home scientific equations to solve for overtime.

 

You couldn't do anything creative worth a damn on a $4000 PC EGA XT machine for a start, nothing musical nothing graphical and nothing video related, it has nothing to do with games specifically. Workbench and GEM were far superior to Windows in 1986/87 for a home user and a lot less archaic, 1980s Windows is nothing more than a shitty barely functional Mac OS hack (detailed in Pirates of Silicon Valley) for x86. Summer of 1987 I used all three machines daily at home (520STM, Amiga 1000 and 80186 EGA PC). I used Windows/GEM/Workbench on them, used the official Microsoft WP in DOS (inferior for normal people to First Word given away free with even my 520STM). Compared to a DOS PC my Amiga was more like a Unix workstation thank you. I doubt anybody else here ever used all three machines at the same time daily for 2 months for all sorts of things back in the mid-late 80s when they were selling like crazy. 

 

Let's not get all defensive, the PC was inferior in every way except if all you did was write 1000 page novels, needed a hard disk for a massive SQL database or did your accounts on something like Lotus 1-2-3/balanced scientific equations at home etc and nothing else on a home/family computer. PC is a business tool but why were 80% of home users buying one? Other than that it has no use for a family/home environment.

 

You can't expect me to make a video showing MS Paint vs Dpaint/Neochrome, then whatever mortgage sized extras you needed for PC XT to do MIDI sequencing in 1980s, then buy a $20,000 esoteric PC bespoke 24bit colour upgrade system and compare it to an Amiga 1000 with an Archos A/Video24 plugged into the display chip socket to give you broadcast quality 24bit video, 12bit 25fps animation AND the worlds first digital chromakey function all for the price of a soundblaster+adlib card combo purchase PC owners made really can you?

[Keatah]

6 hours ago, zzip said:

With PCs you got

1. kick-ass keyboard (well you could always a shitty clone keyboard, but largely PC keyboards were much more comfortable to type on, and they detached, you could put them on your lap.

We loved that. Such a novel feature. Felt rich and expensive too.

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

2.Dos apps were still largely ran in character-based modes,  ST and Amiga lacked character-based modes, they had to send 8 or 16-bytes to the screen to display a single letter, while PC only had to send one byte, that meant anything character-based felt  much faster and more solid on PC

This is huge and did indeed contribute to the solidity of the machine. Both in technical terms and how it felt to the user. The Apple II was the only other machine to feature it. A sort of snappy precision. Unwavering.

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

5. Huge software library with well known software

This is important and brings up the notion of standards where everyone could interchange data with everyone else. Clone? Original? 100% compatible? You were covered and it just worked. And there was software for every conceivable situation, with more being developed daily!

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

6. optional math coprocessers could cut through spreadsheets like butter.

This was magical stuff to a green teen. That a piece of silicon could understand the underpinnings of the laws of nature was something I hadn't ever heard of before. And yes of course there was real software to make it go. Not blurtings from newsletters, but real and complete commercially sold packages. My interest was in celestial mechanics. So a chip that could comprehend the music of the spheres was something I simply had to have.

 

And I've said 101 times before - I was thrilled that Intel gave me a freebie when I got my first PC. And their engineers went through all the trouble to build it right into the main CPU! Imagine that! Whooot!

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

7. Networking such as Novell.   I don't know about Amiga, but Atari barely had an offering here.

I don't recall much (if any) networking stuff on the Amiga. Networking was pretty far away and different from Amiga's target audience - small time home gamers and home artists. Nothing to businessy.

 

I'm sure there were a few cards or adapters, but they were not compelling additions. Nor would they be commonly available. Not like what was on the PC. PC had stuff from the getgo early on.

 

But Amiga was still making promises in 1990. Businesses don't run on future promises.

..nebulous buzzwords about something that may happen later - all the while PC was humming along with 50 billion brands of cards. (3Com being my personal fav.)

 

You'd see 100 billion ad snippets like so..

..all available from CDW's local 751,000 acre-sized warehouse half'n'hour's car ride from my house or workplace. And all 3 ad snippets were from June of 1990.

 

When one needed to get something done in the real world, the PC was a readily available option.

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

8. PC build quality was usually much much higher,  you could understand why it costs more.

This higher build quality enabled the PC to work in a huge variety of locations and environments. The plastic toy Amiga didn't stand a chance.

Edited December 20, 2022 by Keatah

[zzip]

1 hour ago, oky2000 said:

You couldn't do anything creative worth a damn on a $4000 PC EGA XT machine for a start, nothing musical nothing graphical and nothing video related, it has nothing to do with games specifically.

If you were a creative person, you'd buy a Mac or something.    PC's were strictly business in the beginning,  maybe scientific/academic work to.   Virtually nobody was doing video in the 80s,  Amiga was the only system even remotely capable of that and not very well compared to the tools we have now. 

 

1 hour ago, oky2000 said:

You couldn't do anything creative worth a damn on a $4000 PC EGA XT machine for a start, nothing musical nothing graphical and nothing video related, it has nothing to do with games specifically. Workbench and GEM were far superior to Windows in 1986/87 for a home user and a lot less archaic, 1980s Windows is nothing more than a shitty barely functional Mac OS hack (detailed in Pirates of Silicon Valley) for x86. Summer of 1987 I used all three machines daily at home (520STM, Amiga 1000 and 80186 EGA PC). I used Windows/GEM/Workbench on them, used the official Microsoft WP in DOS (inferior for normal people to First Word given away free with even my 520STM). Compared to a DOS PC my Amiga was more like a Unix workstation thank you. I doubt anybody else here ever used all three machines at the same time daily for 2 months for all sorts of things back in the mid-late 80s when they were selling like crazy. 

Yeah the first versions of Windows were weak,  but they weren't widely used either.   DOS applications persisted well into the 90s.   Win95 was the game changer and tried to end the dual-personality of PCs

 

The other thing you miss is these business users were often not technical or adventurous.   They saw a computer as an appliance, nothing more.   They wanted it to work the way they were used to.   If they learned Word Perfect with all its idiosyncrasies,  the last thing they'd want to be told is "use 1st word instead".   "I don't want to learn a new software package,  why can't I just use wordperfect?"  And while.    They didn't really care about GUI or multitasking.   They just wanted the software to work the way they expected to.

 

In fact one of the worse experiences of my career was trying to teach DOS application users how to use Windows GUI apps.   Just the fact that a Window could pop up over here one day, over there the next day or start minimized the third day was enough to send them into panic.    You couldn't document step-by-step instructions for Windows the same way you could for DOS,  Windows was full of unexpected surprises.   It was really hard to get them to adjust.

 

1 hour ago, oky2000 said:

Let's not get all defensive, the PC was inferior in every way except if all you did was write 1000 page novels, needed a hard disk for a massive SQL database or did your accounts on something like Lotus 1-2-3/balanced scientific equations at home etc and nothing else on a home/family computer. PC is a business tool but why were 80% of home users buying one? Other than that it has no use for a family/home environment.

The other factor is herd mentality- people want to buy what everybody else has Amiga/ST were not selling huge numbers in the US compared to PC, so that only reinforced that PC was the way to go.

 

EDIT:  Also prices fell, while a true IBM PC may have cost $4000 in the beginning,  by the late 80s you could get a clone system for well under $1000,  much closer to Amiga/ST price

Edited December 20, 2022 by zzip

[zzip]

22 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I don't recall much (if any) networking stuff on the Amiga. Networking was pretty far away and different from Amiga's target audience - small time home gamers and home artists. Nothing to businessy.

 

I'm sure there were a few cards or adapters, but they were not compelling additions. Nor would they be commonly available. Not like what was on the PC. PC had stuff from the getgo early on.

I remember at one trade show Atari announced something called "MosesPromiseLAN". it was a silly name for networking product and not sure what happened to it.   I think only the Mega STE and Atari TT had LAN ports but but were rather pricey machines too.

 

26 minutes ago, Keatah said:

 

6 hours ago, zzip said:

2.Dos apps were still largely ran in character-based modes,  ST and Amiga lacked character-based modes, they had to send 8 or 16-bytes to the screen to display a single letter, while PC only had to send one byte, that meant anything character-based felt  much faster and more solid on PC

This is huge and did indeed contribute to the solidity of the machine. Both in technical terms and how it felt to the user. The Apple II was the only other machine to feature it. A sort of snappy precision. Unwavering.

Yeah it often wasn't pretty, but it was solid.  It was a mistake to declare character modes dead in the mid-80s as the Mac/Amiga/ST did.   Not sure whose idea that was, but sounds like a Steve Jobs move.    The ST still had a poorly implemented full-screen text viewer mode that could have benefited greatly from a true character mode.

[mickster]

2 hours ago, oky2000 said:

As a home/family computing device the PC was indeed horrible in every way, a real "Home P[rick's]C[hoice]". I can't really believe all those people who bought a PC for so much money went home and just used DOS business packages or took home scientific equations to solve for overtime.

 

 

Another thing to remember is the dealer networks of PCs in the mid to late 80's.  Basically you had old 8 bit systems sold at department stores.  Very few independent stores selling Commodore and Atari 16bit products.  In my area, there was one Atari store 30 minutes away, and another 3 hours away . These stores rarely would have much in stock.  Apple was a little better,  2 stores 30 mins away,  after that, once again 3 hours to the other stores.

 

PC's and compatibles sold absolutely everywhere.  Every mall had a Radio Shack with pc compatibles.  Big box stores had usually 10 to 20 different models (with  financing).  Also tons of 'professional' stores with high end business models with networking support.

 

If a person wasn't a 'fan' of Atari and Commodore 8bit machines, they never knew the 16 bit stuff existed. 

 

A person can't buy it if they can't see it.   While Commodore and Atari had enough money to make computers.  They really didn't have enough money to sell computers. 

 

 

 

 

[mickster]

One more comment (I could talk about about this topic forever.  It feels like I am reliving the 80's as I type).

 

Power without the Price mentality really only buys a company some time.  It's like saying "Hey we are just as good, but cheaper".  The problem is, in electronics the prices always come down and features go up.  So, even when you are the cheapest, you have to keep putting out new models that continue to be the cheapest but still have all the advantages.

 

The IBM PC format was this slow lumbering monster that just kept gobbling up new features, kept backward compatibility, and constantly dropped in price. The compatibles were everywhere, so all these companies were aggressively competing for customers.  No longer did a computer user have to put up with companies promising features and software and then not deliver.  With IBM compatibles , if one company didn't deliver, another one would.  

[Muzz73]

9 hours ago, oky2000 said:

The Mac multiplexes a single DAC at 3 points on the vertical blank I think, the engineers wanted more DACs but Steve Jobs didn't even want sound in the first place so that was the compromise. Read it in some engineer/designer's blog about Mac audio. 

 

You can't decide the lifespan of a machine, nobody designed the C64 to last a decade, that only really happened because so many pioneers from 1982 to 1987 sort of time frame constantly pushed the machine to its limits. The ST was rarely pushed to its limits outside the demoscene. Ultimately though the ST suffered from a double knock-out punch of Atari having to raise ST prices due to the DRAM price hikes of early-mid 1988 when Commodore didn't and just as the prices were about to come back down the £525 Amiga 500+modulator turned into the identically priced £400 A500 RRP. It never really recovered from that. 

 

The ST was better than the crapfest IBM PC EGA spec of home machine yanks kept buying in the mid 80s for a hell of a lot more money. Everything about the ST is superior to the EGA PC XT spec those idiots went ga-ga for. Leonard Tramiel talks about this 'sickness' affecting the US consumers in that time frame post video games crash of USA. 

 

If this crap is what I had to play in 1987 I would have slit my wrists lol

Don't have a heart attack laughing at this pathetic machine that conquered mid 80s USA for home consumers.

Absolutely. A whole lot of people went PC crazy over here when there were far better choices available that did a lot more for a lot less (basically anything that wasn't a DOS PC). Almost as if we (in the USA) were the only ones who didn't "get it." It reminds me of the war between VHS and Betamax - Betamax was superior in practically every way, but VHS is what caught on. There are a few parallels there if you look for them.

 

I used to have the argument with my PC user friends wherein they would scoff at whatever computer I had at the time and tell me that theirs had all these expansion slots. It used to burn their backsides when I would point out that you would have to fill all of them to do what my my C=64/IIgs/ST/Amiga/Mac (not necessarily in that order) did right out of the box. Back then, the PC was kind of a silly concept...

 

"OK, here's this bus. Oh, you want to hook up a monitor? That'll take one card slot. You want a floppy drive controller? Another card slot. Serial? Parallel? Game ports? There go three more." That still doesn't even consider a hard disk controller, a trashy sound card or anything auxiliary.

 

I didn't include any of my ][+ or //e machines from back in the day above because some of the basic functionality did have to come from bus slots, but at least you could hook up a monitor, a cassette recorder and a joystick to get started.

[+DarkLord]

/sarcasm mode on....

 

Wow, after reading through this thread I now realize what an awful choice I made when I picked

Atari over the PC world back in the 80's and wish I could time-travel so could correct those just

horrendous choices I made from that era.

 

Geez, when me and a couple of my Atari friends were watching another acquaintance show us

the latest 4 color PC game with "beep-boop" sounds and herky-jerky scrolling, I should have

realized then that I needed to jump ship immediately. We should have felt guilty as sin for

looking at each other and rolling our eyes in disbelief at what we were seeing.

 

I should never have kept on using my Atari's for everything including e-mail right up until 1999/2000

when I bought my first non 68k family machine and installed Mandrake Linux (anyone remember those

guys?) on it because I still couldn't stand Winblows. Nothing's changed there, BTW. I have a Win10 box

for a handful of games that won't play nice (Star Citizen, for example) but that's it.

 

But hey, at least those PC's from then weren't built from toy plastic and had crappy keyboards, right? 

 

[Keatah]

9 hours ago, mickster said:

PC's and compatibles sold absolutely everywhere.  Every mall had a Radio Shack with pc compatibles.  Big box stores had usually 10 to 20 different models (with  financing).  Also tons of 'professional' stores with high end business models with networking support.

Not to mention mail order. And while I loathed mail order for Amiga stuff, PC had popular in-store vendors also doing mail order. So that added confidence. And even in-store pickup was an option. Or you could pay $$$ to have someone come out and set up your system and your computer furniture even!

 

9 hours ago, mickster said:

If a person wasn't a 'fan' of Atari and Commodore 8bit machines, they never knew the 16 bit stuff existed.

That was another pain-point I never mentioned in recent times. I would always get frustrated when other people would ask me what system I had. And I replied Apple II and Amiga. While everyone knew Apple II, no one knew Amiga. And I would launch into a downsliding explanation of what one was. And inevitably it would get suggested to me that I buy a PC compatible so that I could work efficiently. Not have to worry about file converting. Not have to be stuck at 7MHz and 1MB RAM. Not have to be bogged down by bit-mapped text.

 

9 hours ago, mickster said:

While Commodore and Atari had enough money to make computers.  They really didn't have enough money to sell computers. 

It's that damned race to the bottom mentality.

Edited December 21, 2022 by Keatah

[Keatah]

11 hours ago, oky2000 said:

As a home/family computing device the PC was indeed horrible in every way, a real "Home P[rick's]C[hoice]". I can't really believe all those people who bought a PC for so much money went home and just used DOS business packages or took home scientific equations to solve for overtime.

PC wasn't intended for anything but business and serious non-toy applications and tasks. It's why mom'n'dad used it for serious productivity. Then bought junior the Amiga so he could bang on it with his basement beatoff buddies.

 

I paid somewhere between $2300 - $3000 (depending what extras you count) for my first PC. And I was absolutely thrilled at how it lifted me up up and away from the stagnating 16-bit doldrums. Straight away I was using MS-Word in Windows 3.1 for real honest-to-gods work the very same weekend I opened the box. I finally had a real computer with 2 (TWO!!) sophisticated operating systems.

 

My scientific studies and fractal calculations absolutely flew by with workstation speed. And I could go to and from school with little more than a satchel of floppies. And on the job I could bring my assy analysis home and touch up something if I had a late-nite idea. So $3000 was cheaper than cheap to have that capability.

 

11 hours ago, oky2000 said:

You couldn't do anything creative worth a damn on a $4000 PC EGA XT machine for a start, nothing musical nothing graphical and nothing video related, it has nothing to do with games specifically.

Pretty sure you're right. And while Amiga could do graphics and video, it was rather experimental and still a tedious endeavor for a typical home user. Still needed to thoroughly understand computers. Still needed to get the necessary hardware upgrades, toaster, genlock, digitizer, extra memory, extra drive.. Pretty sure that adds up rather quickly.

 

And it's ok that it had nothing to do with games. Games would be quite limited for a while no doubt. But then again earlier 8-bit micros had color limitations too. And pong consoles had 2 colors.

 

BUT. The PC had growth built into it from day one. 16-bit systems at the time were rather limited. Before I retired my 486 I had done numerous upgrades to all the major subsystems. Sounds, Graphics, RAM, CPU, HDD storage, network functionality, CD-ROM. I was able to grow in-to and out-of the system gracefully. Not left holding a shitbag 16-bitter

.

11 hours ago, oky2000 said:

Workbench and GEM were far superior to Windows in 1986/87 for a home user and a lot less archaic, 1980s Windows is nothing more than a shitty barely functional Mac OS hack (detailed in Pirates of Silicon Valley) for x86.

Maybe so. But GEM or WORKBENCH didn't evolve. Windows did.

 

11 hours ago, oky2000 said:

Summer of 1987 I used all three machines daily at home (520STM, Amiga 1000 and 80186 EGA PC). I used Windows/GEM/Workbench on them, used the official Microsoft WP in DOS (inferior for normal people to First Word given away free with even my 520STM). Compared to a DOS PC my Amiga was more like a Unix workstation thank you.

A stagnating platform going nowhere. I'm always happy to start at the back as long as there's a path forward - something PC had in spades & droves.

 

11 hours ago, oky2000 said:

I doubt anybody else here ever used all three machines at the same time daily for 2 months for all sorts of things back in the mid-late 80s when they were selling like crazy. 

For a while I used both PC and Amiga in late 80's up to about 1993.

 

11 hours ago, oky2000 said:

Let's not get all defensive, the PC was inferior in every way except if all you did was write 1000 page novels, needed a hard disk for a massive SQL database or did your accounts on something like Lotus 1-2-3/balanced scientific equations at home etc and nothing else on a home/family computer. PC is a business tool but why were 80% of home users buying one? Other than that it has no use for a family/home environment.

Easy peasy. Bring your business home. Some of us were actually working and studying at home. And PC gave us a solution and a way forward. And it was demonstrating that way forward through it's array of expansion slots and new speed grades every year. Not to mention bigger storage. And in good time we'd be wowed again and again with VGA and Soundblaster and its descendants. What a time!

 

11 hours ago, oky2000 said:

You can't expect me to make a video showing MS Paint vs Dpaint/Neochrome, then whatever mortgage sized extras you needed for PC XT to do MIDI sequencing in 1980s, then buy a $20,000 esoteric PC bespoke 24bit colour upgrade system and compare it to an Amiga 1000 with an Archos A/Video24 plugged into the display chip socket to give you broadcast quality 24bit video, 12bit 25fps animation AND the worlds first digital chromakey function all for the price of a soundblaster+adlib card combo purchase PC owners made really can you?

Pretty sure the answer would be no. Yes, the Amiga flew to new heights when it came out. There was little or no question of its a/v superiority. But it got stuck and stopped. Just. Stopped. No more evolution. No new capabilities.

 

PC continues to evolve today.

[Keatah]

10 hours ago, mickster said:

One more comment (I could talk about about this topic forever.  It feels like I am reliving the 80's as I type).

Being stuck in the 80's is a good thing!

 

10 hours ago, mickster said:

The IBM PC format was this slow lumbering monster that just kept gobbling up new features, kept backward compatibility, and constantly dropped in price.

I recognized this sometime in the 286/386 era. And solidified it to where I was done and done with Atari/Amiga when word of the 486 hit the public consciousness.

 

10 hours ago, mickster said:

The compatibles were everywhere, so all these companies were aggressively competing for customers.  No longer did a computer user have to put up with companies promising features and software and then not deliver.  With IBM compatibles , if one company didn't deliver, another one would.  

Absolutely. This applied equally with hardware, software, services, add-ons, and more.

 

The promise of what the Amiga was supposed to do and never did is what royally disappointed me. I was used to expansion and growth from the Apple II line. And I expected that from the Amiga, because that's what they told me it would be. (sorry to all of you that keep hearing me complain about that.)

 

I got more and more interested in the PC when I observed that there were multiple (big name) packages that would do the same or similar things. And that gave me choices to pick from. No fear of getting pigeonholed into something.

 

9 hours ago, Muzz73 said:

Absolutely. A whole lot of people went PC crazy over here when there were far better choices available that did a lot more for a lot less (basically anything that wasn't a DOS PC). Almost as if we (in the USA) were the only ones who didn't "get it." It reminds me of the war between VHS and Betamax - Betamax was superior in practically every way, but VHS is what caught on. There are a few parallels there if you look for them.

Technical superiority is only one aspect of a package. The stuff has to be affordable, realistic, durable, versatile, and most importantly available.

 

IDK. When I looked at an Amiga I saw a one-trick-pony, toys and games. When I looked at a PC I saw business possibilities, mathematical studies, celestial computations and astronomical simulations. Serious word processing with solid WYSIWYG features. In retrospect I may have at home, too, because my Apple II had a Microsoft 16K RAMCARD and "Microsoft" printed on some of the ROM chips. I had a good experience with it in the late 70's and very early 80's. And I figured I'd have a good experience with a Microsoft branded OS. And I did. An ineffable continuity was taking place.

 

9 hours ago, Muzz73 said:

I used to have the argument with my PC user friends wherein they would scoff at whatever computer I had at the time and tell me that theirs had all these expansion slots. It used to burn their backsides when I would point out that you would have to fill all of them to do what my my C=64/IIgs/ST/Amiga/Mac (not necessarily in that order) did right out of the box. Back then, the PC was kind of a silly concept...

I don't know about that. It was like building up your system. It is the essence of the system. Equipping it to fit your needs.

 

I didn't need resolutions much beyond 1024x768. But I wanted billions of colors. And I could have that for about $200 in the early 1990's. (yes I had to wait till 1992 when the price/performance and personal funds aligned)

 

Computers like the C64/IIgs/ST/Amiga/Mac/400/800 could not change out their graphics or sound chips or allow you to pick one that had the features you most wanted. You were stuck with what originally came with the machine.

 

9 hours ago, Muzz73 said:

"OK, here's this bus. Oh, you want to hook up a monitor? That'll take one card slot. You want a floppy drive controller? Another card slot. Serial? Parallel? Game ports? There go three more." That still doesn't even consider a hard disk controller, a trashy sound card or anything auxiliary.

And that's what the slots were for, to give you that all-godlike customization. And in 1992 that consumed 3 slots. Sound. Graphics. And a Multi-IO board (2-serial, 1-parallel, 1-game, 2-HDD, 2-floppy).. Progress! And you still had 5 slots for more stuff yet.

 

9 hours ago, Muzz73 said:

I didn't include any of my ][+ or //e machines from back in the day above because some of the basic functionality did have to come from bus slots, but at least you could hook up a monitor, a cassette recorder and a joystick to get started.

Sounds like a typical starter system. I had cassette, RF modulator, and family TV, as peripherals for my Apple II.

 

Apple II had slots because the industry was so young and new. No one knew how home computers would develop or what as-of-yet undeveloped peripherals would be needed. Slots were a solution to a future undefined problem. But unlike today where pointless solutions are in search of a problem, it was clearly known there would be a some need to expand a system.

Edited December 21, 2022 by Keatah

[Zogging Hell]

The weird thing about PCs is that everyone goes on about their expandibility and what not, but you still end up buying a new one (at least) every five years due to redundancy anyway. 386 to run Wolfenstein in 91, er well in 1993 you need to buy at least a decent 486 for Doom... couple more years and you have to buy another with a Pentium for Quake. Same with Windows, a 486 is ok with 3.1, but with 95 it is struggling, and your Pentium won't be happy with XP. Personally I think it is the complete disposability of the platform that at least partially why it won the computer war, hardware manufacturers get constant income, Microsoft continues to make Windows more bloated (or arbitarily discontinues support for your hardware - Windows 11) so it won't run on your CPU/ memory/ graphics card combo.. and the cycle repeats. So how much does the expandibility really help really (particularly now most things are actually buit in anyway)?

For serious stuff the ST actually was still completely useable in the 90s (if you weren't tied to a particular mainstream software package). My dissertation at Uni (all 12000 words with multiple fonts and pictures) was done on an Atari in 1999, and it was producing better output than the Windows NT computers in the uni labs were doing.. as I could buy decent software for the ST at half the price. And that is probably why there aren't STs today. If a machine is good enough to run for years, and not need replacing, and the software is too cheap, it isn't making anyone any cash is it

[+DarkLord]

@Zogging Hell Totally agree with the ST usability comments. As I mentioned in my previous post,

I was all Atari right up until 1999/2000 or so when I actually built a Mandrake Linux box...

 

This is something I hadn't seen talked about too much here - "built in" or "Planned obsolescence".

 

The idea that the manufacturer only wants their product to last a certain life cycle - not building

up to quality and a "last for life" mentality but basement level builds...after all, gotta keep those

customers coming back, eh? 

 

[mickster]

4 hours ago, Zogging Hell said:

The weird thing about PCs is that everyone goes on about their expandibility and what not, but you still end up buying a new one (at least) every five years due to redundancy anyway. 386 to run Wolfenstein in 91, er well in 1993 you need to buy at least a decent 486 for Doom... couple more years and you have to buy another with a Pentium for Quake. Same with Windows, a 486 is ok with 3.1, but with 95 it is struggling, and your Pentium won't be happy with XP. Personally I think it is the complete disposability of the platform that at least partially why it won the computer war, hardware manufacturers get constant income, Microsoft continues to make Windows more bloated (or arbitarily discontinues support for your hardware - Windows 11) so it won't run on your CPU/ memory/ graphics card combo.. and the cycle repeats. So how much does the expandibility really help really (particularly now most things are actually buit in anyway)?

For serious stuff the ST actually was still completely useable in the 90s (if you weren't tied to a particular mainstream software package). My dissertation at Uni (all 12000 words with multiple fonts and pictures) was done on an Atari in 1999, and it was producing better output than the Windows NT computers in the uni labs were doing.. as I could buy decent software for the ST at half the price. And that is probably why there aren't STs today. If a machine is good enough to run for years, and not need replacing, and the software is too cheap, it isn't making anyone any cash is it

Yes what you say is very true and I understand your point of view.  Please don't mistake my posts as PC compatibles being perfect. They definitely had their downfalls.

 

For me personally,  Atari 8 bits were amazing for about 7 years, after that ST's were fun for about 5 years.  That being said, I had a lot of fun with IBM compatible hardware and software from the 90's on.  I really enjoyed the constant hardware revolution of all the 90's computers.  I actually really enjoyed using DOS and win3.1.  

 

Back in the day, I was frustrated that 8 bits and the ST didn't evolve like the Mac and PC.  What I didn't understand is that by using custom chips, they could only do so much without cutting their own throat and breaking compatibility. Custom chips saved them money up front, but killed them tech wise in the end.  I also had no idea that both Commodore and Atari were basically going broke and  the executives were just bleeding it dry.   Another issue that I didn't understand back then was the difference between video and cpu speed.  I looked at the computer as a whole unit.  I didn't realize that the fastest cpu in the world will be bottlenecked by video hardware when it comes to moving stuff around on the screen.

 

I could have stuck with the ST through some of the 90's but I would have missed so much.  I loved being there for the evolution of 3d graphics (both in software and hardware), the early LAN/modem gaming that moved the internet, and the 1st generation of VR headsets that arrived in 1995.

 

In an alternate universe,  IBM did a better job of copywriting their computer design.  I would love to know what would have happened if all those companies were not able to make the PC compatible that we know of today.

 

Funny thing is, I am using my IBM compatible to type this message on an Atari Forum.  To my immediate left is an Atari 600xl with monitor, and to my right is an Atari 1040STE setup.  For all the the advances in tech, those Atari computers sure are special to me!!

 

Later,

mickey

 

 

 

 

 

 

[mickster]

1 hour ago, DarkLord said:

@Zogging Hell Totally agree with the ST usability comments. As I mentioned in my previous post,

I was all Atari right up until 1999/2000 or so when I actually built a Mandrake Linux box...

 

This is something I hadn't seen talked about too much here - "built in" or "Planned obsolescence".

 

The idea that the manufacturer only wants their product to last a certain life cycle - not building

up to quality and a "last for life" mentality but basement level builds...after all, gotta keep those

customers coming back, eh? 

 

Just curious did you give up on gaming as ST stuff dried up until you got into Linux?

 

I realize the ST had a huge catalog, maybe you just continued to explore everything made on the ST?

 

 

[+DarkLord]

13 minutes ago, mickster said:

Just curious did you give up on gaming as ST stuff dried up until you got into Linux?

 

I realize the ST had a huge catalog, maybe you just continued to explore everything made on the ST?

 

 

 

Nah, lots of the games (especially RPG's) had great replay value so I continued to do that. I also tried

ST games that I hadn't gotten around to yet. Heck, that still applies even today. I've still not played

the Phantasie series and I've itching to do that. I'm retired now, so even though there's not nearly

as much "free" time as you'd think retirement would give you, I do have more time free so I'm hoping

to start that (maybe this winter).

 

After I built my first Mandrake Linux box, I played Starcraft for the first time ever (Wine). There were

also quite a few Linux releases and of course now, lots of Linux games. I do keep the Win10 box for

a handful of games that my son and I play together that under perform with 'Nix (like Star Citizen).

 

Man, that game is really hardware intensive.

 

I've not even mentioned BBS gaming - which I still do. Sure, it's nothing like the commercial releases

were but I've been playing a lot of Thieves Guild lately and it's way cool. Kirkman did an excellent

report on it here:

 

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/09/15/thieves-guild-memories/

 

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/09/15/paul-witte-and-herb-flower-creators-of-thieves-guild/

 

Super cool fact - one of the Thieves Guild original authors is playing the game on DarkForce! right

now! 
 

[zzip]

14 hours ago, mickster said:

Power without the Price mentality really only buys a company some time.  It's like saying "Hey we are just as good, but cheaper".  The problem is, in electronics the prices always come down and features go up.  So, even when you are the cheapest, you have to keep putting out new models that continue to be the cheapest but still have all the advantages.

I'm not sure that was obvious at the time of the ST though.   At that point, the PC world was dominated by IBM, Compaq and maybe a handful of others that were selling high-priced, high margin machines,   and as far as anyone knew they'd be happy to keep selling those high-priced machines.   IBM had already killed off the 'affordable' PCjr, the year before, and that was still more expensive and less powerful than an ST.     Jacks other motto was "computers for the masses, not the classes", and at the time there was nobody building affordable 16-bit machines in the US market.    He had succeeded wildly with the C64, he thought he could do the same with the ST-- there was even less competition!      But the clone wave really took off a year or two after the ST.    I'm not sure how many could have forseen that PCs would become the standard platform "for the masses".   I remember seeing articles around the time of the ST stating that MSX computers were coming and they were going to create the standard computing platform.

 

15 hours ago, Muzz73 said:

Absolutely. A whole lot of people went PC crazy over here when there were far better choices available that did a lot more for a lot less (basically anything that wasn't a DOS PC). Almost as if we (in the USA) were the only ones who didn't "get it." It reminds me of the war between VHS and Betamax - Betamax was superior in practically every way, but VHS is what caught on. There are a few parallels there if you look for them.

People get hung up on technical benefits while ignoring practical ones.     VHS was industry standard, Betamax was a Sony thing,  you want to be able to go rent and buy tapes no matter what brand of VCR you own.

 

Also reminds me of the plasma TV fans in video forums bitching and moaning about how plasma was dying because all the 'idiots' were buying LCDs.   Ok sure plasma had better picture quality, but LCD was way more versatile-  much lighter, more energy efficient, works well in all levels of room lighting, much less susceptible to burn-in.   And they were always improving on its weak points, improving viewing angles, response times, contrast ratios.   

 

In the same way people complaining about how PC killed ST/Amiga only focus on audio/visual and ignore all the other practical advantages to owning a PC.

 

And I say this as a happy ST owner that waited until around 94 to jump to PC.  

17 hours ago, mickster said:

A person can't buy it if they can't see it.   While Commodore and Atari had enough money to make computers.  They really didn't have enough money to sell computers. 

And it didn't help that Atari wanted to be a "jack of all trades" computer company, like embarking that transputer misadventure, licensing System V Unix,  trying to get into the high-end workstation market.   Atari was a consumer brand. They should have kept focusing their marketing dollars on that instead of trying to break into business markets with a brand name that everyone associated with games.

 

7 hours ago, Keatah said:

Maybe so. But GEM or WORKBENCH didn't evolve. Windows did.

Well GEM/TOS did eventually becaome a true multitasking OS with MultiTOS.     But here's a an example of a hole Atari's GEM got stuck in.    GDOS is the part of GEM that handles fonts: proportional-spaced fonts,  font scalling, multiple typefaces-  all those nice WYSIWYG features.    But GDOS wasn't ready by the time STs went into production.   You'd get a copy of GDOS on disk if you got a WYSIWYG application,  but it wasn't used by anything else since there was no guarantee that it'd be available.    So an Atari GEM desktop even in the 90s would use bitmapped, fixed space fonts (8x16),  while Windows and pretty much any other OS by the mid 90s was using scalable, proportionally-spaced fonts in every application.    This made GEM screens look dated.

 

[zzip]

5 hours ago, Zogging Hell said:

For serious stuff the ST actually was still completely useable in the 90s (if you weren't tied to a particular mainstream software package). My dissertation at Uni (all 12000 words with multiple fonts and pictures) was done on an Atari in 1999, and it was producing better output than the Windows NT computers in the uni labs were doing.. as I could buy decent software for the ST at half the price. And that is probably why there aren't STs today. If a machine is good enough to run for years, and not need replacing, and the software is too cheap, it isn't making anyone any cash is it

Yeah all my college work was done on my ST,  and it was awesome that ST was compatible with MS-DOS disk format so I could write in my dorm room on my ST and print on the compter lab's laser printers.    But there was one important app I couldn't get on ST that forced me to buy a PC...    Doom! 

 

 

[Zogging Hell]

3 hours ago, DarkLord said:

@Zogging Hell Totally agree with the ST usability comments. As I mentioned in my previous post,

I was all Atari right up until 1999/2000 or so when I actually built a Mandrake Linux box...

 

This is something I hadn't seen talked about too much here - "built in" or "Planned obsolescence".

 

The idea that the manufacturer only wants their product to last a certain life cycle - not building

up to quality and a "last for life" mentality but basement level builds...after all, gotta keep those

customers coming back, eh? 

 

Yeah I certainly got my monies worth out of the ST and Falcon. I managed to stay Atari for most things until the very early 2000s thanks to an extravangant Milan clone purchase, so I was most tech capitalist's nightmare. I had to admit defeat (I started doing a C++ course on Windows and the web was getting too complex) and bought a cheapo Compaq Armada laptop and a no brand name PC. The Armada was sporting a Pentium 233 and was out of date - had been fairly high end five odd years earlier though. The cheapo clone had a Cyrix CPU allegedly clocking in at 500mhz, and onboard SiS graphics and was actually worse than the laptop! However, when I want to write something complex and I mean really write something, that requires a lot of concentration and no distraction, I still use the Mega ST even now and swap the files into Word later.