Missing the excitement of home computers.

[Tickled_Pink]

I was getting a major nostalgia hit last night looking at various retro computing YouTube channels and looking at all the stuff that was not only released but a lot of interesting stuff that was never released, despite being in the prototype stage. We know the market was pretty fragmented back then but companies could still make a profit. Computers were arguably much more accessible, even when it came down to programming. Yeah, I know we have much better tools today but you have to be a genius to be able to write anything in assembler for modern PCs.

 

What would be the chances of an actual home computer succeeding these days? You know, an all-in-one mass market device for gaming and tinkering?

[Hans23]

What is missing in Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Agon Light, MicroMite and the many other systems that exist today?  How are these not "actual home computers"?  I think that the options for tinkering with computers today are huge, and there are many different fields in which simple systems can be built from cheap, readily available components by individuals to have a bit of fun.  How much mass are you looking for that the Raspberry Pi family does not have?

[+Gemintronic]

The Spectrum Next may hit your sweet spot.  The actual Spectrum Next probably is going to be expensive and hard to get like every other project.  BUT, I have seen clones available from time to time.

[+OLD CS1]

4 hours ago, Hans23 said:

What is missing in Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Agon Light, MicroMite and the many other systems that exist today?  How are these not "actual home computers"?

I would call most of these home hobbyist computers, akin to the KIM-1, but I would not call them home computers (with the notable exception of the Agon Light.)  Make something out of those which offers the ability to turn it on and go, like the home computers I grew up with.

 

Hook up to a TV (monitor,) attach a keyboard and optional mouse, a storage device, and have an interface which is immediately ready to start programming (like BASIC in pretty much every 8-bit home computer,) take commands or offer a desktop environment, and off you go.  No dicking around with SD card images, having to use another computer to get things going, or SDKs, just plug in and go.

[Duewester]

I think the thing is, the home computer age was about revolutionary technology and accessibility. Today, it's about evolutionary tech. People get behind revolutions but tend to be bored by evolution.

We here are the ones who look at the "good old days" and say "If I'd only known then what I know now...". I think most people today just take for granted what has evolved.

[+cjherr]

10 hours ago, Duewester said:

I think the thing is, the home computer age was about revolutionary technology and accessibility. Today, it's about evolutionary tech. People get behind revolutions but tend to be bored by evolution.

Amen to that. I think back to those good old days and everything was exciting. It was NEW, and it was all amazing. Now, it’s commonplace. Think about Atari/Apple/C64. Whichever you owned, it was still cool to check out your buddies other type of system and see what it could do. Also, you could update the hardware. Add memory, update graphics/sound/storage media. Every time you did, it felt like a new system. Now, you replace it all every 2 years.

[zzip]

13 hours ago, cjherr said:

Amen to that. I think back to those good old days and everything was exciting. It was NEW, and it was all amazing. Now, it’s commonplace. Think about Atari/Apple/C64. Whichever you owned, it was still cool to check out your buddies other type of system and see what it could do. Also, you could update the hardware. Add memory, update graphics/sound/storage media. Every time you did, it felt like a new system. Now, you replace it all every 2 years.

Yeah a lot of the fun was in what you can make it do.   You were always battling against limited memory, limited storage, limited graphics and sound.

 

Getting a few extra colors on screen was awesome,  your first grainy digitized photo,  the low-sample rate digitized audio was so cool.

 

Now your average computer can display 16 million colors in sufficiently high resolution, digital photos are commonplace as are CD-quality (or better) digital samples.   Storage is cheap,   when was the last time you ran out of RAM?   

 

I guess pushing the limits was fun.  Seeing stuff for the first time was cool.   Now it's all old-hat and commonplace.

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, zzip said:

Yeah a lot of the fun was in what you can make it do.   You were always battling against limited memory, limited storage, limited graphics and sound.

My first couple of years at VCF-SE, I talked to embedded developers who had taken a liking to our "retro" computer hobby as these computers offer similar limited environments to their embedded stuff.

[MrMaddog]

The closest we have to a modern "home computer" is the Raspberry Pi400 since it's a computer-in-a-keyboard, and it's also great for messing around with.

 

Everything is included so no need for a daily driver PC to set one up.

 

The RPi models are starting to come back though at slightly more expensive prices...

[82-T/A]

On 6/26/2023 at 5:01 AM, Tickled_Pink said:

I was getting a major nostalgia hit last night looking at various retro computing YouTube channels and looking at all the stuff that was not only released but a lot of interesting stuff that was never released, despite being in the prototype stage. We know the market was pretty fragmented back then but companies could still make a profit. Computers were arguably much more accessible, even when it came down to programming. Yeah, I know we have much better tools today but you have to be a genius to be able to write anything in assembler for modern PCs.

 

What would be the chances of an actual home computer succeeding these days? You know, an all-in-one mass market device for gaming and tinkering?

 

I think I'd have to echo what a lot of other people here were saying. At the time, everything was new. Someone on here put it best when I think they said what we were experiencing at the time was "revolutionary" ... from literally year to year for what felt like 10 years. Now we're in a period of (as he said) evolutionary incremental development of the "pc," and it's far less exciting. I can honestly say that the Dell 990 Core i7 computer I bought 13 years ago in 2010 with Windows 7, is not at all much different than the Lenovo Legion Core i9 I have right now in 2023 with Windows 11.

 

I mean... just imagine that... 13 years have gone by, and a side to side comparison of the capabilities are almost negligible. Sure, the graphics card is measurably faster... but Windows doesn't look much different, and they both still kind of use AGP graphics cards, ram is faster, the processor is faster... but really, they aren't much different. 95% of the software that I might run on my newer PC, I can still run on my slower PC without any issues at all.

 

But then you look at what 13 years meant from say... 1987 to 1995. I've kind of hand-picked years there... but in 1987... if you were lucky enough to even have a "PC" computer at home, you probably had an 8088 clone of some sort, with a monochrome/CGA or maybe an EGA monitor. You used 5.25" floppy disks, and probably didn't even have a mouse hooked up (what would it even be for?). By 1995... you likely had a Pentium, or at least a high-end 486 DX2, you had a high resolution mouse, a Sound Blaster, a 2x speed CD drive, Super VGA w/ at least 1-2 megs of video memory, and if you didn't have Windows 95 immediately, you probably had something else like Windows 3.1, GeoWorks, or OS/2.

[zzip]

1 hour ago, 82-T/A said:

 

But then you look at what 13 years meant from say... 1987 to 1995. I've kind of hand-picked years there... but in 1987... if you were lucky enough to even have a "PC" computer at home, you probably had an 8088 clone of some sort, with a monochrome/CGA or maybe an EGA monitor. You used 5.25" floppy disks, and probably didn't even have a mouse hooked up (what would it even be for?). By 1995... you likely had a Pentium, or at least a high-end 486 DX2, you had a high resolution mouse, a Sound Blaster, a 2x speed CD drive, Super VGA w/ at least 1-2 megs of video memory, and if you didn't have Windows 95 immediately, you probably had something else like Windows 3.1, GeoWorks, or OS/2.

Yeah in those years the technology leaps were insane!   I remember being stuck with cassette while floppy drives were more expensive than the computer itself.   But then suddenly they weren't, and I was able to buy one and it changed everything!   Same with hard drives,  high price with very low capacity in the mid-80s,  but by the 90s they were moderately priced with reasonable capacity.   Again, getting one changed everything.  And each time there's the thrill "Can't believe I finally got one".   Part of that came from being young without a lot of disposable income too-- that made it necessary to wait and dream about the upgrades you might have someday.

 

These days it's rare to see game-changing upgrades.  And even though cost is much less of a barrier for me now, there just isn't a lot of upgrades I can do to my PC to bring back that thrill.