5 Jun
2024
5 Jun
'24
3:25 p.m.
On Wed, 5 Jun 2024 at 13:30, Bill Degnan via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
that's an important distinction, affordability.
You define personal
computers to contain microprocessors, which made them affordable. The
demand was always there, it's the point in the demand curve that allowed x%
of the population of an affluent country to afford them. Above the
point, not personal past it, personal.
Is that what you're saying?
Yep, pretty much.
This is one way of _describing_ it. There are others.
Another way of looking at it is this: a personal computer is a type of
microcomputer. This is using the old classification of microcomputer,
minicomputer and mainframe.
If a device is not a microcomputer, it then must be either a
minicomputer or a mainframe. Early on many mainframes didn't even
support interactive sessions so they more or less disqualified
themselves from being "personal" in any commonly-understood sense.
Which leaves minicomputers.
A single-user desktop (or deskside) minicomputer isn't a personal
computer, because it's not a microcomputer. (And it costs as much as a
car.) Then what is it? What do you call a single-user minicomputer?
The other, often overlooked category: it's a workstation.
Workstations, for as long as they existed, were personal computer
_like_ devices but typically an order of magnitude more powerful and
an order of magnitude more expensive. They also generally ran what ben
mononym calls a proper OS.
Workstations existed before microcomputers and before personal
computers, and continued happily existing for about 30 more years, but
by the time of 32-bit high-performance PCs with grown-up OSs, they
were teetering, and by the time of commodity _64-bit_ PCs, or
multiprocessor/multicore PCs with OSes that could use that, or of
course both (64-bit multi-core), they were dead.
A workstation wasn't really a type of PC. They exceeded PCs in
specification, in performance, in price, and in sophistication of the
OS... and when PCs caught up, they obliterated workstations because
workstations also exceeded PCs in price by, as I said, at least an
additional zero.
--
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