Cameron Kaiser wrote:
ITYM "arstechnica" (note second C) ;)
I wonder where they got the tidbit that IBM was planning to rebadge the
Atari 800 as their "personal computer" originally. Is that true??
I'm happy to see a history, even a relatively vapid (though it seems
quite factual) one, that still acknowledges Atari and Commodore. Despite
being a Mac user now, with some of the retrospectives out there you'd
figure that IBM and Apple were the only companies that *ever* made computers.
<soapbox>
It'd be nice to see that article written from a global perspective.
It's a little irritating when people write "this is the way it was" accounts
of history when what they're actually doing is writing down "this is the way
it was in a single country" - it tends to come across as though none of the
other countries in the world made any contribution to the evolution of computing.
Us vintage enthusiasts know that isn't true and that innovation came from all
over, but the wider audience who read the article may not appreciate it.
</soapbox>