15 Oct
2012
15 Oct
'12
8:59 a.m.
On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 10:24 AM, Jules Richardson
<jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/13/2012 06:30 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
My recollection is that there was a perceptual divide between "serious
machines for serious business" and "toy machines for playing around
with at home". The following technologies existed abundantly outside
of the IBM-compatible PC realm before being adopted one-by-one
with the claim (suddenly) that these were "must have" technologies.
o Color
o Sound
o Network Interface
o Graphics co-processors
o Multitasking OS
o Input devices other than traditional 'keyboard'
I just remember a lot of "oh... your machine isn't suitable for
business computing; it has X and that means it's only good for playing
games." Each of those technologies eventually worked their way into
the baseline for "the PC" and now, nobody could imagine a "real
computer" without it.
-ethan
On Sat, 13 Oct 2012, TeoZ wrote:
Hmm, I don't know - I think a lot went with color because that's what they
saw their peers/competitors doing. They didn't need it, but once a few had
it, everyone had to have it, because it looked prettier and was "more
modern".
Where have you been, computer games have been driving upgrades since
the DOS era on PC and one of the major reasons people purchased
computers since the Commodore/Atari days.
In the EARLY days of the 5150, "BUSINESS" users went with monochrome.
Then they came back to "upgrade" to color (to run games, but they would
never admit it). To make use of what was there, "256 color accounting"
was developed.