Why did microcomputers die off?

On Mon, Dec 23, 2013 at 12:00 PM, BE Arnold <bearnold at outlook.com> wrote: Go back and read Byte from the late 1970s through the mid 1980s. Look at the architecture in the articles and read the ads. Business computing for that market (i.e., below mini-computers) was largely S-100-based or an Apple II with a CP/M card. Not long after the PC clones hit the market, and I mean a few months, you can see PC compatibles displacing CP/M and S-100 hardware. It didn't go entirely away right away, but by 1985, look how spares it is compared to 4 years earlier. Home computing, as you described the category, was, by 1978, heavily Apple, Commodore, and TRS-80, then Atari joined in, and all grew dramatically while the other vendors (Ohio Scientific, Quest, etc., etc) didn't and eventually faded away. There were not that many S-100 in the same price belt as Commodore and Atari, which was part of why there was a split in the hobbyist market (as well as age - I went to meetings in the mid-1970s and saw lots of S-100 machines in the hands of middle-aged engineers who could afford them, but the younger crowd was more likely to zoom in on a machine with BASIC in ROM and cassette for primary storage because they were less expensive and there was no requirement to be compatible with older stuff). The big shift I saw was a few years after the PC came out. When it came out, Apple and Commodore, and to a lesser extent Atari and Radio Shack, dominated computers in the home. In that environment, hobbyists were often using DOS on a PC at work and whatever they already had at home. When the clones came out, bringing the price of a DOS- compatible into the Apple II price range, that's what people chose as their next machine, and suddenly, there were PCs in the home that weren't the PCjr that IBM envisioned would be the way in. To cite a personal data point, in 1984, I was writing kids software for the Commodore 64, Apple II, and BBC Micro. We tentatively began to support the PC, but sales of our product were consistently for the home models. At the time (around the era of DOS 2.1), there just weren't as many PCs in homes with children as there were Apples and C-64s. Two years later it was a different landscape. There started to be a lot more PC clones as home computers. As I mentioned - you can see these trends in the ads and articles in publications like Byte from 1976-1985. -ethan