C-64 vs the world (vintage flamebait) (was Re: Micro$oft Biz'droid Lusers)

--- Richard Erlacher <edick(a)idcomm.com> wrote: OK. A little before I remember them, but I'll concede the date. I will debate the term "clone" for a machine that came out before the machine it supposedly is a knock-off of. I will accept that there were Korean '286 boxes before IBM had one. Were they 100% AT- compatible, or did they jump the gun? This is a serious question; I personally have no knowledge of them. And where did Amiga crop up in this? We were discussing the C-64. Why are you dragging the Amiga into the fray? No... the A1000 came out in late 1985, IIRC, for $1,100, 7.something MHz 68000 processor (32-bit registers, 16MB flat address space, unlike the 80286), 256KB RAM, 4096 colors, stereo sound, 3.5" 880KB floppy, 15KHz RGB monitor, serial port, printer port, two mouse/game ports, two-button mouse. Extra 256KB of RAM was approx $100. I got mine in early 1986 for $850, new, without monitor, but with everything else (still have it, too, but with an extra 2.5MB RAM, SCSI, dual ROM socket, Rejuvinator, etc.) That's how it was equipped when it first came out. It is roughly contemporary with the widespread availability (not first release) of the PC-AT. When the Amiga came out, there were lots and lots of PC-XTs and quite a few PC-ATs in the real world. This question shows that you consider all IBM PCs and PC clones to be interchangable and undifferentiated. Was the PC-AT available in 1981? How much did _it_ cost? At least the C-64 was virtually unchanged from 1982 onward (barring a motherboard cost-redesign and a slightly modified sound chip) The "PC" changed every 3 years...PC, XT, AT, 386SX, 386DX, 486, Pentium, etc., etc., etc. Not that this is a bad thing, but it means that you cannot compare machines without clearly specifying the year and what you are models you are comparing. Most is not all. I knew plenty of those people, too. At the company I worked at from 1984 onward, we all had at least one VT100-class terminal (some DEC, some CIToH) on our desk and not a PC in sight, with two exceptions over the years - one 5150 (still have _it_, too) attached to a 68000-bus analyzer in the engineering department (c. 1983-1984) and one PS/2 Model 30 in the accounting department (c. 1986; not too sure about that) - and, you guessed it, I have _that_ as well (there is, in fact, little from that company that I _didn't_ get when they went bust, including 3 MicroVAXen, 3 Unibus and BI VAXen, numerous PDP-11s, two Straight-8s, etc...) Nevertheless, in company after company, people did have a 5150 or better on their desk at work after 1981, and I assert that that more than any other factor drove them into peoples' homes. Why buy a $500 word processor when you can steal one from work? Why learn two computers when you can get by with one? I expect that was typical. Absolutely, except for brand-name die hards who _did_ pay the $5K. I met several of them who wanted to run Windows 3.1 on their $5,000 computer and were horrified that they could not. "I just paid thousands of dollars for this..." I heard over and over. -ethan __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Games - play chess, backgammon, pool and more http://games.yahoo.com/