Fred Cisin wrote on Mon, 4 Mar 2013 17:57:09 -0800 (PST):
but the
cheapest computers in the first half of the
1980s cost $100 and were practically useless for anything except
programming in Basic
citation, please
$100 did NOt buy you anything that could run CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple-DOS nor
ANY other operating system.
Isn't this what I had said?
citation, please
My MOTHER was able to find a mass-marketed machine with drive and OS for
$500.
While WE would prefer having language in ROM,
by the 1990s, you could run any languages from disk.
Was it a Commodore Amiga? Things like that were indeed available, but
were on their way out. So you are right - I was oversimplifying the
situation.
You are comparing bottom-of-the-barrel scrapings of
1980s
with upper-end 1990s. The same identical bottom of the barrel still
existed in the 1990s, and the same $2000 had previously existed in the
1980s.
The CHANGE that you claim to observe is simply that in the 1980s, you were
interested in the $100 machines, but in the 1990s, you ignored them, and
refused to acknowledge the existence of anything less than $2000.
The computer market changed MUCH LESS than YOU did.
That is not entirely true. I designed very low cost computers at the
time and so did pay attention to what was happening in Brazil, the USA
and the UK (with some difficulty). I did not have any data for the rest
of the world (except bits and pieces from Japan).
OTOH, it IS true that over time, more and more crap
has been discarded.
There were no computers on the curb on trash day, and now there are.
If you accept the validity of USED stuff, then I can cobble together used
crap with less looking around now than then.
No, I don't count used stuff. I have no problem with it myself and
several of my work machines were given to me by people who were going to
throw them away. But I have a lot of experience with poor people (an
important part of my intended market) and they prefer to not have a
computer at all than to get something that isn't the very latest. So
while a new $12 computer (an 8 bit Nintendo videogame inside a computer
keyboard) instead of a $20 Pentium 4 PC from 2004 is an amazingly stupid
technical choice, it is the most popular one.
Another issue is the lack of uniformity in used machines. I have been
trying to help in a project to reuse computers siezed by the local
government from illegal gambling rings. Inside the machines are regular
PCs, but with lots of different processors (Pentium II to more modern
stuff), lan cards, disks and so on. Installing a simple Linux on them to
run something like Scratch for the children is a lot of work, and
getting it done on one machine doesn't help much with the next. In the
end, it takes up more than $35 worth of our time.
WHY can't they just say, "it's FUN! and
you can cobble together the rest
of what you need to make it usable from the crap that is lying around"
And THAT is fun, too!
But that is exactly what they do say.
By the way, I should explain to the several people commenting in this
thread that I am Raspberry Pi's *competitor*. So while I think I do
understand them, I obviously don't fully agree with them. And I started
designing computers and processors in the late 1970s while in high
school, so I did participate in some of this history and am not someone
who just read about it years later.
-- Jecel