30 Sep
2005
30 Sep
'05
3:37 p.m.
At 2:32 PM +0100 9/30/05, Liam Proven wrote:
Until the rise of the PC, European microcomputers and
American ones
evolved in quite different directions - mainly because American ones
were too damned expensive for us in the Old World so we used cheaper,
more efficient machines. I bought train tickets in Amsterdam in 1990
from a woman using an Atari ST workstation; they were the kit of the
whole Centraal station, as far as I could see. I knew labs and
businesses as well as schools in Britain entirely based on Acorn
32-bit RISC micros running RISC OS - even the Acorn licensed Unix,
RISC-IX, was too expensive. I believe Amigas as well as STs were very
widespread in Germany. Serious (& rich, back then) British DTP types
used Macs and still do.
The interesting thing here is, both the Amiga and the Atari were US
computers. Yet, if anything, they were more popular in Europe,
especially in the UK and Germany (today most anything for either
platform tends to come out of one of these two countries).
As for the Acorn, did it ever get exported anywhere? I know they
never really made it here to the US. Another good example would be
the Sinclair, except for the little Timex-Sinclair system that was
out at about the same time as the VIC-20, or a little before, I don't
think any Sinclair models made it to the US (I have one, but it came
from a list member a few years ago).
Sadly for way to long, the US has been either PC or Mac, and this
tended to be true, even when the Atari and Amiga were available.
Zane
--
--
| Zane H. Healy | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary) | OpenVMS Enthusiast |
| | Classic Computer Collector |
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