ITT: greatest computers in the 70s and 80s

The C64 was better than the Spectrum. The Spectrum had a stupid rubber keyboard, and less RAM. ZX81 was worse. Too poor to get a stick-on keyboard. Worst, worst keyboard ever!

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yep, it was quite horrible.

The Apple III

youtube.com/watch?v=SLRX34ADM2c

Oh great, this thread again.

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>Worst, worst keyboard ever!
Hold my beer

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At least it has something resembling keys

It's like typing on tic tacs.
It hurts your hands.

Call me a psycho, but I always liked these pudgy AIO machines.

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I used to have a 486 Compaq all in one like that, for just general use it was comfy and tidy

what kids today don't understand about computers in the 70's and 80's is that you just couldn't get access to good information. There was no web like today. You'd ride your bike to the library, look all through their computer books, and find just useless bullshit. You'd go to the bookstore, but you couldn't find useful books, or even really know which books would be useful. You'd get the computer home and fuck with it and you'd spend hours typing shit only to see "Syntax Error" over and over and over. It was hacking in a way that kids today really don't understand I don't think.

It was my first computer. Just sat in the corner of my room with a shelf above it for the printer (which vibrated and had to be pushed back every now and then). I even used it when I went to college in the early 00's. I don't think I've ever been as productive as I was when all I had was that machine and Word 5.

floating window manager bloat

World.

that was supposed to be "word"*

It was a computer designed by Americans and sold by an American company.

Yeah but the lards hate it because they missed out on it, out of cluelessness, it never gained popularity there thanks to marketing from the competition.

>Yeah but the lards hate it because they missed out on it
>Amigas were never sold in or available in North America
Excuse me? The TV studios here in Toronto used to always use them with Video Toaster.

Leafs are just mini-me America anyway.

Amiga was ok if you liked playing CRPGs or doodling in DeluxePaint. That was about it though.

Never claimed they weren't sold, just that they didn't gain popularity.
Never claimed Leafs are Lards either.

Why does every Amiga thread turn into Europe vs America retardation? It's always the same thing here or on /vr/.

The biggest downfall of the Amiga was most of its software being made on about a $25 budget.

Americans didn't really care for it because Commodore was incredibly incompetent at marketing it at the height of the PC boom and people mostly disregarded it as a gaming console just like the C64 was before it, something to buy for your kids to keep them off of the real computer you used for productive work where color and sound didn't really matter compared to things like expandability and resolution.

It's obviously not true at all, especially after the 2000 came out, but that's how it was, and Commodore really sucked at turning that stigma around. They didn't have a good name to fill in the gaps or widely appealing killer apps/solutions to draw people to the platform out of necessity until it was too late.

Because of simple-minded trolls making simple-minded inflammatory statements to get attention, because they don't have enough knowledge of the subject to be noticed or "appreciated" otherwise.

Its strengths were in multimedia content, unfortunately the 80s was too early yet for this to be a viable idea and the bread and butter computing tasks like word processing and accounting were areas where Amiga fell short against PCs and Macs.

Because it's fun, you plebs get real triggered by it.

>The MikroMikko line was manufactured in a factory in theKilodistrict ofEspoo
Fuck yeah

PC hardware before about the mid-90s was utter garbage...but it had the big A-list software like Lotus 123 that people wanted. Amiga didn't. Most of what you could get for productivity stuff was crap and you had to use it on a 640x200 resolution screen with 8x8 text. Hard disks and high density floppies were also never properly supported.

>I watched a youtube documentary
kek

Absolutely. Amigas were great multimedia systems... in an era where most people were buying computers for data processing and hard number crunching, something you could certainly do on an Amiga, but it was never the focus nor was the software really quite there for it.
That was only really the case for the early models like the 1000 to my own understanding.
I don't really watch Youtube, I've just hoarded over 200 systems over the years and have played with almost every major platform to date. My Amiga game is still pretty lame, though, but it's really not hard to see why the average American buyer didn't really care for them at face value.

I used 640x512 even on my 1MB A500 with my Philips monitor. Latter in the early/mid 90's a VGA monitor with a cheap scandoubler with my 1200. The 1200 had a built in hard drive from factory and a PC floppy drive that could read HD PC floppies and DD Amiga ones. Good times.
Pretty much everything after Amiga 1000 and 500 supported hard drives out from the factory, either directly on the motherboard or a Zorro card controller.

I think it hasn't aged as well as the C64 for that matter. The problem with being an early multimedia machine is that it invariably feels limited compared to how multimedia computers later became, while with an 8-bit system like an Apple II or C64, the audiovisuals are limited enough that you can use your mind to fill in the blanks a bit.

sinclair's machines literally existed for one purpose: to be cheap as shit and drive prices down
that's it
like, none of them were actually any good, but people bought them because they cost 1/5th of what the competition did
it's like being on the road with a golf cart vs a car

it sold pretty fucking well here, it's just that europoors were literally poor and were still buying it after people started moving to PCs
it's also a slow fucking shit
still dunno how euros got by, the machine wasn't even a full MHz over there

because amiga fanboys are the most annoying faggots in existence
nostalgia nerd?

>because amiga fanboys are the most annoying faggots in existence
They always acted like it was this unbelievable supercomputer that nothing else could touch when the reality was often pretty disappointing.

It was good hardware to be sure, but rarely got the level of software support it deserved. American devs treated it as an afterthought while Euros didn't have the budget to make anything good.

Is that failed bait or are you just utterly retarded?

Only about 1000 were made because socialism doesn't need no computers

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This is Jow Forums though, everyone here is a 20 year old shitposter or hipster, the Amiga fags keep into shitholes like amiga.org, etc and avoid flamewards like EU vs US because they share too much hardware between the continents.

By about 1992 you ended up with Amiga games that spanned ten floppies and you couldn't install them on a hard disk.

Most of those games had HD install option though, specially in the early 90's.

B A S I C . 1 . 0
A
S
E
D

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I have a PC game that will check for a weak sector on it's floppy and refuse to work elsewhere

True, most are multiplats, some of them have their definitive version on the Amiga though. There's maybe a dozen good games that are Amiga exclusive.
As for the rest of the software, most is hobby software. No real modern office or productivity software that isn't very basic, outside of a few packages, like DPaint and some 3D and CAD software. Also trackers I guess.

>Crazymotion BASIC

Some Amiga arcade ports were excellent, others were utterly horrifying.

The ultimate sin Commodore committed was still having one button joysticks on the thing.

640x512 @ 50i was flickery hell compared to VGA modes. (and Atari ST high res ;^)

No? The monitor did flicker fixing. Plus later the scandoubler did the same.

Yeah, as someone more into workstations and really high-end hardware from around that time I always roll my eyes at Amiga shills when they try to throw a single-user 68000 machine that does 16 colors at 640x200 at me like it's some kind of mind-altering alien technology.

I still like the computers and still think those capabilities are great in context, but they hardly blow me away. Commodore just directed more effort into improving those capabilities in an affordable manner than IBM, Apple or most other professional computer vendors did at the time, since most of their users that actually needed color or sound for whatever they were doing were usually more than able (and needed) to front the money for the more expensive high-end color graphics options or just bought a workstation to begin with.

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Sadly I never used these high end computers back in the day so I don't really care about them other than their technical perspective. Lets face it, this is mostly nostalgia, the Amiga was there for us and did thing it's competition sometimes couldn't, at least turning it's hayday.
Same for the other computers we used.

youtube.com/watch?v=kDs0hP4JYJs

This just looks like a VGA PC game from the early 90s with less color. I've also felt that the NES has held up better than the 16-bit consoles because the latter were at the point where audiovisuals became just good enough to date badly, because there was less "let your mind fill in the blanks" like on 8-bit hardware.

>mfw my hobby got ruined by soiGR

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fucking based. the cpc is easily the best 8 bit microcomputer

Yeah I hate that guy too.

I feel that the thing had some questionable design choices, namely the 16k graphics page that eats one quarter of your memory and has no hardware acceleration so games are like trying to steer a cement truck.

As I understand, the Amstrad CPC's graphics were similar to the Apple II DHGR mode.

Nothing wrong with that, man. If you sent me back in time to the late '80s and threw a 2000 on my desk, I wouldn't complain at all. I like the high-end shit the most, but I also firmly believe almost every single machine back then had its proper place, and a niche where it could excel, and plenty of other things it could do just the way you wanted.

Twats like OP that try to start dick fights about dead platforms grind my gears, though. Why can't we just fucking enjoy it instead of worrying about who was better than who?

Fuck yeah, it's amazing what people still manage to do with it

youtube.com/watch?v=HVv-oBN6AWA

I think so, but DHGR Apple II software practically always required 128k because of the huge memory demands of the mode. The Amstrad CPC had only 64k.

>no point: the post
nice

It came out in 84, which was awfully late for a new 8-bit machine.

>the machine wasn't even a full MHz over there
Come back when you mastered 3rd grade mathematics.

Yeh most later 8-bit machines like the C128, TRS-80 CoCo 3, and Spectrum 128 were just extensions of existing hardware rather than something completely new.

For what it's also worth, 1985 was the last year in which sales of 8-bit computers exceeded sales of 16-bit ones.

Other than the A500, Commodore did not manage to produce a single viable machine after the C64.

it's unfortunate because that brought along tons of choppy crap but it still had lots of great software. rick dangerous 1 and 2 on the cpc are easily the best 8 bit ports
I can't wait for them to finally release this. it feels like I've been waiting for an eternity

>Come back when you mastered 3rd grade mathematics.
...the 985kHz PAL C64 isn't less than 1MHz?

On the Amstrad you maybe had a little more leeway because it was a Z80 machine and Z80 code is more compact than 6502 code.

You probably looked at anons picture and saw a C64, but he said "amiga 500". See:

The Xerox alto

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The machines were viable, since they were pretty much selling themselves, the problem was that their marketing wasn't viable, the Amiga period, even the Amiga 1000, was after Jack Tramiel had left and a lot of internal restructuring was done.

>1973
This machine will be 46 years old in a few weeks.
Truly amazing what was possible, but came only decades later onto the mass market.

Yeah and the funny thing is Xerox had it sitting in storage for a while and didn't know what to do with it

The manufacturing method for all that crap needed for it weren't really as viable turning it's brith to even turn it into a mass produced consumer machine, they did build them and sell them in a limited number though, usually to universities or high ranking computer scientists. Mind you the Lisa came out 10 years latter and was a bulky thing.
It was still used by the research center themselves to build upon many other things we take for granted today though.

But yeah, Xerox could have made more money off it than they did, they just didn't realize what they had, at the last the high up guys.

That's like Ampex inventing the VCR and perceiving there to be no market for it so they let the Japanese take it and run with it.

Sup, Jow Forums.

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The Amiga's failure in the American market, summed up in one post.

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What monitor did flicker fixing?

I think I'm with that guy who already replied to you. I think the systems themselves definitely had all the right ingredients to be viable even if the factory configurations lagged behind the competition, but the marketing was just terrible, and that cascaded into everything else.

Holy fucking shit I'm actually laughing in tears right now.
Thanks user.

He only deals with Wintel though.

>Mind you the Lisa came out 10 years latter and was a bulky thing.
Shit, it's not like the Mac would have been any different had they decided to provision it for an internal hard disk and a larger monitor.

I'm pretty sure a lot of the Alto internals were wire-wrapped if I remember right, definitely not something for a mass-produced consumer system. But I think that even if Xerox had bothered to try and commercialize the technology first, we would have still gotten something expensive and niche like the Star, but just sooner. Hell, we already kind of got that timeline going with the PERQ that came out long before the Lisa and was basically a more mass production-friendly shit brown Alto, and you can see how many people remember that thing existed.

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>You'd go to the bookstore, but you couldn't find useful books, or even really know which books would be useful.

then you'd go to the newsagent's and find about a hundred different computer enthusiast magazines, with pages of example code, lists of user groups and bbses.

Fagsame

You wish :v)

No, user just made a good joke.

True. Thinking about all this makes me wonder how cool it would have been to work in a research center like PARC that's literally all R&D with free founds and free hands. Those guys must have been real lucky to literally come up with shit and try and test.

What happened to the PanaCAL ET (and by extension BTRON) is still incredibly depressing.

>Nip engineers invent TRON in 1984 with the goal of providing a fast, accessible, open and unified digital infrastructure, improve on it in following years and eventually come up with BTRON, a version of TRON for PC applications
>TRON and its variants (especially ITRON, the industrial subarchitecture) spread like wildfire through the Japanese market because it's dirt-cheap, insanely flexible and is very good at playing nice
>By 1989 the Japanese government has decided to switch the computers in their schools from MS-DOS to BTRON machines; the prototype machine unveiled was called the PanaCAL ET and was capable of displaying moving color video on a separate display while using an Intel chip from 1982 and 2MB of RAM
>Microsoft and other American software companies REEEEE
>US trade commissioner threatens to completely ban any all goods incorporating TRON from import, which at this point is most Japanese electronics with embedded systems
>Nips knuckle under and abandon the switch
>Through what is surely pure coincidence the threat came through Tom Robertson, an official in the US trade office in Japan who had recently been offered an executive position at Microsoft and still fucking works there

I can't even find a picture of the damn thing and at this point I don't even know if one exists.

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