Re: The apple 2, the PC, and the clones

["Paul Grammens" <grammens@svn.net>]

"Exegete" <millers@noneofyourbusiness.com> wrote
>
> Commodore and Atari lost the home market, but not to Apple. The home
> market was lost to the PC, and it was in the days of the 386 that it was
> lost.
>
> The PC captured the home market when the "clones" did what IBM tried to
> do with the Junior. A machine that allowed you to bring home your work
> and finish it off in the surroundings of your family, and also offered
> great color and sound for games. Once the VGA and SoundBlaster was
> there, the PC was a game machine as well as a productivity box. And ID
> is the company that saw that and took off on it.
>

Yep. That was exactly my situation. I bought the 386 so I could leverage the
computer knowledge I got from work at home. The price/performance was way
ahead of anything else.  And playing ID games was probably the primary use
of that first computer. Many years later, when I got my first IIgs with a
TWGS and hard disk,  I got a real kick out of playing Wolf3D again on that
platform. Frankly, it wasn't as good as on my 386-25 with VGA.

> The strange thing is, that the Tandys, Compaqs and Dells of the day took
> exta hardware to be the great game machine that the IIgs could have
> been, if it only had two things: software, and more speed.
>

Don't forget screen resolution. That 386 I bought in '90 came with SVGA and
a 14" monitor.

>
> >
> > It started several years ago when AMD became a player in the
> > PC market.  Lesser CPU manufacturers like Cyrix and IDT and
> > Rise had come and gone but when AMD introduced the K6-2,
> > decent sub-$1000 PCs with good gaming capabilities became
> > available and the home market exploded.
>
>
> You're off by about 10 years here.
>

I don't know about 10 years, but AMD's 486 chips were terrific buys long
before the K6-2's. I mostly buy AMD chips, because they always give you more
bang for your buck. The 133mhz 486 chips were faster than the more expensive
Intel P-75, for example.
-Paul