Hence the quote "there is MS DOS compatible, PC DOS compatible, and FlightSimulator Compatibe, in increasing orders of difficulty."

Later 'Jet' provided some test indication as well. I was always amazed because CP/M machines were all different sort of by design, it was the sheer quantity of the original 5150 PC that made it worth specializing for that target. I later owned an Epson QX-10 with an "MS-DOS" card. And simply MS-DOS compatible ran hardly any software at all!

This is why, despite growing up a Commodore kid, I've never really sat and wondered about the "could have been" very much like some people have... even if Commodore had survived they would have been in ever-growing trouble with their architecture and there's no reason to believe that whatever they put out in, say, 1995 would be any particularly better or worse than what we really got, because it would pretty much be a full rewrite anyhow.

Might have fared exactly like Apple in the 90s? Trying to push a 80s architecture and system in 1999?

And part of my point is precisely that in the subsequent rewrite, the OS-level specialness of Apple is now essentially gone. (Apple itself of course has a distinct identity.) While I do not necessarily believe where we are today is completely inevitable, I do also tend to think that it's an awfully strong local optima. (People often come up with radical ideas for alternate approaches but IMHO have a hard time proving alternate approaches are generally better, as opposed to better for a very particular use case.)

Why didn't this work out for high-end Android handsets? They are in a similar situation.

By 'this' do you mean why didn't Android completely beat iPhone? Similar reason to why the Mac is making a comeback. The hardware market has changed.

In the 80s / 90s, computers were very expensive and it was common to only buy exactly what you needed. PCs excelled at this. Everything was an option: Video card (MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA), ram, hard drive, hard drive controller, serial port controller, sound card. If you later needed more capabilities you upgraded whatever was necessary.

As computers became cheaper, upgrading began to make less financial sense. Upgrading a component and paying for it to be installed became almost equal to the cost of a new computer. There also became less to upgrade, onboard sound, network, etc was good enough. The only thing left to upgrade was CPU (but usually required a new motherboard) and video card. Upgradability which was originally a huge selling point became a niche feature.

As integration continued, size, weight, power consumption all became more important than upgradability / customization. Hardware wise, all Android phones and the iPhone are pretty much the same.

I wonder how long throwing away 'computers' after a year or two of use will remain common for us in the first world.

Does technology get the credit for the difference between the 80s, or is it some mix of the current balance of geo-politics, interconnected global trade, wage arbitrage that still allows slavery in the supply chain, and free interest rates (in the case of Europe, negative)?

May be in the end game biodegradable 'computanium' that is killed and reborn daily right before it becomes obsolete?

It still feels very strange and disturbing to throw away something less than a decade old much less two years.

I tend to retire my machines to less demanding or suitable tasks. A Mac Pro 2006 (with a Cinema Display from 2000) is still going strong as a studio music computer running Logic Pro X (essentially a Hackintosh on Mac hardware, as Apple stopped supporting them). A MacBook from 2005 drives a TV with streaming video (although it needs retiring now).

It is harder with smartphones, but I have older phones being guest map and GPS devices.

It is only common in countries where people go for contracts like US.

In many countries people pay full price for handsets and use pre-paid cards. In no way you see them replacing their mobiles every two years.

> May be in the end game biodegradable 'computanium' that is killed and reborn daily right before it becomes obsolete?

Server side from the client perspective, that's effectively what "the cloud" really is.

Android has too many other stumbling blocks that make this sort of social innovation happen - in Androids' case, I believe, there are far, far too many clones with variance in the implementation of the standard that make it impractical to target the broader platform for such tricks.

One the one hand. On the other hand, getting newer Android releases running on, for example, the G1DEV phone is an example of how this ethos has persisted, even on Android.

thanks for this, fascinating