Instantix
Instantix on Hacker News
When you think of it, Apple (and so Jobs) have really missed the mark with the Apple III. The Apple II (1977) was really good with its expandability capacities, its keyboard, its monitor, its floppies drive and its good installed base. It was a very advanced machine. The PC is a kind of copy. So the Apple III (1980) should have been the one which became the market standard. It miserably flopped.
Commodore with the PET (1977) was a pioneer too with a good installed base but the CBM-II (1982) was a poor upgrade which had no internal cards connectors. Not very appealing. And the C64 was not quickly upgraded in the way it could have be.
And those three machines were stuck with the brilliant 6502 (1975) but which did not appeared into a 16 bits version until 1985 thanks to Commodore which did not really invested to develop MOS Technology.
So the choice of the 8088 8/16 bits CPU (1979) by IBM was really a game changer. It made the machine open to the future and viable. Another reason to choose it.
And then Commodore made the A3000 not high enough to take the Video Toaster. How to shoot yourself in the foot...
Not sure all C64 were made equal. Perhaps emulators are based on C64 which had really lavish colours.
3090 second hand can be found at something like $600.
The advantage of the C64 tape recorder was it reliability and the motor being pilot by the computer. With personal tape recorders there was a lot of problems due to heads miss aligned.
In 2024 doing AI @home is clearly a new exciting thing but it require a good budget to be pleasant to use.
Rick Dickinson, the Sinclair designer guy, was simply a genius. It helped a lot for the success, the ZX81 and the Spectrum being just beautiful objects.
On a side note, I think one of the most iconic manual cover for a computer is the ZX81 one. Designed by John Harris, it's a masterpiece. I think he designed the Spectrum manual too but it was not so great.
We had beautiful computers at the time. I would say, in order of appearance, the Atari VCS, the ZX81, the Spectrum, the Commodore C128 and the Amiga 500 (inspired by the C128), the Apple IIc Plus. The original Macintosh eventually. It was just like having a piece of art at home.
The Spectrum Next, still designed by Rick, is beautiful too.
It's me or they did the first karaoke here? In any case the first @home karaoke for sure.
Projects describing the real world. A car have a motor which have pistons. But can be a mess for inappropriate projects for sure.
It can be very useful at the start of a project to synchronize everyone but the over use of it can clearly be a problem.
On the other hand we have the proof that an Airbus can hit another plane when landing and deliver everyone fine.
I agree for an ideal world but the problem is often the wall of the reality i.e. TIME. Levelling the playing field takes time and it's not doable when you have to deliver now, not in a month. So playing at a level sustainable by everyone on the long run is certainly a better and more robust approach.
And perhaps the code was bad just by using a functional approach which nobody master. QED
Are you sure those "smartest developers" would be still smart if they have to maintain someone else abstract code? Easy to memorize layers of abstraction when it follow your own logic and you build it step by step.
Thanks for this post, having a VCS at the time, I was aware of the existence of this cartridge but never get a chance to had one. Today I can finally have a taste of it.
What was great with all those Atari cartridges, was the illustrations. I wonder who was the artist(s). Always inspiring sketches and the guy which is drawn in this manual is not out of place. A real piece of art.
Sometime frameworks are a real help, sometime using it is just making thing bloated and it's hard-linking the future to someone who have the knowledge of the framework.
I didn't know that transputer were made for the Amiga. Some years ago I did some research about the Atari one and the conclusion was: inefficacy. The serial link linking each transputer being a bottleneck. And more transputers you add, more complexity in tasks distribution you add so the performance curve was flattening.
I'm curious to know if multi-core processors were designed with this lesson in mind.
The Spectrum was first a very beautiful object thanks to Rick Dickinson. And, as a side note, he proved with the Spectrum Next, he still have all his talent.
Frankly, to have this object at home in the 80 was classy! A work of art.
And for me it's what define the Spectrum. The main games were not the most beautiful but had a very distinctive and enjoyable touch. A tiny machine but which a lovely and specific spirit. It was a so nice time in my memory.