Speaker 1: Get in text with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works and I love all things tech and
Speaker 1: a few weeks ago a listener wrote in and asked
Speaker 1: me to do an episode about a somewhat obscure personal
Speaker 1: computer from the nineteen eighties, at least obscure if you're
Speaker 1: from the United States, as I am. If you're from
Speaker 1: the UK, you may be more familiar with it. But
Speaker 1: after I looked into it, I realized there really wasn't
Speaker 1: quite enough information for me to do a full episode
Speaker 1: and and have something that actually feels like a full
Speaker 1: tech Stuff episode, but didn't inspire me to dedicate a
Speaker 1: few shows to some of the early personal computers out
Speaker 1: there that competed directly with the big names that eventually
Speaker 1: went out in the consumer market. So this episode is
Speaker 1: going to be about those machines and the stories behind them. Now, today,
Speaker 1: when you think about personal computers, you probably separate them
Speaker 1: into two big categories Mac and Windows machines, or maybe
Speaker 1: you say Max and PCs, but I usually say Windows
Speaker 1: machines because Honestly, I think max are personal computers. To
Speaker 1: PC is a term that IBM kind of coined, but
Speaker 1: we really just talk about those being computers that you
Speaker 1: would use at home, like one person at a time
Speaker 1: uses it. We use a shorthand for the general form factor.
Speaker 1: There are, of course, other operating systems out there besides
Speaker 1: mac os and Windows. There are lots of different Linux
Speaker 1: distributions obviously, but I'm talking about the broad categories that
Speaker 1: the general public would identify in the market. So you
Speaker 1: don't tend to run across anything apart from mac os
Speaker 1: and Windows. For the general public, You power users out there,
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not including you in the general public.
Speaker 1: Your your laked, okay, so just just just embrace your lateness. Now,
Speaker 1: those two big names, Mac and PCs grew out of
Speaker 1: the tumultuous early days of personal computing. The Mac is
Speaker 1: a descendant of the Apple computer line, the Apple one
Speaker 1: and then really the Apple too, uh, and then later
Speaker 1: on of course the Macintosh computer. Windows machines trace their
Speaker 1: history back to Doss based personal computers such as the
Speaker 1: IBM PCs and their numerous clones. And in the next
Speaker 1: couple of episodes, I'll dive further into the stories behind
Speaker 1: how Apple struggled to stay relevant before it experienced a
Speaker 1: real renaissance, and how IBM came about with their personal
Speaker 1: computer and the clones that helped really define what PCs were.
Speaker 1: That will be in the next couple of episodes. But
Speaker 1: there were many other computers that companies introduced in the
Speaker 1: late seventies and throughout the eighties, and some of them
Speaker 1: you've probably heard of if you you may have owned
Speaker 1: or have had a chance to play with. But I
Speaker 1: hope you hear about at least a couple that are
Speaker 1: new to you. So what was the first personal computer.
Speaker 1: Well that's a matter of some debate, but you could
Speaker 1: argue somewhat convincingly that it was the micro in computer,
Speaker 1: which was created by friend Sui Garnell. It became available
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy three. They used an Intel eight zero
Speaker 1: zero eight microchip as its processor. Now, this chip was
Speaker 1: an eight bit CPU that could address sixteen kilobytes of memory. Now,
Speaker 1: this was certainly the first non kit computer that ran
Speaker 1: off a microprocessor that anyone could buy if you happen
Speaker 1: to have the one thousand, seven hundred fifty dollars or
Speaker 1: so that it cost, and remember that's nineteen seventy three dollars. Well,
Speaker 1: there was a computer that actually preceded the micro in
Speaker 1: that some might put forth as a contender for the
Speaker 1: first personal computer. But it did not run off a microprocessor.
Speaker 1: It had several chips that served the purpose of a
Speaker 1: processing unit, and it debuted in nineteen seventy one. However,
Speaker 1: only fifty of those were ever made, and without a microprocessor,
Speaker 1: it's hard to compare it against the computers that would
Speaker 1: follow it. So I really look at the micro in
Speaker 1: as maybe the first. Many of the earliest personal computers
Speaker 1: weren't sold in electronics stores or even as prebuilt machines.
Speaker 1: You would order a kit. You would get all the
Speaker 1: parts and some instructions, and then you'd busy yourself in
Speaker 1: your workspace with various tools and lights to put everything
Speaker 1: together in the hopes that you got it right. The
Speaker 1: Altare eight hundred was such a kit. Micro Instrumentation and
Speaker 1: Telemetry Systems or m I t S MITS was the
Speaker 1: company responsible for the design and marketing of this early
Speaker 1: personal computer. MITS had made calculators in the nineteen seventies.
Speaker 1: The Altar eight eight hundred gave hobbyoists their first real
Speaker 1: chance to own an actual computer. Up to that point,
Speaker 1: computers were big and expensive machines that mostly belonged to
Speaker 1: research organizations or universities or corporations, not individuals. The Altar
Speaker 1: kit came with a power supply. It came with a
Speaker 1: back plane that served as a motherboard, and five cards
Speaker 1: that would plug into that backplane, including the CPU, which
Speaker 1: was an Intel eight eight microchip, and there was also
Speaker 1: a card containing RAM to the tune of two fifty
Speaker 1: six bytes, not kill a bytes or megabytes, just just bites.
Speaker 1: And it had a lid that covered the sides and
Speaker 1: the top of the computer with a front panel that
Speaker 1: had switches and lights on it. Those switches were input
Speaker 1: devices and the light was the output device, as in
Speaker 1: no display, no printer, little lights that would light up
Speaker 1: on the front to indicate the results of whatever it
Speaker 1: was you were programming. So if you wanted to program
Speaker 1: the earliest version of the ALTA hundred, you'd use the
Speaker 1: switches to code in binary. Now, remember a computers read
Speaker 1: information in zeros and ones, So each switch had a
Speaker 1: position that represented zero and a second position that represented one,
Speaker 1: and you'd have to move them into whichever position to
Speaker 1: represent the value you wanted, then hit another switch to
Speaker 1: load that set of instructions into the outear's memory before
Speaker 1: going on to the next line of code. This was,
Speaker 1: as you could probably imagine, a somewhat laborious process. I mean,
Speaker 1: you have to remember that a single character could take
Speaker 1: an entire byte of information as eight bits, so just
Speaker 1: to do one character it gets pretty tiresome to do
Speaker 1: this bit by bit literally, and when you were done,
Speaker 1: the output you would get would be in the form
Speaker 1: of those lights flashing up on the panel. And later
Speaker 1: mits offered kits that included paper tape readers, allowing you
Speaker 1: to code on tape first and then feed it into
Speaker 1: the ALTE hundred rather than moving switches manually. Later still
Speaker 1: there were kits capable of sending information to a very
Speaker 1: low resolution screen capable of showing twenty four lines of
Speaker 1: eight characters, all an upper case, so it was always
Speaker 1: shouting at you. If you had the patients and the knowledge,
Speaker 1: you could program these machines to carry out certain tasks,
Speaker 1: but they fall far short of what we think of
Speaker 1: when we consider personal computers today. So rather than go
Speaker 1: through all of the early machines that relied on switches
Speaker 1: and lights for input and output. How about we skip
Speaker 1: ahead of bit and get to a form factor. We
Speaker 1: tend to associate with personal computers, and by that I
Speaker 1: mean a computational device that uses a keyboard for input
Speaker 1: and a display for its primary output. Just know that
Speaker 1: there were other computers out there that did not have
Speaker 1: those luxuries that you could go out and buy or order.
Speaker 1: Usually it was a mail order that you would do,
Speaker 1: and you might get a readout from a panel of lights,
Speaker 1: are printed page from paper tape instead of having a display.
Speaker 1: Just know that those did exist. I'm not going to
Speaker 1: go through all of them because it would just sound
Speaker 1: like a weird catalog from Night teen seventy six. The
Speaker 1: computers that incorporate keyboards and displays had a much wider appeal.
Speaker 1: They seemed less intimidating than their predecessors, more accessible. In
Speaker 1: other words, the early personal computers were still very much
Speaker 1: in the world of hobbyists, as very few average consumers
Speaker 1: had much experience with computers or any idea of what
Speaker 1: they would do with one if they got one. I
Speaker 1: do have to mention one thing that Altaire did end
Speaker 1: up doing. It was the launchpad for a multibillion dollar
Speaker 1: company because the Altaire inspired two guys named Paul Allen
Speaker 1: and Bill Gates to write a basic compiler. It's to
Speaker 1: compile code for this computer for the Altaire. They founded
Speaker 1: a company called micro Soft had a hyphen in the
Speaker 1: middle back in those days, and it was called that
Speaker 1: because it was micro for micro computers. That was the
Speaker 1: class of computers. These sort of things were considered, and
Speaker 1: then Soft obviously for software. In nineteen seventy six, another
Speaker 1: famous pair of people, this time Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs,
Speaker 1: introduced a kit based computer called the Apple one. The
Speaker 1: kit was pretty much on mother board and you had
Speaker 1: to go out and purchase this power supply and a keyboard.
Speaker 1: Not to mention you had to build or or find
Speaker 1: a case for the thing. You just had sort of
Speaker 1: the guts of the Apple one. Otherwise, it didn't take
Speaker 1: the world by storm, but its successor, the Apple two,
Speaker 1: definitely did. And then when we were off to the
Speaker 1: races for home computers, and in the next episode, I
Speaker 1: will definitely talk more about the Apple two and its
Speaker 1: effect on personal computers and the marketplace. That same year,
Speaker 1: at the Altaire convention, engineers demonstrated the very first video
Speaker 1: display module. This was a memory mapped alpha numeric video
Speaker 1: display for personal computers. This component is what made it
Speaker 1: possible to create interactive games and other types of software
Speaker 1: for home computers. Short after the debut of the Apple
Speaker 1: two came the t r S a d TRS stood
Speaker 1: for Tandy Radio Shack. The Tandy Corporation started off as
Speaker 1: a leather goods company. In fact, there still is a
Speaker 1: Tandy leather company. But the Tandy Corporation expanded well beyond
Speaker 1: leather goods, diversifying as it grew, and one of the
Speaker 1: companies it purchased in nineteen sixty three was Radio Shack.
Speaker 1: These days, the company that was the Tandy Corporation is
Speaker 1: now the Radio Shack Corporation. This, by the way, was
Speaker 1: not completely unheard of. There was another company that started
Speaker 1: off doing something that uh it is now is no
Speaker 1: longer known for. So that would be Nintendo, that started
Speaker 1: off as a playing card company and of course now
Speaker 1: is known as a video game console and title company. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the Tandy Corporation introduced the TRS eight and nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: seven the keyboard How's the actual computer, and this would
Speaker 1: become a form factor common among those early computers where
Speaker 1: rather than having a separate keyboard and like a CPU
Speaker 1: tower the way desktops today typically have, the whole thing
Speaker 1: was in one big case. You had a keyboard and
Speaker 1: it was attached physically to a case that that contained
Speaker 1: the CPU, the memory, the motherboard, all of those components
Speaker 1: would be inside it, so you would look like just
Speaker 1: a giant, clunky keyboard. Uh. The t R S A
Speaker 1: D also came with a separate monochromatic monitor, meaning only
Speaker 1: one color on their you know, it's just black and white.
Speaker 1: He also came with a cassette drive. The cassette drivee
Speaker 1: was your data storage device. So you would put a
Speaker 1: cassette into the drive and you could save data to
Speaker 1: it or read data from it. And when I say
Speaker 1: a cassette drive, I mean very much like an audio cassette,
Speaker 1: you know, if you had an old tape player. The
Speaker 1: cassette drives for these old computers were essentially the same thing.
Speaker 1: They were just storing the information magnetically on the tape
Speaker 1: inside the cassette, and the drive would read from it
Speaker 1: as if it were the same as a music based cassette.
Speaker 1: Now you may think, well, that sounds like it might
Speaker 1: be really hard to locate a specific piece of code
Speaker 1: that you've saved to that particular cassette, and you'd be right.
Speaker 1: It's doing it all sequentially, So that takes quite some
Speaker 1: time to track down a specific bit of code. But
Speaker 1: that was a relatively inexpensive solution to figure out how
Speaker 1: you could save media from a computer onto something that's physical.
Speaker 1: The computer's microprocessor was from a company called Zilog z
Speaker 1: I l O G. That company launched in ninety six,
Speaker 1: and the processor was called the z A D CPU.
Speaker 1: That's what powered the TRS A D. It was Zlog's
Speaker 1: first commercial product. It was based off the Intel A
Speaker 1: D E D processor. One of the co founders of
Speaker 1: Zilog was at Rico Fagen, who had previously worked for Intel.
Speaker 1: The company developed not only the CPU, but also an
Speaker 1: assimilar based development system for the chip and the chips
Speaker 1: clock speed, which is the speed that a processor can
Speaker 1: run operations at, was one point seven seven mega hurts.
Speaker 1: That then it could essentially run one point seven seven
Speaker 1: million operations per second. That's oversimplifying, but generally speaking, that's
Speaker 1: all you can understand it. It had four kilobytes of RAM,
Speaker 1: which a later version of that computer would boast up
Speaker 1: to sixteen kilobytes of RAM, and the operating system for
Speaker 1: the computer was basic. As in the actual operating system
Speaker 1: all caps be a S I C Basic. The whole
Speaker 1: thing cost five and nine cents, and that included the monitor.
Speaker 1: A year after Tandy debut the home computer, it launched
Speaker 1: a disk drive for four hundred dollars. At that point,
Speaker 1: the disk drive costs more than the basic computer system
Speaker 1: that that you could buy without the monitors. So if
Speaker 1: you just went out and bought a computer and you
Speaker 1: didn't need a monitor, that would cost you four hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: The disk drive would cost you four dollars. That tells
Speaker 1: you how expensive those peripherals were in those early days.
Speaker 1: Tandy also offered an expansion interface for two d ninety
Speaker 1: nine dollars. It had a printer port to tape drive
Speaker 1: connectors up to thirty two kilobytes of additional RAM, a
Speaker 1: serial port, and more. Tandy reportedly didn't have high hopes
Speaker 1: for the sales of the TRS eighty. They thought, well,
Speaker 1: this is an interesting product, but we don't know if
Speaker 1: there's a market there. The company was surprised when in
Speaker 1: the first month alone, they sold ten thousand units. Within
Speaker 1: a year or two, the company offered a slightly more
Speaker 1: advanced model. Not everything was smooth sailing for Tandy, however,
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty Tandy discontinued the Model one TRS eighty,
Speaker 1: and it's not the as of sales or because the
Speaker 1: computer was obsolete at that point. They could have technically
Speaker 1: kept selling it except for the fact that the f
Speaker 1: c C had some words for Tandy. They had formed
Speaker 1: some new rules about computers, and the old design that
Speaker 1: Tandy had with the Model one violated those rules. Specifically,
Speaker 1: the Model one generated a radio frequency emissions in excess
Speaker 1: of f c C guidelines, meaning if you had a
Speaker 1: Model one and it happened to be near a radio
Speaker 1: or a TV set, it could actually cause all sorts
Speaker 1: of interference. Tandy would make several other computers, including the
Speaker 1: Model to, the Model three, the Model sixteen, and the
Speaker 1: Model one hundred. Later it would introduce the Model For
Speaker 1: another reason the numbers jump around is that the Model
Speaker 1: six team in the Model one were departures from the
Speaker 1: design of the earlier tr S A D computers, but
Speaker 1: it does show that the conceit of creating a numbering
Speaker 1: or naming system for your computers and then abandoning it
Speaker 1: dates all the way back to the earliest day of
Speaker 1: personal computers. So while I often will joke about Windows
Speaker 1: eight jumping straight to Windows ten and skipping Windows nine
Speaker 1: and all these other sort of like iPhone eight going
Speaker 1: to iPhone ten, these kind of ideas, it turns out
Speaker 1: this is not a new thing. It's been around sense
Speaker 1: the earliest days of personal computers. Eventually, Tandy would produce
Speaker 1: an IBM compatible computer called the Tandy one thousand. More
Speaker 1: on that in our IBM clone episode that will be
Speaker 1: coming up not too long from now. Tandy would produce
Speaker 1: more computers in that IBM compatible line and sell them
Speaker 1: through radio shack stores. But eventually the company sold off
Speaker 1: its computer division to another entity, a st Computers in
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties, and that was that for Tandy. Now,
Speaker 1: I've got a lot more to say about some of
Speaker 1: those early computers from various companies, but before I jump
Speaker 1: into it, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Getting back to nineteen seventy seven, that was the same
Speaker 1: year that the TRS eight Model one came out. Another
Speaker 1: company was getting into the home computer business at that
Speaker 1: same time, and that company was Commodore. Now, Commodore had
Speaker 1: started back in the nineteen fifties as a portable typewriter company.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen sixties they began to produce adding machines
Speaker 1: and later on calculators. And in the nineteen seventies there
Speaker 1: was an engineer named Chuck Pedal who had worked for
Speaker 1: a company Commodore had acquired, who convinced the founder of Commodore,
Speaker 1: Jack Tramiel, that home computers were the next big market,
Speaker 1: and he even had a design in mind for what
Speaker 1: would become Commodore's first personal computer. That computer was called
Speaker 1: the PET two thousand one. According to Commodore, the letters
Speaker 1: PET stood for Personal Electronic Transactor. There are those who
Speaker 1: believe that that's a bit of a fab racation, and
Speaker 1: that the company came up with the name PET first
Speaker 1: and then just went back and made it an acronym later.
Speaker 1: This particular computer had a microprocessor that was designed by
Speaker 1: MS Technologies or Most Technologies if you prefer. Commodore had
Speaker 1: purchased this company, and Pedal, the guy who proposed this
Speaker 1: whole idea, had been an engineer for Most Technologies, So
Speaker 1: the chips designation was the six five zero two CPU.
Speaker 1: This is an incredibly important microprocessor because it was the
Speaker 1: one that powered lots of early computers, not just the
Speaker 1: Commodore machines, but then other devices like the Apple two computer,
Speaker 1: so it was a big deal. The six five O
Speaker 1: two CPU, however, was not a superpowerhouse. It was a
Speaker 1: one mega Hurts processor. Uh. The PET computer had four
Speaker 1: kilobytes of RAM. Later models would knock that up to
Speaker 1: eight kilobytes, and it also had a built in screen.
Speaker 1: So at a casual glance, the PET look like it
Speaker 1: was one of those big, clunky keyboards I was talking
Speaker 1: about just a minute ago, with a small monitor perched
Speaker 1: on top of the case. But in fact it was
Speaker 1: all a single unit and you didn't wouldn't remove the
Speaker 1: monitor from the case. It was all molded together. It
Speaker 1: also had a built in cassette drive for loading and
Speaker 1: reading data, and like the TRS e D, it used
Speaker 1: the Basic operating system. The keyboard for the PET was small,
Speaker 1: Some would call it a chick lit type of keyboard,
Speaker 1: so tiny little keys. It made typing on the device
Speaker 1: really challenging and uncomfortable, and this is typical of some
Speaker 1: of those early computers, especially the ones that came from
Speaker 1: companies that were making calculators. The buttons look more like
Speaker 1: calculator buttons than keyboard buttons. The PET also had four
Speaker 1: external expansion ports, allowing users to plug in peripherals, including
Speaker 1: a disk drive. The PET cost sears, which meant it
Speaker 1: was more expensive than the TRS eight, and technically the
Speaker 1: PETS microprocessor was a little less powerful than Tandy's computer.
Speaker 1: Commodore first showed off the PET of the nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: seven Winter Consumer Electronics Show, but this was just one
Speaker 1: of the computers Commodore would introduce. Another big one was
Speaker 1: the VIC twenty computer, known as the VIC one thousand
Speaker 1: one in Japan, VIC stood for Video Interface Chip. It
Speaker 1: was the first inexpensive color computer available on the consumer market.
Speaker 1: It cost two d dollars when it was released in January,
Speaker 1: and it also became the first home computer to sell
Speaker 1: one million units. Like the PET, it relied on the
Speaker 1: most six five zero two processor and it operated at
Speaker 1: one mega hurts. It had five kilobytes of RAM, which
Speaker 1: sounds pretty weird because you typically see RAM and units
Speaker 1: divisible by four, and not all of that RAM was
Speaker 1: available to the user. The computer reserved one and a
Speaker 1: half kilobytes of RAM for its routine operations, leaving you
Speaker 1: three and a half to play with. The computer consisted
Speaker 1: of a chunky keyboard case that housed all the computer bits,
Speaker 1: and you would connect this to a Commodore seventeen O
Speaker 1: one monitor via a five pen composite video cable. The
Speaker 1: display could generate sixteen different colors. In addition to the
Speaker 1: display port, the VIC twenty had ports for an Atari
Speaker 1: twenty joystick, a rom cartridge port in the back, and
Speaker 1: a few other ports for peripherals. Like other computers I've
Speaker 1: mentioned in this episode, you could get a cassette drive
Speaker 1: for the VIC twenty. They also offered a floppy drive
Speaker 1: starting in nineteen eighty two. Commodore was able to keep
Speaker 1: the price down for the VIC twenty largely because the
Speaker 1: company had its own microprocessor manufacturing division. Because it acquired
Speaker 1: that Most Technologies company I mentioned back in the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: it didn't have to purchase components from other companies, so
Speaker 1: that helped Commodore set the price point at an extremely
Speaker 1: attractive competitive figure for those who wanted a personal computer
Speaker 1: but felt the other options in the market were too expensive.
Speaker 1: So while Apple had to go and buy their chips
Speaker 1: from Commodore, Commodore was producing their own chips. So that
Speaker 1: was how they were able to keep costs down. And
Speaker 1: we're not done with Commodore yet. Their next big product
Speaker 1: was the one that a lot of people fondly remember
Speaker 1: to this very day, and that would be the Commodore
Speaker 1: sixty four. It was called the sixty four because it
Speaker 1: sported sixty four hole kilobytes of RAM. Like the other
Speaker 1: computers Commodore release, this one relied on the most sixty
Speaker 1: ten as at CPU, so slightly better CPU than what
Speaker 1: it had been using, but still from most technologies, and
Speaker 1: this one still operated at around one mega hurts of
Speaker 1: clock speed. The Commodore sixty four had a similar form
Speaker 1: factor to the VIC twenty. It looked like a chunky
Speaker 1: keyboard that you plugged directly into a display, though this
Speaker 1: time you could actually use a color television as your monitor.
Speaker 1: The Commodore sixty four would go on to become the
Speaker 1: best selling computer model of all time, selling more than
Speaker 1: seventeen million units during its life cycle. The Commodore sixty
Speaker 1: four is operating system was wrong basic like the VIC twenty,
Speaker 1: it also had a joystick port. Actually technically it had
Speaker 1: to joystick ports. It had a cartridge port and a
Speaker 1: serial peripheral port. Originally, the external media storage device was
Speaker 1: the Commodore Data set. That's a cassette based media transfer device,
Speaker 1: which was known to be very slow. Later Commodore would
Speaker 1: offer a disk drive system, which was also known for
Speaker 1: being very slow. Not to mention noisy, and I should
Speaker 1: mention about those cartridges. So the cartridges are rom based cartridges.
Speaker 1: That means that everything that's on the cartridge is permanently
Speaker 1: part of that cartridge. You can't alter it. If you
Speaker 1: have a program on that cartridge, you can't overwrite it,
Speaker 1: you can't change it. All you can do is load
Speaker 1: the program onto the computer, and then the computer's memory
Speaker 1: could save certain results, and you could even save information
Speaker 1: to an external drive like a cassette drive or a
Speaker 1: disk drive. But the cartridge will always remain the cartridge.
Speaker 1: It is physically programmed onto the circuit board of the
Speaker 1: cartridge itself. This is the same as for cartridge based
Speaker 1: video game systems like the twenty or the Intellivision or
Speaker 1: the Clico Vision. Now, the thing about these cartridges is
Speaker 1: that they take a lot of time and effort to
Speaker 1: produce it. I mentioned this in the Naughty Dog episodes
Speaker 1: where Naughty Dog actually encountered a problem with this where
Speaker 1: they were launching one of their games, but the company
Speaker 1: that was manufacturing the cartridges had to give preference to
Speaker 1: Madden because Madden was definitely going to sell out and
Speaker 1: Naughty Dog felt like they got burned in the process. Well,
Speaker 1: that's part of the problem with the cartridges is that
Speaker 1: it's an actual manufacturing process. You can't just do it anywhere.
Speaker 1: You have to do it in a plant where you've
Speaker 1: set it up to make cartridges and you only have
Speaker 1: a limited amoun of capacity. You can only produce so
Speaker 1: many cartridges within x amount of time. So it definitely
Speaker 1: has its downsides. The upside is that it's pretty fast
Speaker 1: to load the information if you have designed your computer
Speaker 1: system properly, and once you have a cartridge, as long
Speaker 1: as the cartridge remains undamaged and the computer remains undamaged,
Speaker 1: you're good to go. You just plug it in, you're
Speaker 1: ready to launch that program. Getting back to the Commodore
Speaker 1: sixty four, it also had a sound interface device. It
Speaker 1: was called the six eight one. You gotta love these
Speaker 1: different devices that are named by numbers. This three channel
Speaker 1: component would allow digital mozarts the chance to create computer
Speaker 1: generated music. The Commodore sixty four was one of the
Speaker 1: first home computers to offer such an opportunity where you
Speaker 1: could create computer generated music using a proper program, because
Speaker 1: it had the chip in it that would allow you
Speaker 1: to play it. When the computer went on sale in
Speaker 1: two it was priced at five dollars. Eventually Commodore was
Speaker 1: able to drop that to about one. By that time,
Speaker 1: the company had streamline manufacturing, so it cost about twenty
Speaker 1: five dollars to make a Commodore sixty four, so bucks
Speaker 1: to make one sold for two hundred bucks. Not bad. Technically,
Speaker 1: Commodore was competing with itself a little bit here, because
Speaker 1: the VIC twenty computer hit one million sales a few
Speaker 1: months after the Commodore sixty four launched, so you had
Speaker 1: two different computer systems on the market at the same time.
Speaker 1: Commodore would continue to introduce a few other computers in
Speaker 1: this line, but also made a move in nineteen four
Speaker 1: to expand its home computing division by acquiring another company
Speaker 1: called Amiga. We'll get back to Amiga a little bit
Speaker 1: later in this episode, but here's a spoiler alert. While
Speaker 1: Commodore was the number one computer company in the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, outperforming all others, and the Amiga line became
Speaker 1: known for their advanced graphics and sound capabilities, none of
Speaker 1: that really would ultimately matter. None of it would allow
Speaker 1: the company to remain competitive against IBM, Compatibles and Apple.
Speaker 1: The Commodore home computer divisions were either acquired by other
Speaker 1: companies or were liquidated by the mid nineteen nineties. Okay,
Speaker 1: now we need to jump back in our timeline a bit.
Speaker 1: We followed Commodore for a while, and I know this
Speaker 1: is a lot of hopping around, but it makes sense
Speaker 1: to trace certain families of computers while we concentrate on them,
Speaker 1: as opposed to saying, let's go back to Commodore and
Speaker 1: now let's go to Tandy, now let's go to etcetera.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna jump back to nineteen seventy eight. That's
Speaker 1: when another company announced that it was going to wade
Speaker 1: into the personal computer space, and that company had just
Speaker 1: released a home video game system called the VCS Game
Speaker 1: Console but better known as the Atari twenty six hundred.
Speaker 1: Atari introduced to computer models at the same time the
Speaker 1: four hundred and the eight hundred. The Atari four hundred
Speaker 1: was another example of a computer that had a keyboard
Speaker 1: built into the form fact or. You could connect the
Speaker 1: computer to a television using an r FTV video output
Speaker 1: port and cable. There was also a monitor r GB
Speaker 1: output port if you prefer to use a computer monitor
Speaker 1: instead of a television. It had a single cartridge slot
Speaker 1: under a cover on the top of the computer, so
Speaker 1: he would flip up the top cover. It was on
Speaker 1: a little hinge and that's where the cartridge port was.
Speaker 1: It ran on the proprietary Atari operating system, though you
Speaker 1: could buy a cartridge that would allow you to run
Speaker 1: Basic on the computer so that you could do some
Speaker 1: programming directly onto the Atari four hundred. Now, the four
Speaker 1: hundred was the low end entry computer that was best
Speaker 1: suited for playing cartridge based games. In fact, that was
Speaker 1: the primary purpose for the four hundred. It was more
Speaker 1: robust than the AT twenty video game system, and the
Speaker 1: four hundred shiped originally with eight kilobytes of memory, though
Speaker 1: later models would upgrade that to sixteen kilobytes. The four
Speaker 1: hundred was technically expandable because it used the same motherboard
Speaker 1: as its big brother the eight hundred, but you would
Speaker 1: need to open up the case to do it, and
Speaker 1: that was supposed to only be done by a licensed
Speaker 1: Atari dealer or repair service. The Yahoo's out there who
Speaker 1: like to mess with your own computers hands off, said Atari.
Speaker 1: Not that that ever stops anyone who actually has really
Speaker 1: determined to make modifications to their machine. The Atari four
Speaker 1: hundred used the popular six five oh two CPU, the
Speaker 1: one I mentioned before from most technologies that went into
Speaker 1: tons of different computers in those early days, and it
Speaker 1: had a processor speed of one point seven nine Mega hurts.
Speaker 1: The keyboard was a membrane style input device that a
Speaker 1: lot of Atari enthusiasts absolutely hated because they said it
Speaker 1: was really hard to type on the thing. It cost
Speaker 1: five hundred dollars on launch. The eight hundred, as you
Speaker 1: would expect, was more powerful than the four hundred, and
Speaker 1: it shipped with eight kilobytes of RAM, expandable up to
Speaker 1: forty eight kilobytes. It also had an r GB and
Speaker 1: TV video outports, and like the four hundred, it ran
Speaker 1: on the Atari operating system. It had two cartridge ports
Speaker 1: under the top cover, and unlike the four hundred, you
Speaker 1: could even remove the top cover to get at four
Speaker 1: expansion slots inside the machine. Both the four hundred and
Speaker 1: the eight hundred used special purpose coprocessors or sound and
Speaker 1: graphics that allowed the CPU to focus on other operations,
Speaker 1: and it boosted the power of both machines, making them
Speaker 1: some of the most sophisticated home computers in graphics and
Speaker 1: sound at that time. Peripherals for the eight hundred included
Speaker 1: optional floppy disk drives, a dot matrix printer that could
Speaker 1: print text characters forty wide forty columns wide at about
Speaker 1: forty characters per second, so it was not the fastest. Uh.
Speaker 1: There were also additional chips that had onboard processors and
Speaker 1: you could plug those right into the eight hundred, which
Speaker 1: would further enhance its processing capabilities. It's kind of like
Speaker 1: giving it a temporary brain boost. One thing the Atari
Speaker 1: eight hundred didn't have was standard ports for peripherals made
Speaker 1: by companies not called Atari. That changed when Atari introduced
Speaker 1: the Atari eight fifty interface module, which included standardized cereal
Speaker 1: ports and a printer port compatible with Centronics printers. Atari
Speaker 1: would also offer up a modem peripheral. To use it,
Speaker 1: you would actually lift a phone off its cradle and
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna pretend that Tari is going to understand
Speaker 1: what I'm talking about here, but she's too young to
Speaker 1: remember these. I'm talking about those wired handsets from the
Speaker 1: old days, folks, so no cordless phones or anything like that.
Speaker 1: You would lift the handset off the cradle, you would
Speaker 1: stretch it over, and you would lay the headset onto
Speaker 1: the modem itself. It had a pair of cups that
Speaker 1: the handsets receiver would slide into, so you would have
Speaker 1: the the microphone on one side and the speaker on
Speaker 1: the other side plugged into these cups, and then you
Speaker 1: would use a cartridge called the Telelink one to operate it.
Speaker 1: That's that was cutting edge technology back in the early eighties,
Speaker 1: late seventies early eighties. Later, Atari would introduce another modem
Speaker 1: that could plug directly into a phone line and didn't
Speaker 1: require you to take an existing phone off the hook.
Speaker 1: You could use either a cassette based drive or a
Speaker 1: disk drive with the Atari eight hundred. The cassette drive,
Speaker 1: while less reliable, was also less expensive, and so a
Speaker 1: lot of folks would opt for that choice. The eight
Speaker 1: hundred sold for nine dollars and nine five cents when
Speaker 1: it first hit store shelves. Atari would go on to
Speaker 1: produce more computers throughout its history before the company hit
Speaker 1: real hard times in ninety three, as I have talked
Speaker 1: about in this show, before the home video game market
Speaker 1: was collapsing in on itself. It was a terrible crash
Speaker 1: due to an over saturation. Among other things, Atari introduced
Speaker 1: computers called the twelve hundred, six hundred XCEL, the fourteen
Speaker 1: fifty XL, and the fourteen fifty x L d E,
Speaker 1: but before three was over, the company had to cancel
Speaker 1: some of those, including the twelve hundred, due to production
Speaker 1: and design problems. In four, Jack Tramiel, the guy who
Speaker 1: had founded Commodore, left Commodore, or some would say was
Speaker 1: ousted from Commodore, and bought Atari. He would redirect the
Speaker 1: company to sort of abandon their higher end systems that
Speaker 1: they were planning on releasing and concentrate more on the
Speaker 1: less expensive computer designs intended for the average consumer. Eventually,
Speaker 1: Atari transition from an eight bit based system to a
Speaker 1: sixteen bit based computer system, but those machines couldn't really
Speaker 1: compete with Apple or the IBM clones that were coming
Speaker 1: onto the market at that time. Atari did release a
Speaker 1: line of their own IBM clones, but by then it
Speaker 1: was a little too too little, too late, and it
Speaker 1: wasn't enough to save the company. If you want to
Speaker 1: learn more about that, you should go listen to the
Speaker 1: episodes that Chuck Bryant and I recorded about Atari a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. We dove into great detail about
Speaker 1: the company and the woes that they suffered. Ultimately, Atari's
Speaker 1: shine wore off. The four hundred and eight hundred were
Speaker 1: successful systems with decent sales, but after those early successes,
Speaker 1: the machines Atari design began to see lower sales figures.
Speaker 1: By the nine nineties, the company had become little more
Speaker 1: than just a brand name and getting back to ninety
Speaker 1: nine again. The same year of the debut of the
Speaker 1: A four hundred and the hundred systems was when a
Speaker 1: company called Texas Instruments introduced its first home computer, which
Speaker 1: was the t I slash four. Great names these computers.
Speaker 1: Texas Instruments had made a name for itself originally as
Speaker 1: the first producer of commercial silicon transistors. The company also
Speaker 1: made the first transistor radio in the nineteen fifties, so
Speaker 1: by the nineteen seventies it was producing scientific calculators. The
Speaker 1: T I N nine Slash four would become one of
Speaker 1: the other big contenders in the early home PC space
Speaker 1: in the United States. So I'm going to talk all
Speaker 1: about that in just a second, but first let's take
Speaker 1: another quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, So
Speaker 1: let's talk about the original T I Slash four. And
Speaker 1: for those of you who love this computer, you're probably thinking,
Speaker 1: why are you saying it like that over and over again?
Speaker 1: Just because I want to. It was a powerful computer
Speaker 1: for its time. While other computers were relying on the
Speaker 1: most microchip from Commodore UH, the T I nine had
Speaker 1: its own proprietary CPU. It was called the t M
Speaker 1: sred and it ran at three mega hurts, nearly twice
Speaker 1: as fast as some of the other more powerful home
Speaker 1: computers on the market at that time. The form factor
Speaker 1: was similar to those other other early home computers I
Speaker 1: talked about, so it looked like a big, clunky keyboard.
Speaker 1: This one had a cartridge port built onto the front
Speaker 1: of it where you could slide rom cartridges into the
Speaker 1: machine to run your programs. Texas Instruments also sold a
Speaker 1: monitor that was in fact a thirteen inch Zenith color
Speaker 1: TV that Texas Instruments had modified slightly to make it
Speaker 1: a working computer monitor, so it wasn't like an off
Speaker 1: the shelf Zeno of TV. It was slightly changed. When
Speaker 1: the t I nine launched, you had to buy a
Speaker 1: monitor with it because there was no way at that
Speaker 1: moment to connect it to a regular TV. Texas Instruments
Speaker 1: was working on an RF adapter, so then you would
Speaker 1: be able to connect it to a television, but the
Speaker 1: adapter had not yet received approval from the f c
Speaker 1: C for those radio frequency emissions. Like some of the
Speaker 1: other personal computers of the era, the keyboard on the
Speaker 1: t I nine was in that tiny key chick lit
Speaker 1: style that made it kind of difficult to type on. Again,
Speaker 1: more clearly some influence from the Texas Instrument calcul later
Speaker 1: days that were you know in that keyboard. It used
Speaker 1: a Texas Instruments flavor of Basic as its operating system,
Speaker 1: and booting the computer would allow you to run either
Speaker 1: an equation calculator whatever program was on the ROM cartridge,
Speaker 1: or you could load right into Basic programming on the
Speaker 1: t I was a bit of a frustrating experience. You
Speaker 1: could program in the Basic computer programming language, which was good,
Speaker 1: since that was more or less the standard programming language
Speaker 1: and home computers at that time. But those programs would
Speaker 1: run much more slowly on the Texas Instruments computer compared
Speaker 1: to other computers even with that processor I was talking about.
Speaker 1: So why is that, Well, it was because the computer
Speaker 1: also had a proprietary graphics programming language coded onto it,
Speaker 1: so every program made on the t I nine had
Speaker 1: to be interpreted by the computer twice, which slowed things down.
Speaker 1: You could get a cassette tape external drive, but most
Speaker 1: of the computers popular our programs were just on cartridges.
Speaker 1: On the right side of the computer was a system bus,
Speaker 1: and you could plug different expansion units directly into that
Speaker 1: system bus. Those expansions include some cool stuff like a
Speaker 1: speech synthesizer, a thermal printer port, a memory expansion card,
Speaker 1: and more. The expansion units were called side cars, and
Speaker 1: they also had ports on their sides where you could
Speaker 1: attach additional side cars, So you could attach up to
Speaker 1: six side cars to the basic computer this way, daisy
Speaker 1: chaining them together, except each one was a physical device,
Speaker 1: and most of them were about the width of an
Speaker 1: external disk drive. So once you've got six of these
Speaker 1: attached off the side of your computer, you found yourself
Speaker 1: with an incredibly wide machine. Also, the way the side
Speaker 1: cars worked meant that you always had to plug the
Speaker 1: speech synthesizer into the tin, and then you would plug
Speaker 1: the memory expansion side car into the speech synthesizer part
Speaker 1: on its side, and then you could add anything else
Speaker 1: on to the rest of the chain. Texas Instruments also
Speaker 1: created a special keyboard overlay system, and that would indicate
Speaker 1: what the alternate functions for certain keys were when you
Speaker 1: ran specific programs. So you could buy a game that
Speaker 1: would come with an overlay, and you put the overlay
Speaker 1: on top of your keyboard, and that would let you
Speaker 1: know which keys would execute specific tasks within the game
Speaker 1: that you bought. But this was true for any program.
Speaker 1: If you had a program that wanted to repurpose certain
Speaker 1: keys for very specific functions, the overlay would help you
Speaker 1: remember which keys were the ones mapped to those functions.
Speaker 1: The Basic computer with monitor cost one thousand, one fifty
Speaker 1: dollars in nineteen seventy nine, which made it one of
Speaker 1: the more expensive computers on the market. It achieved modest success,
Speaker 1: prompting Texas Instruments to revise the approach, and they discontinued
Speaker 1: the original computer by one and introduced the T I
Speaker 1: nine slash for a This new version had a brand
Speaker 1: new graphics chip and an improved full sized keyboard. It
Speaker 1: also got rid of the sidecar solution for expansion, so
Speaker 1: instead you could purchase what was called the peripheral expansion box,
Speaker 1: which looked like what we would think of as a
Speaker 1: CPU tower today. It looks like, you know, a big
Speaker 1: computer case, only its purpose was to house the various
Speaker 1: expansions you could connect to this computer. The case could
Speaker 1: hold up to seven expansion cards. Well technically you can
Speaker 1: hold eight, but one of those slots was needed for
Speaker 1: the interface card that allowed the case to communicate with
Speaker 1: the computer in the first place. The peripheral expansion case
Speaker 1: cost one thousand, four hundred seventy five dollars, which made
Speaker 1: it pretty darn expensive because the computer itself, if you
Speaker 1: got it without a monitor, cost only five dollars. So
Speaker 1: this expansion set cost almost three times as much as
Speaker 1: the actual computer it was expanding. Now, I had one
Speaker 1: of the computers, not the expansion set, but I had
Speaker 1: the computer when I was growing up, but I only
Speaker 1: have some vague memories of it as I was a
Speaker 1: little tyke at the time when we had the t A,
Speaker 1: but I do remember seeing down to play a rousing
Speaker 1: game of Hunt the Wumpus. And yes, that was a
Speaker 1: real game. If you remember it, give me a shout,
Speaker 1: because I love to find other people who played it.
Speaker 1: The version that was for Texas Instruments was different than
Speaker 1: the version that you could find on other platforms. On
Speaker 1: most platforms, it was a text based game, but on
Speaker 1: the Texas Instruments computer it was actually a graphic based game.
Speaker 1: So there you go, Hunt the wump Us. Some real
Speaker 1: computer history, right there. Texas Instruments sold about two and
Speaker 1: a half million units of this revised home computer, and
Speaker 1: ultimately they felt that the market for home computers was
Speaker 1: far too saturated by competitors and that was gonna be
Speaker 1: really hard to carve out a profitable space. So Texas
Speaker 1: Instruments decided that they were gonna end this grand experiment.
Speaker 1: Now I just have a few more computers to mention.
Speaker 1: I should point out there were a lot of others
Speaker 1: that came out around this time, not just the ones
Speaker 1: I'm going to cover next, but honestly, to cover every
Speaker 1: single computer that came out, whether it was a one
Speaker 1: off or the beginning of a small chain of computers
Speaker 1: would take several episodes. One of the ones I do
Speaker 1: want to mention is the one that was requested at
Speaker 1: the top of this episode. The request was specifically for
Speaker 1: the Sinclair z x e D also known as the Spectrum,
Speaker 1: and had a z e D a microprocessor with a
Speaker 1: three point to five mega hurts clock speed, and it
Speaker 1: was it used an adapter to send video signals to
Speaker 1: a user's television. The original model had sixteen kilobytes of RAM.
Speaker 1: A more advanced version shipped with forty eight kilobytes of RAM.
Speaker 1: The operating system was ROM basic and the keyboard computer
Speaker 1: was very very small. In fact, it didn't have all
Speaker 1: the standard keys on the keyboard for this first model.
Speaker 1: You had to use function buttons to designate anything beyond
Speaker 1: the base a numbers and letters on the keyboard. The
Speaker 1: computer system could connect to a cassette drive or additional
Speaker 1: memory modules, and it was originally sold only in the UK,
Speaker 1: though it did make its way to the United States eventually.
Speaker 1: It's very compact. It was a very small computer. It
Speaker 1: costs just two hundred dollars in the United States when
Speaker 1: it first became available here. However, there were some concessions
Speaker 1: that had to be made. You know, you got an
Speaker 1: inexpensive computer. It was small, didn't take up a lot
Speaker 1: of space, but it also didn't have any support for
Speaker 1: color graphics, it didn't have any support for sound, and
Speaker 1: the keyboard was a membrane style keyboard that was not
Speaker 1: easy to use and it would wear out relatively quickly.
Speaker 1: Sinclair would follow this up with the z X eighty one,
Speaker 1: which in the US was sold by time X under
Speaker 1: the name Timex Sinclair one thousand. Time X would go
Speaker 1: on to release a couple of other computers, mostly Sinclair clones,
Speaker 1: but would get out of the home computer business by
Speaker 1: four In two thousand seventeen, a recreated version of the
Speaker 1: Sinclair z X Spectrum came available after some initial missteps
Speaker 1: happened not due to technology, but rather over arguments about
Speaker 1: who owned the intellectual property. Once those arguments were settled,
Speaker 1: the initial run of ten thousand recreations of the classic
Speaker 1: system sold out right away. And this system looks pretty nifty.
Speaker 1: It's a kind of a black keyboard with a rainbow
Speaker 1: across part of it. And uh, you know, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people with a lot of fond memories of it,
Speaker 1: just like there are people who have fond memories of
Speaker 1: the Commodore sixty four. Some people really love those old
Speaker 1: spectrum computers. Now. Not too long ago, I did a
Speaker 1: multiple episode series about the company Xerox, and in that
Speaker 1: series I talked about the Xerox eight twenty, which was
Speaker 1: the company's attempt to get into the personal computer business,
Speaker 1: although they were looking really at office computers, not home computers.
Speaker 1: Xerox's Park facility had already created a computer in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three that boasted many of the features consumers would
Speaker 1: find in state of the art PCs a decade later,
Speaker 1: like a graphic user interface or gooey and a computer mouse.
Speaker 1: But Xerox had no plans to market that computer, called
Speaker 1: the Alto, to the public. They used it pretty much
Speaker 1: exclusively internally. The Xerox eight twenty was meant to be
Speaker 1: the next big thing in small businesses and offices. It
Speaker 1: sold for the princely sum of two thousand nine dollars.
Speaker 1: This put it out of reach for most average consumers,
Speaker 1: but Xerox had high hopes that would become the desktop
Speaker 1: machine and offices around the world, and that the company
Speaker 1: would be able to lay claim to that very fertile ground.
Speaker 1: But unfortunately, the high price, the relatively slow speed of
Speaker 1: the machines at two and a half mega hurts processing speed,
Speaker 1: and the uninspired design of the hardware were all strikes
Speaker 1: against the eight twenty. Xerox tried again with the eight
Speaker 1: twenty two, but couldn't really make a dent in what
Speaker 1: was then IBM's domain. So Xerox got out of the
Speaker 1: office computer business by five Before I sign off earlier,
Speaker 1: I said I'd talked more about Omega computers. Back in
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies, a guy named j Minor joined Atari
Speaker 1: as a developer for the twenty six hundred game console.
Speaker 1: He also got to work designing the chip set that
Speaker 1: would find its way into the Atari four hundred and
Speaker 1: eight hundred line of home computers. Minor left Atari in
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy nine after having disagreements with the company's new management.
Speaker 1: In nineteen eighty two, he joined a project that had
Speaker 1: been launched by Larry Kaplan, who was another former Atari
Speaker 1: employee and he was also the founder of Activision. This
Speaker 1: project was meant to create a new game platform. Kaplan
Speaker 1: wouldn't stick with it. He would actually leave this project
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty two, but it found new life as
Speaker 1: it became the centerpiece for a company that was calling
Speaker 1: itself the Amiga Corporation, and uh J. Minor would become
Speaker 1: the head engineer of the Amiga Corporation. Then we get
Speaker 1: into some soap opera level stuff going on, all right,
Speaker 1: So in nine you had the video game Crash. Atari
Speaker 1: found itself in a bad way. The company was floundering. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: over at Commodore, Jack Tramiel, who was again the founder
Speaker 1: of Commodore, was effectively ousted from his own company by
Speaker 1: the board of directors. Tremuel left Commodore and he went
Speaker 1: on and decided to purchase Atari because Atari was kind
Speaker 1: of reeling at that time. Atari, by the way, had
Speaker 1: loaned half a million dollars to Amiga, and Amiga was
Speaker 1: in danger of going bankrupt. Amiga had developed some technology
Speaker 1: that had promised. They had shown off some demonstrations at
Speaker 1: various conferences, but they weren't getting any investors. No companies
Speaker 1: had actually stepped up to buy Amiga's technology, largely because
Speaker 1: Amiga was sort of positioning this as a gaming platform
Speaker 1: and the collapse of the video game industry had everyone
Speaker 1: very nervous, So in order to stay afloat, Amiga took
Speaker 1: a own from Atari. So Tramiel leaves Commodore, he goes
Speaker 1: and purchases Atari. Several of his engineers and developers over
Speaker 1: at Commodore leave the company and go to joint Tramiel
Speaker 1: over at Aitari, and that left Commodore without a solid
Speaker 1: plan for its computer business. So you had this company, Commodore,
Speaker 1: that had previously been the most powerful home computer company
Speaker 1: in the world. In fact, only a couple of years previously,
Speaker 1: the Commodore sixty four was the top selling computer in
Speaker 1: the world seventeen million units. That's amazing. But now they
Speaker 1: just had their talent rated. Effectively, they all defected, so
Speaker 1: they didn't really have a game plan for where they
Speaker 1: were going to go next. They decided that maybe what
Speaker 1: they should do is acquire Amiga. So this is a
Speaker 1: weird shuffling that you've you've got here, You've got Atari
Speaker 1: that lends Amiga five thousand dollars. Atari starts to wobble.
Speaker 1: The founder of Commodore leaves Commodore, sweeps in buys Atari,
Speaker 1: bringing along some top talent with him. Commodore reaches out
Speaker 1: to buy Amiga and as part of this transaction pays
Speaker 1: off the Atari loan. J Minor got to work on
Speaker 1: the first Amiga computer now that the company was safely
Speaker 1: in the embrace of Commodore and the computer would not
Speaker 1: be ready until when it launched. It was called the
Speaker 1: Amigo one thousand. It had a Motorola sixty eight thousand
Speaker 1: CPU that ran at seven point one four mega hurts.
Speaker 1: It shipped with two hundred fifty six kilobytes of data,
Speaker 1: expandable up to eight megabytes. It could show up to
Speaker 1: four thousand, ninety six colors, granted you had to set
Speaker 1: the resolution of the display to three twenty by two hundred.
Speaker 1: It had a thirty two bit multitasking graphic user interface.
Speaker 1: It had four channel stereo sound. You could even show
Speaker 1: multiple screens at different resolutions on the same monitor at
Speaker 1: the same time. It was a killer computer if you
Speaker 1: wanted to play games. It's tex specs left other machines
Speaker 1: in the dust, specifically when gaming was considered. It was
Speaker 1: also a little expensive. The Amiga one thousand with monitor
Speaker 1: would set you back one thousand, seven nine dollars. The
Speaker 1: Amiga had no internal expansion slots, but you could plug
Speaker 1: expansions into various ports on the system bus. Commodore would
Speaker 1: release multiple computers in the Amiga line, but the problem
Speaker 1: was they weren't compatible with MS DOSS, which meant they
Speaker 1: just weren't readily adopted. IBM had already managed to really
Speaker 1: insinuate itself into that world and people were starting to
Speaker 1: kind of solidify behind IBM and MS DOSS, So Amiga
Speaker 1: was left out from that. Even though you could argue
Speaker 1: that the technical specs and the performance of the Amiga
Speaker 1: was far better than what you would get with any
Speaker 1: comparable IBM machine or IBM clone, it wasn't compatible with
Speaker 1: all the software and customers were kind of going where
Speaker 1: the software was, so for Amiga it just would eventually
Speaker 1: kind of fizzle out. It was sold off during the
Speaker 1: time where a Commodore was going out of business back
Speaker 1: in the mid nineteen nineties. So what was it about
Speaker 1: Apple and IBM computers that allowed those versions to survive
Speaker 1: when all these other computers eventually faded away. Well, I'm
Speaker 1: going to cover that in the next couple of episodes.
Speaker 1: With Apple first, we're going to talk about them and
Speaker 1: how they were able to weather the storms of the
Speaker 1: late seventies early eighties home computer boom and how they
Speaker 1: survived to the company that they are today. And we'll
Speaker 1: also talk about IBM and the decision that IBM made
Speaker 1: that ended up costing the company quite a bit because
Speaker 1: they were being very nice and that niceness ended up
Speaker 1: costing them. The home PC market, it gets pretty complicated,
Speaker 1: but it has all to do with clones. Will talk
Speaker 1: about clones a lot in the next two episodes, so
Speaker 1: tune in to hear about that and hear about how
Speaker 1: the home PC market turned into what it is today. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: whether it is a specific technology, a company, a personality
Speaker 1: and tech anything like that, let me know. Send me
Speaker 1: a message, Send it to me via email. The addresses
Speaker 1: tech Stuff at how stuff Works dot com, or you
Speaker 1: can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The
Speaker 1: handle of both of those is tech Stuff at hs W.
Speaker 1: Remember we've got an Instagram account you can follow, so
Speaker 1: go follow that. You can also tune in on Wednesdays
Speaker 1: and Fridays you can actually see me record these shows live. Uh.
Speaker 1: The place to go is twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: Just visit there. You'll see where the schedule is, and
Speaker 1: you can. You can tune in, you can be part
Speaker 1: of the chat room. You can join in with all
Speaker 1: the regulars, and I will talk to you again really soon.
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