after the stunt they pulled shutting down the Atari 520ST in 85
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I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this. What happened?
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I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this. What happened?
Long story, but you asked for it.....
Eight-bit microprocessors had been being used for a few years for traffic signal controllers and people realized that a very small general purpose computer could be made from them so that by 76 - 78 you saw Apple microcomputers made using Motorola chips and other microcomputers being made using Z80 and 8080 chips, but memory access and software were very limited, everybody knew they needed at least 16 bits.
1978... Intel came out with the first 16-bit microprocessor but the architecture was munged and segmented and the whole world of OEM microcomputer manufacturers, mostly some 300 small companies in Silicon Valley, took one look at the 8086 and the specs for the Motorola 68000 and told Intel "Thanks but no thanks, we'd rather wait the extra year and a half or whatever!", meaning that the 68000 was what they really wanted, 32-bit registers, 32-bit data paths and buses available, no nonsense, no BS, no segmented architecture.
If Intel had been a Japanese company that would have been it, i.e. that would have been more shame than they could have lived with, the president, vice president, board of directors and everybody else in senior management would have committed sepuku. The natural decision of the market place was to let Intel die.
And then, IBM stepped in with the PC and reversed the entire basic decision of the market. In fact the PC wasn't even a full 8086, it was a crippled toy with an 8088 chip i.e. 16-bit registers and 8-bit data paths. That is, they locked the world into an 8-bit world for several more years.
The one company which was in a position to challenge IBM by producing a real mass-market microcomputer with the 68000 chip was Apple; what they did was to produce two computers (Lisa and toaster Mac) which were so pathetic they convinced the whole world that the 68000 itself was a bad idea. Those computers were using the 68000 chip itself to generate graphics so that remnant compute power was less than a T80 running at two or three MH. They never were used for any meaningful work.
And then, in 1985, Atari came out with a personal computer which was what the PC should have been from day one. The 520 was a beautiful machine with an 8 MH 68000 chip, a half meg or meg of memory which was huge at the time, a real graphics card, good graphics, and the GEM GUI and applications.
Apple realized that it would be three or four years before they could have anything to compete with that. They threatened to tie all of Atari and DRI (GEM)'s products up in courts for years unless crippling changes were made to both the 520 and GEM and the upshot was Atari getting out of computers, presumably because they figured it was too ugly a business to be in and they'd rather sell toys.
This (Apple) is the company which claims to be the computer company for "the rest of us".......