Dan Farquhar writes about the history of personal computers, vintage hardware, and the companies behind them.
HN commenters link it in retro computing threads, such as a piece on building PCs in the 90s, with discussion of Amiga, Atari and Commodore.
Not bad. I don't like its tone of approval, TBH.
I much preferred the
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raucous bazaar, teeming with variety.
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I hate the way the PC
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the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that
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I really did not like...
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he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants)
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That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.
It's a very American viewpoint. I only discovered in recent years that in the rest of the world, the Amiga and ST did much better than at home.
I was a kid when this happened. The Mac launched when I was... 15 I think?
To a rounding error, nobody owned PCs in the UK. They were extremely expensive business machines. Nobody owned Apple II either, and Macs were for the seriously rich.
We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about. We aspired to Camputers and Elan and Memotech.
Nobody _wanted_ office equipment. Would you offer a child a stapler to play with? That's how fun the PC was.
Amigas were huge and very desirable and seen as a gift from the future -- see this article from 2 days ago:
https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-time/
If you couldn't afford an Amiga, then the ST was a worthy competitor.
They were not some flop, some footnote of history. You can still buy new Amiga compatibles today from loads of vendors...
https://www.apollo-computer.com/v4standalone.php
https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/
The ST OS…
Yes, the Tandy 1000, 2000 and their PC-compatible descendants were what Tandy ended up doing, but being PC-compatible they were more of a "surrender and join'em" strategy in the face of the PC juggernaut instead of "beat'em". When I was referring to Tandy I was thinking of their earlier unique non-PC computers like the Model I, II, III, IV (Z-80), Color Computer (6809) and 16 (68000 Unix-based OS), some of which were sold until 1991.
If you're interested, this retro site has several articles covering the Tandy PC clones, why they struggled at launch (weren't actually very compatible early on) and how they eventually failed (weren't differentiated or cheaper at the end). https://dfarq.homeip.net/tandy-1000-models/ But Tandy's PC-compatibles sold very well in-between the first and last couple years. More interesting from a retro perspective though, a lot of people don't realize just how dominant Tandy/Radio Shack's unique (non-PC) computers were between 1977 and 1985. They outsold even Apple, Atari and the C64 in many of those years.
While not quite as tiny, an nvme enclosure with a real drive is likely going to be more reliable, assuming the USB port it’s connected to can actually supply the power it needs.
The enclosures I’m currently fond of are from dockcase, which have a capacitor (PLP meaning power loss protection), so if power is cut, the drive is sent a “oh shit make things safe now” signal and has a few seconds to do so.
I use the larger versions, but there’s a 2230 sized one https://www.dockcase.com/products/dockcase-pocket-m2-nvme-smart-2230-ssd-enclosure-grey
That said, expect all drives to fail. Some you get a warning, others you don’t, so have multiple backups. I don’t recommend the cheap vendor branded Samsung SSDs on eBay, had too many of those die with the firmware version reporting as “ERRMOD” (error mode).
Another good thing to note, is how to power cycle SSDs. Outside of Samsung drives, this has worked on a few drives over the years that decided to suddenly stop working: https://dfarq.homeip.net/fix-dead-ssd/
Not disagreeing (completely) with you, but worth pointing out the very next question in the interview I quoted above looks like this:
> What about device support? > Chuck: You have a subroutine for each device. That’s a library, not an operating system. Call the ones you need or load the ones you need.
...for sure it's a departure from the common way of doing things, at least. And it's almost impossible to imagine, today's generation would have to look at retro-computing to see something akin to the idea [0] [1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64#BASIC
[1] https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-64-operating-system/
Wow someone else from St. Louis? Found this blast from the past too: https://dfarq.homeip.net/building-a-computer-in-the-90s/
I only remembered a couple CompUSAs, Circuit City, and Best Buy selling computers growing up. I don't remember visiting any independent computer stores in the mid 90s.
But talking to those in my parents' generation, most of them bought their computers from some local small shop (and sometimes went back there for computer training!).
I count St. Louis lucky for at least having a Micro Center today, otherwise all my parts would have to come from online stores.
In my opinion, an important detail is missing here. The Amiga 2000 was my first computer, and what made it special was that it had a PC bridgeboard with an 8088 CPU[0]. I remember it never worked properly, but being able to access MS-DOS and program in GW-BASIC was amazing to me. At least I could convice my parents at the time that I would use the computer not only for gaming but for also for school homework ( we had a class for learning programming/informatics )
[0]: https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-bridgeboard-the-pc-compatibility-option/