This page is dedicated to a time when
computers were actually fun, when there was a variety in the market and
IBM-style PCs were the least powerful, most expensive and sucked the worst
of any of the machines out there.
These are some of the countless machines
that I have owned and will always miss. They all have special places in
history, being that they were all among the most advanced machines available
to the general public of their time in one way or another.
The Commodore 64:
My first "real" computer and second
computer overall. These machines were just plain fun, period. Whether you
were playing video games, dialing up your local BBSes with your MoDem or
composing music, these little computers could do it all. With graphics,
sound, animation and a selection of software the Apple II community could
only dream of, there were only three factors that held this machine down
and kept it from dominating the world: 1) cheaply designed and thrown together
power supply, 2) a floppy disk drive slower than molasses in January and
3) the name "Commodore" appeared regularly on the box, atop the case and
in the manual. Aside from that, great computer. It was one of the first
computers to be bundled with an advanced synthesizer onboard (the legendary
SID chip, still revered today). These were the days when you just changed
a single component if your computer had no sound, video or an I/O problem
and you didn't have to worry about the 10,000 other things that could cause
the same problem on a Windoze box.
The Amiga 500:
This was another wonderful machine
perhaps too far ahead of its time to really catch on. Because of the out-of-the-box
multimedia, animation, multitasking and special effects abilities the Amiga
had (infinitely superiour to any PC or Mac of the time), coupled with digital
stereo sound and inexpensive pricing, it was seen as a games machine, a
toy and special projects platform and slowly but surely died out from the
mainstream market. The Amiga still lives on and new units are being produced
to this day, but it has been resigned to being a specialty product and
is not widely supported. There were many legitimate reasons for the Amiga's
slow and untimely demise, not the least of which being that "Commodore"
thing (sound familiar?). Still, it was a lot of fun to see my PC-using
friends come over, point and laugh at the funny little Commodore and watch
their egoes hit the floor when my $500 "toy" did a great many things their
$3000+ '386 (and better) PCs were not even remotely capable of, even with
their SVGA, fancy soundcards, big hard drives and quadruple the RAM and
clock speed.
The Apple IIgs:
An odd machine, to say the least, but
definitely a good one. With many poor Apple designs (as well as many ingenius
ones), this machine was doomed from day one. Key reasons for this being
Apple's refusal to actually support this computer they pushed on the public
coupled with about 95% Apple IIe backward compatability. The latter was
both a blessing and a curse... on the upside, you could upgrade your old
Apple computer to a smaller, faster and better one without having to trash
your old software library. The graphics were equivalent to the Atari STe
and it had an Ensoniq sound chip with better sound quality than ANY other
computer of the time (still better than many modern sound cards in some
respects). On the downside, the Apple IIe compatability (both hardware
and software) meant that not only was the bus 8-bit, but most software
developers would merely create an Apple IIe version of their newest product
and state that it was "IIgs compatable" without taking any advantage of
the IIgs' unique abilities. Finally, I will say this... it was VERY cool
to use my IIgs as a pseudo-16-bit IIe w/two serial ports, SCSI HDDs, ADB
keyboard and mouse and 4.25MB RAM! I would have to say, in all honesty
that of all of the machines I have ever owned, this is one of them I miss
most.
The Apple MacIntosh SE/30:
One of the finest machines Apple has
ever produced, this compact Mac had the power and capabilities of a larger,
much more expensive modular Mac with a much smaller footprint. Essentially,
it was a Mac IIx in a Mac SE case. Mine had 32MB RAM, a 512K video card
and ran both the internal 9" black and white screen and a 640x480x256 RGB
monitor, a 1.44MB Superdrive and an 800K DSDD (as you old school Mac users
know, the Superdrives choked on some of the older Mac and ProDOS disks),
a couple of SCSI HDDs, a full 32-bit bus running the nifty Motorola 68030/68882@16MHz
combo (it'd smoke any PC up to a '486DX-33 for most functions) and had
many other bells and whistles. Wonderful machine, but, alas, Apple's corporate
bumbling (thank you, John Sculley), the release of the dismal Mac Classic
II and the rise of the cheap PC market killed it off.
