Yep, when cheap XT clones made in Japan and Korea hit the market, it changed everything. Once you could get a decent XT clone for under $1,000, it was the beginning of the end for everything else. It took time of course, but in the mid 1980s people started buying Tandy 1000s and Leading Edge Model Ds so they could take work home, then game companies started making games for PCs, which led to better peripherals and better capabilities, which led to better software, and the momentum kept building.

I’m one of those bitter Amiga owners though. It was sometime around Windows 2000 that a PC stopped feeling limiting to me, though the Amiga was much more efficient with its memory and CPU power. Amigas had full pre-emptive multitasking, good graphics and sound capability, and plug and play that just worked. In 1985. Running on an 8 MHz CPU with as little as 256K of RAM, though it was much happier with 512K or a meg. A 16 MHz 386 with a meg of RAM sure couldn’t keep up.

It’s almost the same story, where Intel is usually a generation ahead in process technology. AMD and IBM develop technology jointly in order to keep pace. But at least they’re trying. Commodore didn’t try, and that’s why they went from tech darling to bankruptcy in 9 short years. But when Intel can get 10, 15 percent more chips per silicon wafer AND can charge the higher price, it’s a double whammy. That’s why AMD never seems to gain ground.

As for ARM, it makes sense for some things. ARM won’t displace x86 for everything, but when power requirement is paramount, x86 isn’t going to keep pace with ARM. ARM’s rightful place remains to be seen of course, but it’s useful for more than phones. And I don’t think ARM in the datacenter is a bad idea at all, for purposes like domain controllers, DNS, and even file servers. I worked in a datacenter that had lots of empty floor space, but they couldn’t fill it because the power was at capacity.

I think the reason ARM gets so much hype right now is because nobody knew what it was, then all these ARM-based smartphones appeared out of nowhere, and there’s so much potential with them. Meanwhile PCs are mature technology and there’s not much new going on with them. Smartphones have people excited about technology again, so ARM gets attention.

And we’ve always had lots of architectures; using x86 for desktop PCs, servers, and Macintoshes is a very new phenomenon. Used to be there was x86 and Motorola 68000, a couple of different 8-bit CPUs, and a bunch of 32-bit RISC CPUs. One by one they all fell to x86. Now history is just repeating itself as we realize that x86 isn’t quite the one size fits all solution Intel wanted it to be.

Looking back also remember the time as personal computings wild west and shortly thereafter phrases such as ‘nobody ever got fired for buying IBM’, safely lifting the decision making process from a sea of choices. I once considered a Northstar Advantage for the record, but it was a VIC-20 and a tape cassette found under the Christmas tree, six months later replaced by a Commie-64 with a floppy drive.

The Commie was rode hard beyond its sell by date with much strain to fingers and eyeballs when the 128 came out. A slick package around an improved keyboard and the promise of 80 column text, at work we were hacking TRS-80 Model III’s and it just didn’t seem to offer improvement over that. Besides, the XP clones were coming. Eight megahertz machines with 640K of memory, 20 Meg hard drives and Hercules graphics!