/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.7739145]

Why did this computer do so well and become the industry standard? It seems weird to me considering up until that point computers were heavily advertised for their graphics and sound only for all that to go away in favor of a text based DOS, a one voice beeper speaker, and 4 color CGA (or worse).

[Anonymous No.7739154]

>>7739145
>It seems weird to me considering up until that point computers were heavily advertised for their graphics and sound
Um no they weren't. The thing that sold a computer then was a nice crispy terminal-style green screen that could run WordStar and dBase.

[Anonymous No.7739160]

>>7739154
>Um no they weren't.
Why are you talking about things you clearly know nothing about? The Apple II, Atari 800, and VIC 20 were all out by this time.

[Anonymous No.7739174]

>>7739160
What sold the Apple II primarily was Visicalc run off a green monochrome monitor (plus 80 column text and a CP/M card). The Atari 8-bit line also never actually made Atari a profit.

[Anonymous No.7739181]

>>7739174
Ok but both were still advertised for their graphics and sound capabilities.

[Anonymous No.7739183]

IBM backing and support network for the PC itself + using off the shelf parts made it easy for companies to manufacture compatible clones, expanding the market. (since for example a big company could buy a bunch of IBM machines, then an individual worker might buy a clone to finish some of their work at home.)
graphical capabilities and even hardware performance aren't as important as customer and software support when it comes to business tasks.

plus the architecture itself was easier to mix and match with compared to competitors, so you could tailor it better to your specific needs. if you're just working with an airline tickets database, why do you need high-resolution colour graphics and an FM sound chip?

[Anonymous No.7739193]

>>7739145
>considering up until that point computers were heavily advertised for their graphics and sound only
some computers were advertised like that at the time but remember that ibm were making computers for businesses, education, etc. colour graphics and sound wasn't high up on their priorities when the most people were going to use them for was typing documents, spreadsheets, and other boring shit.

[Anonymous No.7739196]

>>7739145
>considering up until that point computers were heavily advertised for their graphics and sound only
some computers were advertised like that at the time but remember that ibm were making computers for businesses, education, etc. colour graphics and sound wasn't high up on their list of priorities when the most people were going to use them for was typing documents, spreadsheets, and other boring shit.

[Anonymous No.7739201]

>>7739174
>The Atari 8-bit line also never actually made Atari a profit.
imagine believing this? lmao. you faggots need to stop getting your information from poorly sourced wikipedia pages.

[Anonymous No.7739203]

>>7739174
>Atari 8-bit line never actually made Atari a profit
OReally? Atari 8-bit computers came in different models, and could use ROM cartridges along with Floppy Disks and Cassette tapes.

[Anonymous No.7739206]

The underage OP may not realize it but what sold computers and made the bucks was fleet sales of office machines to corporate America. Advertising the productivity use of a computer was standard practice back then (graphics capabilities were primarily advertised in their relevance to making graphs and pie charts). It was a big reason the Amiga proved such a hard sell; it was an early multimedia machine that nobody knew how to market and people didn't see the value in a computer that couldn't run the productivity staples of the day like Lotus 123 and dBase.

[Anonymous No.7739215]

>>7739183
IBM PC wasn't the only computer to have working hardware clones.
>Numerous Apple ][ clones originating in East, SouthEast Asia, Eastern Europe, and Oceania.
>Even more of the Speccy
>Some of the BBC Micro as well.

[Anonymous No.7739219]

>>7739206
i love the amiga so much for its wonderful blitter and copper system. was pure bliss and capable of so many awesome visual effects. absolutely destroyed everything on the market.

[Anonymous No.7739224]

>>7739145
Enterprise sales, mostly. Once it became established in the office people wanted to be able to run the same software at home so then the compatibles started cropping up.

[Anonymous No.7739229]

>>7739181
I would say companies hadn't really nailed down who was using computers yet and that in any case, the market wasn't that big yet. Companies focused on "hey, we've got a computer, look at all the stuff it can do!" because they weren't all that sure what people would actually use their machines for, and new and interesting reasons could appear unexpectedly. (Visicalc for example.)
The theme i'd take from this ad isn't so much that the Apple 2 has amazing graphic and sound capabilities, as that the apple 2 opens up a lot of possibilities for the user - it's the machine to help you discover computing, it's the machine that will teach you to program, it's the machine that will help you with your children's education, it's the machine for playing games, it's the machine to make art, it's the machine to organize your household finances, taxes, to track your health, and to do anything else you can think of. Graphics and sound capabilities are highlighted because they let the machine go "as far as your imagination can take it."

The thing about this style of ad is that it doesn't get tied down - it doesn't just say "Apple 2: The spreadsheet machine" because that might put off the game player, it doesn't just say "Apple 2: the games machine" because that might put off the person who wants a machine that's easy to learn to use, it doesn't just say "Apple 2: the easy to learn to use machine" because that might put off the person who wants the best hardware to program on. So they go for a very broad approach, hoping that someone reading the advert will see the one reason that would make them want a computer and can just skip the others.

[Anonymous No.7739237]

>>7739215
commodore's machines were only systems of the time that weren't cloned, due to the complex custom chips. they confuse the commie hardware bootlegger.

[Anonymous No.7739241]

>>7739145
Gee I wonder what niche sold INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS MACHINES. Perhaps it's lost to time.

[Anonymous No.7739962]

>>7739145
It seems weird to me that you get all your opinions from tards who are as ignorant as you

>>7739160
Oh teh ironing. I have idea how much anon knows but it's clearly more than you. Go ask your grandpa what a computer store looked like in the early 80's. Then ask him what a Kmart looked like. Then show him your posts. Then ask him how much shame you have brought to your family.

[Anonymous No.7739980]

>>7739145
Backroom deals, state intervention and lobbying, like every (quasi) monopoly. IBM, MS, Oracle it's all made up.

[Anonymous No.7740007]

look at the PCjr and PS/1 if you want to know how well IBM was going to penetrate the home markets. Cheap clones made it happen.

[Anonymous No.7740013]

Whatever the actual reason was, be sure that Netflix will make a documentary claiming it was all down to the token negro IBM employed.

[Anonymous No.7740274]

>>7739962
>SOUND & VISION

[Anonymous No.7740320]

My grandfather had an ibm pc and i remember playing some horse racing game and a cowboy game, but i dont remember their names. been looking for years.

Thought the cowboy game might be montezuma's revenge but i dont think that was it

[Anonymous No.7740447]

King's Quest was really the first game explicitly designed around the PC hardware instead of for an 8-bit machine.

[Anonymous No.7740874]

>>7740274
>Toys&GamesSection.jpg
kek

[Anonymous No.7740943]

the IBM team successfully brought together a marriage of the Apple II's color graphics and sound capability and the business computer capabilities of Z80 CP/M machines with a name tag that corporate America knew and trusted

[Anonymous No.7741035]

>>7740874
Don’t be fooled by its friendly exterior and bright colors, the C64 was a very capable computer in its day.

[Anonymous No.7741178]

PC gaming was barely a thing until EGA and Adlib. It was the massive amount of clones that flooded other PC manufacturers out of the market. That and Commodore was run by literal retards.

[Anonymous No.7742223]

>>7739145
You know fuck all about the state of computing at the time.

[Anonymous No.7742236]

>>7742223
>implying that actually is Steve Jobs in the photograph
It is definitely true that he had no love for the IBM company, but how can we be so sure thats not just some random Apple Fan of the day giving the logo the finger?

[Anonymous No.7742256]

Andy Hertzfeld recalled that "Shortly after the [IBM PC] became available in stores, we went out and got one to see what all the fuss was about. [Steve Jobs] was normally pretty tight with money but he let us do this. After opening it up we were so disappointed with what we found. Old, old parts with none of the clever design tricks Steve Wozniak used in the Apple II. The 8088 CPU was a joke compared with the 68000 used in Macintosh. It felt like the computer for the '70s."

[Anonymous No.7742274]

>>7742236
Andy Herzfeld posted the high quality original some years ago.

[Anonymous No.7742518]

>>7742256
>It felt like the computer for the '70s
Not even an Apple fanboy but it really did.

[Anonymous No.7743662]

>>7741035
>Don't be fooled by this being an 18+ board

[Anonymous No.7744742]

many 8-bit machines had better, more featured, and more intuitive operating systems than MS-DOS

[Anonymous No.7744774]

>>7744742
But about the games?

[Anonymous No.7744784]

Video games as a industry does play some role in driving the industry standard forward, in a technological way. But for the longest time business applications were the use case for...I don't know, 90% of shipped and sold units? Gamers were small potatoes.

[Anonymous No.7744806]

>>7744774
MS-DOS games didn't get good until the late 80s.

[Anonymous No.7744815]

>>7744774
As was explained earlier King's Quest was the first game that was truly designed for the PC hardware instead of an 8-bit machine.

[Anonymous No.7744845]

>>7742256
Yep, the PC was overpriced garbage but the corpo suits wanted the IBM brand on their hardware.

[Anonymous No.7744864]

And nowadays every console is x86, which means it's just a PC, EXCEPT Switch.
Why is it like that?

[Anonymous No.7744893]

Imagine
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/a-world-without-the-ibm-pc-9db63c27b85e

[Anonymous No.7744897]

>>7744893
it's pointless to imagine, IBM entering the PC market was an inevitability. Even if they hadn't someone else would have stepped in to make the huge beige tanks businessmen and engineers apparently wanted.

[Anonymous No.7744952]

>>7744897
The real what-if scenario is if IBM was able to successfully stop cloning of their machines.

[Anonymous No.7745093]

It was far cheaper i guess, and most people weren't computer experts at the time

[Anonymous No.7745201]

>>7742256
> The 8088 CPU was a joke compared with the 68000 used in Macintosh.
Comparing the original 1981 PC to the Macintosh isn't entirely fair. The Macintosh didn't come out until 1984. That same Year IBM released the PC AT and the EGA Graphics standard. So if you want to do a fair comparison you should compare the Macintosh to an IBM PC AT, which had an 6-8MHz 80286 and could go up to 16MB of RAM

[Anonymous No.7745206]

I have one of these in my closet.

Does anyone know what video cable it uses? It's not VGA

[Anonymous No.7745217]

>>7745206
>Does anyone know what video cable it uses? It's not VGA
if it's 9 pin then it's CGA/EGA/monochrome and will need a suitable monitor, though if you don't want to bother with a vintage CRT there are LCDs that accept those signals; they're mainly intended for CNC equipment.

[Anonymous No.7745225]

>>7744893

[Anonymous No.7745309]

>>7745217
I'll pull it out and get a picture.

[Anonymous No.7746298]

>>7739962
he's not getting it. he hasn't seen a youtuber tell him the truth. those were kids toys that kids lied about being computers to get gaming systems in their home. computers didn't have cartridge slots. they had business standard software for business shit. inventory, writing letters, formatting documents, performing calculations, drawing graphs, etc. the pc gaming revolution happened after the footprint had been established and developers wanted to reach the largest market.

[Anonymous No.7746310]

>>7746298
Everything about this post is wrong.

[Anonymous No.7746312]

>>7746310
I was just about to write an effort post about how it was wrong but this was satisfactory, thanks anon. Eat a dick >>7746298-san

[Anonymous No.7746521]

>>7745201
Yeah, but it's a lot easier to compare how much taller, stronger, and smarter your 8 year old is to your neighbors 5 year old.

[Anonymous No.7747224]

>>7746298
0/low quality cope