Comparing 1990's Computing Technology

[Gorgonops]

Designer of the Atari 800 (TIA, GITA, ANTIC)   =   Designer of the Amiga 1000 (Lorraine).

That is one of the bizarre ironies of the Amiga story; Commodore basically stole Atari's computer out from under them and Atari slapped together a less capable but quite-a-lot-cheaper-to-build knockoff to try to steal their thunder/get revenge; the positions they'd been in during the C64/800xl war were almost perfectly reversed. (And in the end they probably ended up killing each other rather than doing any material damage to Apple or IBM.)

a home computer built for the masses.

Of course, by 1990 sales figures suggest that the motherboard in the majority of home computers being sold probably looked more like something from this ad than either a Mac Classic or an Amiga:

 

[commodorejohn]

MIDI. ST's were really, really good for that. Some anal-retentive synth freaks use them to this day.

I suppose that's true, although it had more to do with specific programs (i.e. Cubase) than with the system itself (beyond its admittedly spiffy inclusion of MIDI out-of-the-box.)

 

[TheWhiteFalcon]

"Mini", lol. Those are full on AT class boards, rare to see an ATX that size. How times change.

 

[Gorgonops]

A "Full AT" motherboard is a rare and magnificent thing to behold. I've never actually owned a machine with one, I was always just enough behind the technology curve that I ended up with the smaller Baby AT models. I have worked inside some 386 systems with the full size boards bristling with DIP-packaged PALs and equipped with huge proprietary-slotted memory boards and you can't help but be a little impressed. They undoubtedly looked old the day they shipped but they were nonetheless "bleeding edge".

(I believe even the majority of IBM ATs actually had "baby AT" size boards, only the original "Type 1" was full size. There *may* have been 486s that big but by then I'm pretty sure the form factor was mostly extinct. Of course, watch someone prove me wrong with some monstrosity like a dual Pentium Pro in a full AT board.)

You want crazy, crazy overkill in motherboard form? Everex STEP MegaCube, circa 1991. 12 slots, 10 of which are EISA!

 

[NJRoadfan]

I have a full AT Micronics 486 EISA/VLB board here. Luckily the mid-tower case I had could house it.... barely. There were quite a few full-AT boards in the 486 era still, mostly pre-1993.

 

[Denus]

Atari:

• Hahaha, get real.

Clearly a biased opinion...

Did you know that there're many exclusive Atari ST games (and numerous great demos too)?

http://forum.classicamiga.com/forum/showthread.php/2322-Exclusive-Atari-ST-games-that-were-never-ported-to-the-Amiga?p=25974#post25974

I had a great time with my Atari STe, but also enjoyed the Amiga 600 / 1200 later on, but never gave me the good feeling I had with my ST for some reason, even if these machines were superior.

Especially the Atari ST demo-scene was very active back in 87 - 90.

But the Atari ST was only popular in some countries like France, Spain... When I moved from France to the Netherlands, my ST became obsolete very fast because the Dutch people are very Commodore-minded.

 

[bse5150]

Especially the Atari ST demo-scene was very active back in 87 - 90.

Was there ever a demo-scene for the Mac? 

 

[Denus]

Maybe a few demos for the Apple IIGS : http://www.ninjaforce.com/html/special_demoscene.html

 

[bse5150]

Kind of sucks that hackers were never really drawn to the Macintosh platform the way they were to the Amiga and Atari computers.  Some of the demos that they produced on the Commodore and Atari computers were really impressive.  I still enjoy taking in the demos that were produced for my old 800XL.   Amazing stuff!

 

[commodorejohn]

I think the deal was that the Mac was never really a hardware-centric system to begin with. C64, Amiga, Atari, even the IBM PC had a defined hardware standard that democoders could rely on so that they could work as close to the bare metal as they felt comfortable with, which was a big advantage in pushing this or that machine to its limits. The Mac, on the other hand, didn't really bother with standardizing the hardware, since the idea was to use the System and Toolbox exclusively and let them worry about the differences.