Comment by flomo
1 day ago
Total nostalgia talk. Those machines were just glacially slow at launching apps and really everything, like spell check, go get a coffee. I could immediately tell the difference between a 25Mhz Mac IIci and a 25Mhz Mac IIci with a 32KB cache card. That's how slow they were.
Some of us do actually use such machines every now and then.
The point being made was that for many people whose lives doesn't circle around computers, their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
For those people, using digital typewriter hardly requires more features than Final Writer, and for what they do with numbers in tables and a couple of automatic updated cells, something like Superplan would also be enough.
> their computing needs have not changed since the early 1990's, other than doing stuff on Internet nowadays.
So in other words, their computer needs have changed significantly.
You can't do most modern web-related stuff on a machine from the 90s. Assuming you could get a modern browser (with a modern TLS stack, which is mandatory today) compiled on a machine from the 90s, it would be unusably slow.
Not everyone is all the time on the Internet, for some folks their computer needs have stayed the much pretty much the same.
If they want to travel they go to an agency, they still go to the local bank branch to do their stuff, news only what comes up on radio and TV, music is what is on radio, CDs and vinyl, and yet manage to have a good life.
Yeah, I just posted that a lot of that software was amazing and pretty 'feature-complete', all while running on a very limited old personal conmputers.
Just please don't gaslight us with some alternate Amiga bullshit history. All that shit was super slow, you were begging for +5Mhz or +25KB of cache. If Amiga had any success outside of teenage gamers, that stuff would have all been historical, just like it was on the Mac.
The Amiga had huge success outside of "teenage gamers", even if in niche markets. Amigas were extremely important in TV and video production throughout the 1990s. I remember a local Amiga repair shop in South Florida that stayed in business until about 2007, mainly by servicing Amigas still in service in the local broadcast industry -- all of the local cable providers in particular had loads of them, since they were used for the old Prevue Guide listings, along with lots of other stuff.
Goes both ways, Mac was hardly something to write home about outside US, and they did not follow Commodore footsteps into bankruptcy out of sheer luck.
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Amiga was big in Europe. No doubt they were slow though; most computers of the time were.
The Mac didn't exist in Europe except for expensive A/V production machines and the printing world (books, artists, movie posters, covers and the like).
If you were from Humanities and worked for a newspaper design layout you would use a Mac at work. That's it.
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Those machines could be pretty darn fast - if you get one and run the earliest software that still worked on. DOS-based apps would fly on a 486, even as Windows 95 would be barely usable.