16 Oct
2025
16 Oct
'25
7:20 a.m.
I don't consider myself a historian but I enjoy talking about computer history.
I think during the 70s, 80s and 90s there were a lot more than just
the ones mentioned because there were multiple computer segments.
Large Scale and Mainframe Computing.
Office / Business Micro Computing
Industrial Computing
Home Computing
Then eventually Video and other types that elude me at the moment.
And even everything I just said is rather over simplified.
Yes, the Apple II, TRS-80 and Commodore PET, were important. But so
were the S100s, The Atari's, Commodore, Sun, HP, SGI, etc.
We had so many different companies with so many different hardware and
OS solutions competing.
You can argue we still do, but that computing is past the mainframe,
mini and desktop and on to distributed, mobile and wearable.
I guess it's all a matter of perspective.
On Wed, Oct 15, 2025 at 5:57 PM Murray McCullough via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Hi everyone,
According to historians, and I consider myself one, let us consider what
classic/vintage computers were: The 1970s saw the three amigos: Apple II,
TRS-80 and Commodore PET and the OS was DOS and its ilk + CP/M. The 1980’s
saw the Dells, HPs and many others with MS-DOS & IBM PC-DOS from QDOS. We
saw this and behold ’bring on the clones’(I just had to say this!) The era
of old computers saw one generation building on the shoulders of giants who
designed these wayback computers(with apologies to Wayback Machine).
Today’s PCs and ARM machines are just the latest iteration of this
theory(by the way not mine).
Happy computing
Murray 🙂