The home computer war(technicshistory.com) |
The home computer war(technicshistory.com) |
Nowadays often when you see articles about computer history of this era, the articles tend to be focused on Apple and IBM.
So it’s neat this article focuses on the other computers of this era. TI, Atari, Commodore, etc.
In the UK there was good split between Atari and Amiga, and before that the Spectrum and the C64.
Lots of rivalries and interesting characters though, for sure.
In High School, I used the TRS80s for programming in BASIC as well as for electronics stuff. We had access to Apple IIs but used them mostly for VisiCalc, spreadsheet and word processing. Having a RadioShack next to the high school, probably influenced my choice to keep using those brands of machines as opposed to Atari/Commodore. In my original move to Florida, before I returned, the COCO was shipped via land transport, when it arrived, I was informed that the shipment was damaged including the COCO. Life is not kind :(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VIC-20#Applications (First sentence.)
You could preserve some of that with an FPGA ecosystem starting with perhaps a simple RV32 core that you drag and drop UART, SPI, I2C, memory controllers, counters/timers, DMA, MMU, Ethernet, USB and other peripherals.
But part of me would want the old school preserved where we still make a series of hobby/trainer components in DIP (or PLCC/QFP) form and let people build a working computer from core components. Similar to how there was a line of support ICs for the Intel 808x and Motorola 68xx CPU's. Maybe some newer chips like a DIP USB host/device and a serial controller for SPI/SDIO/I2C. Perhaps a simple RV32 core in DIP 40 with a muxed 16 bit bus and 20+ bits of address.
Weirdly the most fun I had was with the BASIC programmable SHARP PC-xxxx line. I still have my PC-1350 somewhere.