Why did everything but MSDOS die back around 1992?

RJBowman · Post by **RJBowman** » Tue Nov 01, 2011 11:34 pm

Mac doesn't count, by the way.

What I'm talking about was this strange phenomena, where everything that wasn't MS-DOS compatible went out of production in a period of about a year or two. It wasn't just Commodore; Atari also shut down. Apple discontinued everything that wasn't Macintosh. What the hell happened?

I stopped reading computer magazines at that time, because the only new breakthroughs being reported were X86-based machines that ran faster and had more memory, and improvements to printers and modems.

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Wed Nov 02, 2011 5:01 am

PC hardware got cheaper and more powerful than the competition. Sound cards for PCs also came and games like Doom were invented. Games were suddenly cooler on PC.

16KVIC20 · Post by **16KVIC20** » Wed Nov 02, 2011 5:13 am

I wonder if it hyas been a completely good thing that there are only 2 major platforms now? If even the Amiga had survived as a mainstream option, things could be very different now. Maybe MS, intel, and Apple wouldn't have so much power.

eslapion · Post by **eslapion** » Wed Nov 02, 2011 10:46 pm

I remember in the early 90's the price of RAM was just plain outrageous at something like 50$ per Mbytes no matter that you'd buy a simple little 1MB 30 pin SIMM or larger 16Mybtes 72 pin SIMMs.

Maybe that has something to do with it.

Personnally, however, I didn't move onto the PC until I found on it an OS that was more or less equivalent to the OS 2.04 that I enjoyed on my Amiga 3000 and that was in late 1994 when I got Windows NT 3.51.

Everybody told me I was crazy to go directly for NT as it was supposed to be "for networks only " but man did it run Netscape Navigator like nothing else! I pity those poor souls who were still babbling with Windows for workgroups or OSII/Warp.

Boray · Post by **Boray** » Thu Nov 03, 2011 6:26 am

An Amiga 1200 was my main computer until 1999 when I got a PC with Windows 95.

6502dude · Post by **6502dude** » Thu Nov 03, 2011 6:43 am

eslapion wrote:I remember in the early 90's the price of RAM was just plain outrageous at something like 50$ per Mbytes no matter that you'd buy a simple little 1MB 30 pin SIMM or larger 16Mybtes 72 pin SIMMs.

In 1993 the going rate (in Canada) was $60 per MB
A 250mb IDE hard drive was about same cost as 4mb of ram.

RJBowman · Post by **RJBowman** » Thu Nov 03, 2011 7:33 pm

I recall a weird paradox:

IBM, Microsoft, and sellers of MSDOS type machines convinced business users that graphics were not important to business computing, and machines with decent graphics were only for video games...

And Apple convinced business users that instant pie charts and WYSIWIG word processing were essential to business.

Frank · Post by **Frank** » Tue Dec 06, 2011 10:18 pm

RJBowman wrote:I recall a weird paradox:

IBM, Microsoft, and sellers of MSDOS type machines convinced business users that graphics were not important to business computing, and machines with decent graphics were only for video games...

And Apple convinced business users that instant pie charts and WYSIWIG word processing were essential to business.

Oh and lets not forget the Anti competition practices of Microsoft. Nintendo was also famous for this.

RJBowman · Post by **RJBowman** » Sat Dec 17, 2011 11:23 am

Frank wrote:Oh and lets not forget the Anti competition practices of Microsoft. Nintendo was also famous for this.

I don't really remember that being a big factor until after Windows 95 was released and they set about to first kill OS/2 Warp and then Netscape. Did Microsoft do something to kill pre-windows hardware makers?

Kananga · Post by **Kananga** » Sun Dec 18, 2011 3:06 pm

RJBowman wrote:...and they set about to first kill OS/2 Warp...

Actuall OS/2 was killed by IBM. First they spent a lot of money on developing and advertising warp 3, then they didn't sell it. Obviously IBM could afford to lose money.