Ask HN: Who where lived through the beginning of the personal computer era?
I first saw an Apple ][ when I was in the 3rd grade at a private school,  I got a TRS-80 Color Computer of my own the next year.  That was my computer for most of the 1980s until I got a Coco 3 and then a 286 machine maybe a year or two after that.<p>What I find striking about it was a time from 1979 to 1986 when home computers seemed frozen in midair.  Steve Jobs for instance was terrified that the Apple ][ would quickly become obsolete and tried desperate things like the Apple &#x2F;&#x2F;&#x2F; (melts down like Three mile island,  they wouldn&#x27;t even demo it at the computer store for that reason),  Lisa (order of magnitude too expensive) and the first Mac (only a cool demo because it had too little RAM.)  Atari thought the Atari 2600 wouldn&#x27;t last so they released a large number of successors that failed to get traction.<p>The basic issue was that,  at that point,  microcomputers hadn&#x27;t obtained what IBM had obtained with the 360 mainframes.  That is,  you couldn&#x27;t expect to replace your Commodore 64 with a Commodore 65 that was compatible but faster and had more storage.  Upgrades were few and far between and each one left you thinking if you want to jump ship to another platform and we all did...  The IBM PC.  IBM really was the first company to do for micros what they did for mainframes.<p>(One reason for that was that early microcomputers were built around the video output system so you couldn&#x27;t increase the CPU clock by 10% without redesigning everything!)<p>I think it was the summer of 1987 when I got a 286 machine and left it behind.  From an operating systems standpoint the 286 was every bit as &quot;brain damaged&quot; as Bill Gates said it was but it was getting into the minicomputer performance range.  The rest of the industry saw Motorola&#x27;s 68k line as being the future but the 68k punched under its weight for realized performance just as the 6502 punched above its weight.  Even Motorola gave up on it and all the companies like Atari, Amiga, Apple and Sun either went out of business or switched to some kind of RISC processor.  People in the PC universe could just upgrade to 286, 386, 486, ... and benefit from an explosion in performance.