Not bad. I don't like its tone of approval, TBH.

I much preferred the

« raucous bazaar, teeming with variety. »

I hate the way the PC

« the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that »

I really did not like...

« he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »

That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.

It's a very American viewpoint. I only discovered in recent years that in the rest of the world, the Amiga and ST did much better than at home.

I was a kid when this happened. The Mac launched when I was... 15 I think?

To a rounding error, nobody owned PCs in the UK. They were extremely expensive business machines. Nobody owned Apple II either, and Macs were for the seriously rich.

We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about. We aspired to Camputers and Elan and Memotech.

Nobody _wanted_ office equipment. Would you offer a child a stapler to play with? That's how fun the PC was.

Amigas were huge and very desirable and seen as a gift from the future -- see this article from 2 days ago:

https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-t...

If you couldn't afford an Amiga, then the ST was a worthy competitor.

They were not some flop, some footnote of history. You can still buy new Amiga compatibles today from loads of vendors...

https://www.apollo-computer.com/v4standalone.php

https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/

The ST OS became FOSS and there are multiple modern versions:

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources

And don't neglect the Acorn Archimedes which stomped on both.

Its OS is FOSS now.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

Runs natively on Raspberry Pi. Other compatible new machines are being made and sold:

https://shop.elesar.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&pr...

Sinclair's QL hardware still has compatible machines made today:

https://www.specnext.com/sinclair_ql-qs/

https://sinclairql.net/djw/q68/index.html

This stuff was nothing to be banished to a footnote, dusty unsold boxes with weird names or whatever.

> « he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »

> That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.

It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari. Their relevance hung on in a couple of niche areas (like Atari with musicians), but outside of hobbyists, neither company mattered much and by 1995 they were both essentially dead from a commercial perspective. The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.

It doesn’t match my experience either and I’m in the USA. The father of a friend of mine in high school had one of the early IBM PC with 5 1/4 disk drive at home - the father worked at IBM - this was a luxury at the time. I think only one classmate I knew had an Apple II at home. Our high school computer club had to go the community college to get access to DEC minicomputers for our first exposure to computers only a few years prior to that. Things changed quickly as competitors out, I bought a Commodore 64 as soon as I could, the cost difference between a C64 and IBM PC or even the Apple II was quite large. Later I got an Atari which was competing with the first Macintosh and Amiga.

> We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about.

And now every mobile phone has a little Acorn DNA in it...