I never knew about this poem. It's a factual observation of that era of computing.

To this day, people getting into retro computing are disappointed by the Tandy 2000 and other non-PC compatible MS-DOS machines. (I get it, having passed up on an AT&T 6300. But if you wanted to give me a DEC Rainbow or Zenith Z-100 I wouldn't say no).

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bitwize 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I still freakin' love the Tandy 2000 because it was an absolute beast compared to most of the competition at the time—a true workstation class machine at an affordable price for 1983. Yes, it was doomed to fail in the coming PC-clone onslaught. So were a lot of machines.

	▲	badc0ffee 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		What did it use for expansion slots? I've seen pictures of the motherboard, but can't really identify what goes where. I don't see any 8-bit ISA slots (which makes sense, as it has a 16-bit bus), and I don't see 16-bit ISA slots (which makes sense because IBM didn't invent that standard until a year later! Also 16-bit ISA would have too many address lines for this thing.)

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em3rgent0rdr 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Still is just a bit true to today with all the walled gardens.

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ErroneousBosh 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It pops up every few months or so on here, and I have to upvote it every time.

I had a DEC Rainbow but I don't know who ended up with it. I also had a Sanyo MBC-555 which had quite good graphics considering but was very much one of the "almost-compatibles". Most things usually failed with the rather opaque "INTERRUPT TRAP HALT" message.