Simple is Best

It used to be like this when I was a kid: They used to make home computers cheap. Our parents could afford us a computer because you could go to K-Mart and buy a Commodore-64 for $150. This particular computer was a mean machine at the time. It ran at 1 mhz, had 16 colors, and had many cool graphics modes to play with. It came with Basic. The computer didn't have to boot, you just turned it on and it was there. We used to write our own programs, it was easy, educational, and fun.

The Commodore-64 outperformed a $2000 IBM PC in many ways including bang for buck and graphics performance. The C64's sound system was incredible for the time. In short, there was very little advantage in the hardware of a IBM to that of a C64. People laughed because of the small footprint and TV. connectivity, but when the incredible games started coming out showing off the capabilities, you can see why Commodore peaked out at manufacturing 9000 units a day. That's a lot, even by today's standards. They cranked out about 9 million C64's total.

Commodore later came out with the Amiga, a computer that pretty much smoked everything. The Amiga in 1985 did what PC's didn't really do until 1995:

• true multitasking
• very good graphics/sound
• multiple, simultaneous resolutions on the same monitor (something PC's still can't do.)
• very efficient use of hardware and memory. Can smoothly multitask programs on a measly 7 mhz machine with 256k of memory.

Now, there are no more cool computers like the C64 or Amiga, you have to pay $2000 for a computer of decent power, when it entirely possible to make them very cheap yet powerful just like in the early 80's. Even worse, with the home computer operating systems being developed by Microsoft almost exclusively, people don't understand how the computers work whatsoever and therefore are buying Microsoft's temporary solutions time after time. They design their products to be difficult to work with so they can sell new fixes and features under the guise of future operating systems. All the problems with Windows could have been eliminated before now, had they intended to do anything right in the first place. They seem to care nothing about improving the quality of life. Microsoft's goal is to make as many people rely on them for software as possible. This includes:

• Developing the OS based on closed-standards, or standards that Microsoft has access to first. This means Microsoft can make programs that run better or faster before anyone else, since they design the stuff in the first place.
• Modifying their products to be incompatible with rival solutions. For example, they put code into Windows 3.1 that won't let it run under anything but MS-DOS, even though there were 100% compatible DOS's being sold by other companies at the time as a cheaper alternative. They are being sued for this right now.
• They purport to release software and never doing it, to keep companies from buying rival products and wait for the Microsoft one.

Offered by Joe.