Inside the World's Long-Lost First Microcomputer

Ah... I worked at a small "computer" type company in the mid-70's that was developing a microcomputer based on a Motorola 6800 microprocessor. Those were the days.

I remember the first computer I bought, in 1987 -- an Atari 1040ST, with 1M of memory!! A lot for it's time. The good old 68000 wars, as dubbed by Byte magazine at the time, were an exciting time. The Mac, the Amiga and the Atari machines, became better at most computer tasks than the IBM compatible PCs of the time. More competition was definitely leading to better choices (and, I think, technological advances) in microcomputing. If Microsoft hadn't been such a predatory company, we might all be better served. Vista, OS-X and Linux might not be the only choices consumers have. True, you can run other OS's on today's hardware, but software is lacking.

And what of choices? What choices in business suites does the average company have? Even Mac hardware has an Intel version.

I miss the early days when there was real competition in the computing world. Developers are probably happier. But if programmers had to port all their "new and improved" software to several platforms, they might think twice about how necessary all the new bells and whistles in that "next version" really are.