On Wed, 5 Jun 2024 at 13:30, Bill Degnan via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote:
> that's an important distinction, affordability. You define personal > computers to contain microprocessors, which made them affordable. The > demand was always there, it's the point in the demand curve that allowed x% > of the population of an affluent country to afford them. Above the > point, not personal past it, personal. > > Is that what you're saying? Yep, pretty much. This is one way of _describing_ it. There are others. Another way of looking at it is this: a personal computer is a type of microcomputer. This is using the old classification of microcomputer, minicomputer and mainframe. If a device is not a microcomputer, it then must be either a minicomputer or a mainframe. Early on many mainframes didn't even support interactive sessions so they more or less disqualified themselves from being "personal" in any commonly-understood sense. Which leaves minicomputers. A single-user desktop (or deskside) minicomputer isn't a personal computer, because it's not a microcomputer. (And it costs as much as a car.) Then what is it? What do you call a single-user minicomputer? The other, often overlooked category: it's a workstation. Workstations, for as long as they existed, were personal computer _like_ devices but typically an order of magnitude more powerful and an order of magnitude more expensive. They also generally ran what ben mononym calls a proper OS. Workstations existed before microcomputers and before personal computers, and continued happily existing for about 30 more years, but by the time of 32-bit high-performance PCs with grown-up OSs, they were teetering, and by the time of commodity _64-bit_ PCs, or multiprocessor/multicore PCs with OSes that could use that, or of course both (64-bit multi-core), they were dead. A workstation wasn't really a type of PC. They exceeded PCs in specification, in performance, in price, and in sophistication of the OS... and when PCs caught up, they obliterated workstations because workstations also exceeded PCs in price by, as I said, at least an additional zero. -- Liam Proven ~ Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk ~ gMail/gTalk/FB: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/LinkedIn: lproven ~ Skype: liamproven IoM: (+44) 7624 277612: UK: (+44) 7939-087884 Czech [+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal]: (+420) 702-829-053
