Think about what youβre claiming for a second.Β§
The Commodore 64 is still literally the best selling computer of all time,
simply because regular people who didnβt identify as geeks wereβ¦
Think about what youβre claiming for a second. The geek market would not have
been able to support a single model of a single machine for very long (just
look at how the Altair fared after the hype died down). But, there were dozens
of highly successful 8 bit micros intended for home use in the US alone (and
dozens more in the UK market, and dozens more across the Soviet Union).
The Commodore 64 is still literally the best selling computer of all time,
simply because regular people who didnβt identify as geeks were still willing
to buy an original-model Commodore 64 in the early 90s. Because both the Lisa
and the original Macintosh flopped (i.e., he got fired from Apple before their
first profitable GUI machine), literally all of the money Steve Jobs dumped
into NeXT and Pixar came from the persistently-profitable Apple ][ line β a
line that was marketed as an educational tool for children and a utility for
small businesses. Everybody who had one of these was performing simple
programming, and enough sold to make millionaires out of Jobs, Woz, Tramiel,
Sinclair, Gates, and dozens of others.
Sure, GUI machines eventually became popular, but the percentage of households
that had a computer didnβt spike with the release of the Lisa but instead with
the first commercial dialup internet services that provided access to the
actual internet (as opposed to a BBS) more than a decade later. The Macintosh,
Amiga, and Atari ST (the premier GUI machines of the 80s) all consistently had
their lunch eaten by 16-bit PCs and the continuing Apple ][ & Commodore 64
lines up until the early 90s, and while Windows theoretically debuted in 1987,
it wasnβt in common use among PC users until the early 90s either (because
until Windows 3.x it wasnβt much different from the DOSSHELL file manager that
had shipped with PC-DOS for years). Even then, Windows didnβt really start
being commonly run on home computers until the release of Windows 95, because
earlier versions were incompatible with DOOM (and the marketing around Windows
95 focused on being able to run DOOM as much as it focused on having a TCP
stack & a web browser).
I know that βGUI machines brought computing to the massesβ is a common cliche
β it became a very effective bit of Apple marketing about ten years after
Apple abandoned it β but itβs never really been true. On a fundamental level,
GUIs arenβt more intuitive for totally naive users than command line
interfaces are β and the command line interface has the benefit that anybody
who can read can learn to use it by typing in examples from a book, while even
mouse use must be taught by someone physically present.
The plain fact is, people who would never call themselves geeks or programmers
regularly bought computers that required programming, learned a tiny bit of
BASIC, and used that tiny bit of BASIC to type in games from magazines and
debug them or to help do their taxes or to just screw around, and they
complained about it no more than people complain about Facebookβs UI.
Please do a tiny bit of research before repeating obviously-flawed cliches.
You call yourself a skeptic, so act like one.
By John Ohno on October 5,
2018.
[Canonical link](https://medium.com/@enkiv2/think-about-what-youre-claiming-
for-a-second-b0bc20a04eb0)
Exported from Medium on September 18, 2020.
