[openbeos] Re: WalterCon 2008: Change of Plans
- From: "Cyan" <cyanh256@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: openbeos@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 22 Jul 2008 16:57:32 +0100 BST
> Europeans also have a bigger alternative culture (germans for
> example, french are more conservative there...), they had Atari,
> Amiga, ... and used them.
> Demo parties using those machines (and PCs) are still huge events
> in germany, whereas there are some in france, but their audience
> is usually count by hundreds, german parties are much bigger.
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Many Europeans were using
non-PC platforms up until the early/mid 1990s, and thus Windows and
DOS didn't really enter the picture until Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22
came along.
Contrast that with America, where as far as I understand the PC has
been dominant almost since day one, with the only real rivalry coming
from the unaffordable Macintosh.
Needless to say, being exposed to the harsh reality of the WinTel
platform is a shock that many haven't recovered from.
As for why the PC was more popular in America in the first place,
I'm not sure. Was it more affordable there? More widely adopted by
business users? Or maybe it has something to do with communications
given that the Americans had free local calls (and thus free modem
use)?
It seems rather cliche to chalk it up to the usual suspects --
ergonomics (the PC-AT being a massive industrial "chassis" with a
huge fan-cooled power supply and 5" floppies, the ST being a compact
all-in-one system with built-in 3" floppy), and politics (the PC
containing user-selected combinations of components from competing
manufacturers, whereas the ST was an integrated system from a single
vendor)...
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