
The Coming Crisis in Home Computers (1983) - indigodaddy
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/06/19/business/the-coming-crisis-in-home-computers.html
======
apo
_' 'I've been in retailing 30 years and I have never seen any category of
goods get on a self-destruct pattern like this,'' said Everett Purdy, senior
vice president of merchandising for Service Merchandise, which sells home
computers through its catalogs and showrooms. Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list
price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100._

That price plunge turned an unaffordable extravagance into something I could
actually buy and start using every day. It wasn't just the computers that
became cheaper, but the peripherals (disk drives, modems, printers) and
software as well. Suddenly, a home system that was never going to happen could
be picked up piecemeal at a fraction of the price.

I wonder how many programmers owe their current careers to this early shakeout
and price collapse.

~~~
coldtea
> Since fall 1982, T.I.'s list price has tumbled from $400 to less than $100.

Besides prices got to rising again... Now $400 is the starting price for a
laptop/PC, and people pay over $3000 often...

~~~
shpx
You forgot about inflation and chromebooks.

$100 in 1983 is $253.90 in 2018[0]. Here's a chromebook with 2GB RAM and 16GB
storage for $116[1]. You can probably get a used one on craigslist for less.

$400 in 1983 is $1,015.60 in 2018. You can buy the lowest spec'd version of
the older macbook air for $1000, or the lowest spec'd version of the new one
for $1200[2].

[0] [http://www.in2013dollars.com/1983-dollars-
in-2018?amount=100](http://www.in2013dollars.com/1983-dollars-
in-2018?amount=100)

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720p-2625-Touchscreen-
ChromeBoo...](https://www.amazon.com/Acer-C720p-2625-Touchscreen-ChromeBook-
Refurbished/dp/B01E9GBRU2) it probably sucks but it's the cheapest one I saw
in the search results

[2] [https://www.apple.com/us/shop/buy-mac/macbook-
air](https://www.apple.com/us/shop/buy-mac/macbook-air)

~~~
stormbrew
To be fair, prices dropping that low is a relatively recent phenomenon. A
fully working and useful general purpose computer (including display) was
never less than like 5-700 for most of the 90s and 00s in my experience.

~~~
bluedino
I remember cheap 286 and 386’s for $1200/1400, but I don’t remember computers
getting down to $500 until eMachines in 1999/2000

~~~
stormbrew
I'm not saying it was always that low, but that's the lowest I ever saw it
get.

------
WalterBright
DEC could have completely owned the PC market. They had the microcomputer
(LSI-11), excellent software for it, an upgrade path to more powerful
machines, and legions of loyal "DEC-heads" just itching to buy one.

DEC fiddly-farted around for years, and finally came up with the Rainbow PC.
Not only did it have nothing to do with the 11, its compatibility with the IBM
PC was deliberately crippled (you had to do things like buy floppy disks only
from DEC). The DEC-heads I knew just laughed in disgust at this, and abandoned
their loyalty to DEC.

The Rainbow fiasco marked the end of DEC. It's pretty sad, what might have
been. The 11 was a fantastic machine.

(I owned an H-11, and thinking DEC was the obvious future of microcomputing,
rewrote Empire for it: [https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-
PDP-11](https://github.com/DigitalMars/Empire-for-PDP-11) )

~~~
jhbadger
Bizarrely enough, one of the few home computers available in the Soviet Union
was a PDP-11 clone in a C64-style case!
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK)

~~~
krasin
For the first two years of my life as a programmer (1996-1998), I only had
access to these PDP-11 clones. Jumped straight to Pentium II. Never had a
sharper upgrade in performance.

------
dwheeler
That was not really a crisis, that was a shake out. The article really focuses
on the Texas instrument computer. They basically bungled it, everybody knew
that software was key for having a popular computer, and yet they do not take
steps to make sure there was lots of software available for it... indeed, they
discouraged it.

~~~
tzs
Amazingly, years later IBM made the same mistake with OS/2, but more so.

Some well known computer columnist, I _think_ it was Jerry Pournelle in his
BYTE column, wrote of attending a trade show when Windows 3 was still king
where IBM was showing OS/2 Warp and Microsoft was showing Windows 95. OS/2 was
out at the point, but Windows 95 was still in beta.

He went to the IBM booth, told them he was interested in programming for OS/2
Warp, and asked what he had to do. They gave him a bunch of forms to fill out
to apply for the developer program. The forms asked for details of his
business and analysis of why he thinks it will make money with OS/2\. If they
were satisfied with this, they would allow him to buy the SDK.

Then he went to the Microsoft booth and asked the same question about Windows
95. They handed him the SDK right there, no charge and no strings attached.

That was when, he said in his column, he knew Windows 95 would be the
successor to Windows 3, and OS/2 Warp would be at best a niche OS.

I said IBM made the same mistake as TI, but more so. The more so is because
IBM also neglected promoting OS/2 to consumers, and they neglected hardware
support, so even if it had all the software that you cared about, it was hard
to discover that OS/2 was an option, and if you did it could be a nightmare
getting it to work with readily available hardware. By 1996, Linux was easier
to get working than OS/2 with most hardware sold at the major retail computer
stores (CompUSA, Computer City).

~~~
Renaud
Developers, developers, developers! [1]

That has always been Microsoft's strength: their ability to bring developers
to their ecosystem.

It doesn't matter if your OS is the best, most modern and revolutionary: it
means nothing if you can't do anything with it.

The same mistake almost bit the iPhone when it was launched.[2]

[1]:[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vhh_GeBPOhs)
[2]:[https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-
st...](https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/07/10/the-revolution-steve-jobs-
resisted-apples-app-store-marks-10-years-of-third-party-innovation)

------
bsenftner
In '83 I was a 17 year old wise-ass with a dippity-doo mohawk and video games
I'd authored in every Sears and K-Mart nation-wide. My best friend did the
contacting of computer stores, and one of them turned us onto his brother - a
distributed of games and toys to Sears and K-Mart. Our best seller was a
Vic-20 game called "GraveCave". Through that experience I became a beta tester
for the original pre-release Mac and backdoored by way into Harvard, working
with Mandelbrot and quite a bit more. Ah, the risks of youth...

~~~
FiveSquared
r/humblebrag. BTW, it was you who made GraveCave? Hello!

~~~
bsenftner
Hi! :)

------
ontouchstart
> The history of the personal computer business, brief as it is, has shown
> that the successful machines are the ones that have the most and best
> software available for them. It has also shown that no single company can
> write all the software itself. It must take advantage of the cottage
> industry of programmers.

------
sys_64738
Jack Tramiel truly was a business genius whose legacy is unfortunately being
written out from history. Only the winners write history in their narrative
but Jack is the forgotten hero who was ruthless with competitors.

"Business is war"

RIP Jack.

~~~
gnachman
How can this be in light of his performance at Atari? I’ve always blamed him
for their downfall, but maybe there’s something I don’t know.

~~~
jfultz
There's lots to criticize re Tramiel's performance at Atari, especially on the
console side where he sat on the already-finished 7800 for two years while
letting Nintendo redefine the marketplace. But Atari had been failing in many
ways up to that point (mostly management failures), and all of those chickens
came home to roost in 1983. What Tramiel took over in 84 was a company that
had already fallen, and was on the brink of utter collapse.

They drove away many of their best software developers, forming competitive
software companies such as Activision and Imagic, and then spent resources
trying and failing to sue them out of existence. Also departing were hardware
folks like Jay Miner and Joe Decuir, who would be major contributors to the
Amiga, an opportunity that Atari would later have in their hands and throw
away. They completely muffed the next-gen console release with the Atari 5200,
which was basically nothing more than a repackaged Atari home computer
(already 3 years old at the time of the 5200's release), crippled by a
terrible analog joystick that didn't self-center and was prone to breaking.
They rushed VCS games to market assuming they would print money regardless of
quality issues. After 9 months of raking in over $300m in profits in 1982,
they ineptly handled the warning signs of Christmas 1982, leading to over half
a billion in losses in 1983.

There was no way the crash of 1983 wasn't going to hurt Atari, but IMO a
company which had been better run could have survived. As it was, without
somebody that had Tramiel's level of discipline at the helm, Atari probably
would have died in 84 or 85.

------
FullyFunctional
The striking part about that article is that there is zero discussion about
technical merit. I've never seen nor used a TI 99/9A, but the stories I read
weren't too kind.

In my neck of the woods (Denmark), in the 1978-ish your choices were expensive
pre-built Z-80 machines, like the Luxor ABC-80 or danish niche computers (some
which were actually amazing for the time). I went with a British kit, the Z-80
based Nascom 2.

Roughly 1 years later, the market had changed and 6502 based options were
abundant with the BBC, VIC-20, and Commodore 64 taking the lead (ZX80, ZX81,
and ZX Spectrum were popular too). Later Amiga arrived with its own following.

All this to say that the world was such a mess of an abundance of incompatible
computers that when the IBM PC came out, the main attraction was the belief
that, because of I.B.M., this would become popular enough that there would be
a critical mass of great and actually useful software.

I sometimes try to imagine how things would have played differently had IBM
abstained from the "hobby market".

------
bookofjoe
>Coleco's Adam, which will sell for $600, includes 80,000 characters of
internal memory, a daisy-wheel printer, a tape storage device, game joysticks,
a word-processing program and a game. The package will allow people at home to
use the computer in place of a typewriter as well as for playing games.

$600 in 1983 = $1,520.72 in 2018. iPhone XS Max w 512GB: $1,449.

~~~
lagadu
So a well specced but not top-end personal computer in 1983 costs about the
same as a simililarly specced computer today and the same as high end phone
that effectively replaces computers for many people? It's kind of
underwhelming.

~~~
chrisco255
Suppose you could teleport an iPhone XS back to 1983...I doubt that anyone
would find it underwhelming.

~~~
nkozyra
That isn't the parent's point, though. It says relatively comparable computer
at relatively comparable price.

~~~
fjsolwmv
They are only "comparable" on the relative scale. That aan interesting
economic observation of consumers' willingness to spend on "technology". The
progress in computing is not "underwhelming" \-- a modern smartphone is not
just a computer, it's also a telephone, a camera, a movie decoder, a video
screen, an audio video recorder, an audio player, a GPS, an accelerometer, a
local wireless communicator, and host incredibly advances applications, while
also being battery powered, pocket-portable, water resistant, shock resistant,
with near 0 electricity cost, noise emissions and heat emissions.

~~~
nkozyra
> The progress in computing is not "underwhelming"

Again, that's not the claim.

------
sehugg
Yes the TI-99/4A was 16 bit, but it only had 256 bytes of (static) RAM
connected to the CPU bus! The other 16k of DRAM was behind the video
processor, so the CPU had to read/write it sequentially one byte at a time.
There was't even a stack for the CPU.

------
rangibaby
I wasn’t alive then but always has the impression that “home computers” like
those described were much more popular in Europe and Japan while PCs became
the dominant platform in the US. Is this why?

~~~
reaperducer
_I wasn’t alive then but always has the impression that “home computers” like
those described were much more popular in Europe and Japan while PCs became
the dominant platform in the US. Is this why?_

Your impression is wrong.

8 bit home computers were massive in the U.S. the main differences between the
U.S. and Europe were:

. Europe was big into Acorn and Sinclair. In the U.S., Sinclair was an also-
ran under the Timex brand, and was widely seen as a toy; Acorn was unknown.

. Tape drives were more common in Europe, while U.S. consumers almost always
had a disk drive or both.

IBM becoming big in the home computer space didn’t happen until the 8-bit
Commodore and early Apple machines were already long in the tooth. When it
came time for people who owned Commodore 64’s and TI99/4A’s to upgrade, the
choices were often Amiga, Mac, or IBM.

IBM was an easy decision for many because they were familiar with the machines
from work, and because the notion of doing more office-like things at home was
becoming popular. It was about this time that the home “computer room” evolved
into the “home office.”

~~~
flohofwoe
I'd say the UK was into Acorn and Sinclair, not (Western-)Europe as a whole.
The situation was very different per country (e.g. the Acorn Atom was quite
popular in the Netherlands, but AFAIK nowhere else on the continent). In
(Western-)Germany it was mainly Commodore (C64 and Amiga), and apparently(?)
Amstrad CPC were quite popular in France and Spain.

Eastern Europe was either ZX Spectrum clones, or "domestic designs", mostly
based on Z80 CPU clones, but also some 6502 based machines (e.g. an Apple II
clone) in Bulgaria.

~~~
coldtea
> _Amstrad CPC were quite popular in France and Spain_

And in Britain and other european countries as well...

------
grigjd3
With hindsight, this article has all the pieces for understanding what
happened with home computers but didn't quite put it together. The article is
correct that software was going to drive computer sales and that you had to
depend on what at the time was a cottage industry. They even mention IBM being
about to enter the market, but the article doesn't seem to be aware of or
recognize the importance of the PC architecture in providing a common platform
for software creators to target.

~~~
davidgay
> They even mention IBM being about to enter the market

They're referring to
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr)
\- a (very much failed) "home computer market" entry.

(The IBM PC is 1981, this article is 1983)

~~~
grigjd3
The Wikipedia article you link even has a quote of an analyst saying this
machine will establish the operating system for the home computer market.

------
baus
I learned to program in BASIC on T.I. 99/4A. The computers themselves were not
expensive, but the peripherals were. It seems insane now, but we used them by
hooking them to a TV.

Even back then it was a niche compared to the Commodore vic-20/64.

I think the real loser from the that time frame wasn't TI, but Commodore who
was in a market leading position, but ultimately lost to the PC and Mac.

------
matt_morgan
The best part here is someone from Salomon Brothers (RIP) talking about how
the computer industry isn't living up to its promise.

------
foxhop
Although the prices of the computers and the extreme price reductions seems
interesting, I think even more so is the companies and brand names that have
disappeared from the "consumer market" due to saturating the market (Texas
Instrument and Atari). I think it is very interesting that the desktop
(personal computer) exploded over the next couple decades and yet the overages
in supply actually sunk these market leaders to the point where they never
recovered.

I think properly forecasting market size and growing your inventory,
surpluses, and work-in-progress properly while pouring extra engineering
capacity into research and development is a delicate balancing act which we
can all learn from.

~~~
ohiovr
Remember the computer shopper publication from ziff davis? it was a monthly 3
inches thick magazine full of vendors selling beige box computers that have
now all been long forgotten.

------
neonscribe
IBM's "Peanut" became the PCjr, one of the great flops of the early PC era.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PCjr)

~~~
julianz
Oh yes I remember these. A family friend bought one to run his business on,
clearly happy that he'd got a bargain. It was a piece of shit and he was
forever running into compatibility problems with software.

------
shubhamjain
> Referring to the $100 rebate that had helped make the T.I. home computer
> popular, Mr. Cosby joked about how easy it was to get people to buy
> computers if you paid them $100 to do it.

It makes sense for Sony, Nintendo, and Amazon to sell their devices at a loss,
making up for it later in selling digital games and books. The loss is an
acceptable cost for a bigger distribution platform. But what reasons T.I. had
to pursue the strategy without having any footprint in software? Can anyone
help me understand this?

~~~
83457
May not have been that was the strategy they wanted to take initially but they
were undercut severely on price my commodore's vic-20 and may have been seen
as the only option.

~~~
russfink
I had a Timex Sinclair 1000, and then bought a Commodore 64. I used a vic-20,
and for the life of me, I cannot see how a vic-20 compares to a Texas
Instruments 99 / 4A. I honestly would have preferred my Timex over a vic-20
just because the 20 character screen with was super annoying. How did you live
with it?

~~~
reaperducer
I used to feel the same way. But it’s importamt to remember that the VIC 20
wasn’t so much a contemporary of the 99/4A as it was its predecessor.

The VIC was somewhat out of phase with the rest of the computer industry at
the time. It was more akin to being a step between CP/M machines and the full-
on 1980’s home computer scene.

Amazingly, people are still producing new VIC 20 carts today. And the quality
of the games is quite impressive.

------
ohiovr
Dad liked the TI 99/4a so much he bought 2 of them, from service merchandise
no less. It had a 16 bit processor and a really swell speech synth module
(golly gee it says good shot pilot when you zap an alien!)

Personal computer prices were in a meteoric decent just a few years prior
radio shack had a catalog of them starting well over $3,000.

------
code_duck
I have one of the original TI PCs, with an 8086. My father purchased it around
81-82. We did have a Commodore 64 as well, and indeed it was far more capable,
convenient and user friendly.

~~~
russfink
I was about 14 at the time and had to save my own money to buy a computer. I
bought a Timex, and then a Commodore 64. I often wished for the Texas
Instruments, because it looked more like a grown up or professional computer,
while the Commodore 64 seemed to emphasize games. In particular, I liked the
Texas Instruments keyboard a lot better than the Commodore. What was your
experience and perceptions? Did you like the Commodore more because it had
better games?

~~~
code_duck
First off I found the BASIC environment of the Commodore 64 much more enticing
and then MS-DOS 2. It was my initial hacking environment.

Then, we did have a lot better software on the C64 such as logo and indeed
many games, and all of the hardware capabilities were far superior such as the
graphics and sound. The TI had an ASCII display only… I don’t even think it
had CGA, which is far inferior to the Commodore and all the PC world had to
offer for years. Even EGA was not as good as the Commodore (one year my friend
got a PCjr for Christmas...). It wasn’t until the PS/2 came out that I was
excited about having a PC.

------
jecel
The 1979 TI99/4 included a color monitor as part of its price while the
TI99/4A did not, so the 1982 and 1983 price comparisons were a bit flawed.

------
ezconnect
Spectravideo was my first hone computer

------
JohnJamesRambo
Whenever I read things like this I grow sad that this generation threw out all
their computers and traded them in for smartphones, which aren’t really
computing at all in my opinion. They are more like watching tv, something we
already did too much of.

~~~
Kaveren
You know this already, but smartphones are just computers that are small and
portable. That's the only difference. Many of the operating systems are
similar or based on those you'd use on a desktop or laptop computer. There's a
large amount of software available on both mobile and traditional computer
operating systems.

TV is non-interactive, smartphones allow a great deal of interactivity.

Besides, I don't think watching a fair amount of TV is a bad thing in the
first place. It's a creative medium, you're consuming art (okay, maybe a lot
of it isn't very good, but it's art nonetheless).

I think you might just be nostalgic.

~~~
beatgammit
Smartphones aren't nearly as good for being productive as desktops and
laptops, though they're pretty good at consuming content. I think this shift
away from desktops and laptops indicates a shift away from productivity.

Yes, a lot of people watched too much TV, but at least they had the capability
of doing things like image editing, building spreadsheets, etc. Smartphones
_can_ do those things, but it's so awkward that it's more likely that you're
not going to bother, so you're more likely to just consume content instead of
create it if you don't own a desktop or a laptop.

Personally, I'm not really nostalgic over traditional computers, but I _am_ a
little nostalgic for stuff created by hand instead of filled in with a
template.

~~~
meuk
This. If we'd have a smartphone with a proper USB connection (one that doesn't
stop working after a few years), and the possibility to connect it to a
keyboard, screen, and mouse, I'd do pretty much everything on my phone.
Instead, I can't even browser normally: I get a dumbed down version of most
sites.

~~~
windows_tips
It's possible to 'dock' a phone with a keyboard, monitor, and mouse. I'm not
sure many easily support that setup though.

------
emmelaich
Classic NYT. Falling prices is a "crisis"

~~~
FiveSquared
Sounds like Trump. And yes, TI was falling and have you read the article?

