I had the ST 520STFM, upgraded to 1Mb and running Spectre GCR. I also had a Vortex AT emulator fitted to it, which emulated an 8Mhz 286. Was excellent, and took me through most of University. MIDI work on it too, with a self-built 5Mb hard drive and the unreasonably good SM124 'paperwhite' mono monitor. Taught myself C on it, DTP/text processing (Signum was awesome), graphics...was great.

Despite that, I eventually got a Mac LC at the tail end of System 6, although mostly I spent my time on System 7. The native applications on it were just more focused on what I wanted to do (honourable exception: MIDI apps were better on the ST), the quality of the hardware was better particularly with the separate keyboard and integrated HD. I still think the LC pizza box design is one of the best they did - flip open the top, easy access to HD upgrades, RAM, expansion slot etc...

Switched again when the 486 DX66 with Win95 combination came out. Multitasking was superior to the Mac too - protected, pre-emptive not cooperative, and the idea of manually guessing RAM allocations when setting up your apps (on the Mac) felt very old.

Switched again when OS X came out. Unix with a pretty front end? Yes please. By that point I'd been running various Linux distros for a while too alongside Windows NT4. OS X's fast pace of integration with other devices (remember iSync? Was the best bluetooth phone integration out there) was superb. Lots of window manager innovation then too. Now? I mean, I still love the integration but it's within a more closed set of devices. I want my colour back in the interface, Lion's drab nonsense still infects their design ideas. But the most surprising to me is the hardware innovation - I have an M2 Pro 14" MBP, and it is superb. Battery life, lack of constant fans, lessons learned from bad keyboards on previous MBPs, ports back...love it.

Workbench itself was never great. MacOS from an interface point of view had it beat. Arguably even GEM had it beaten as a friendly environment.
br> As a system operation tool and functionality of the machine, the Amiga had the Mac beaten. A lot of the "20 years since/30 years since/40 years since..."-style articles completely miss the reality on the ground at that time. It wasn't a battle between IBM and Apple, Apple were completely outsold by Commodore and took to simply lying about sales figures. But Commodore isn't around any more to claim its rightful credit.

I never owned an Amiga, but shared a house with two people who did. I owned an ST and later a Mac LC. I have no qualms at all accepting that the Amiga was the more powerful beast of that crowd.

Agree with everything you said. I had a weekend and summer job selling computers and computer games. Could not believe the amount people were willing to pay for PCs, that did far, far less than the Amigas or STs for literally an order of magnitude more.

Also agree with Apple and OS X. I had a Mac LC but left when the holy triumvirate of Windows 95/486 DX66/Doom made them good enough to go for. Didn't return until OS X Jaguar and the fantastic Powerbook G4. System 7 still having to manually assign amounts of RAM to an application and hope the programmer (often me) called yield(), when Win 95 was doing pre-emptive mode multitasking was just...yeah.

That's a somewhat fascinating take on history. It's not correct though...

The 6502 was dated as you said, but the cheapness was the point. Chuck Peddle deserves a lot more credit than he gets for kickstarting widely available microcomputing in general through the price of this. Next up - the IBM PC. IBM has little to do with the success of the PC standard. That would be Compaq, who reverse engineered the original BIOS and made a clean-room compatible one. The idea of an open PC 'clone' was certainly not IBMs - Compaq brought those into existence. Microsoft saw the opportunity that created, and the rest is history. When IBM tried to assert authority with their Microchannel standard, they failed.

Also - the Mac as failure? Seriously? Apple's 'great success' came from putting their machines in schools. History is written by the winners - at the time, they were massively outcompeted and outsold by Commodore and just lied about being number 1 (see: Commodore: A Company On The Edge for more details.

Replying to undo accidental moderation.

They aren't. Apple TV does it too, it's just that some providers (alright - I mean Netflix...) don't want to appear on it and so don't integrate.

Bah, got EV link wrong. Here's the link I meant.

Not quite. Buicks have a passable market in China, and you can clearly see them losing that from the link I sent over. China is a) the world's largest car market and b) forging ahead on EV sales>. This is likely the reason for the all-electric Buick range, not the US.

I'm in the UK, we don't get Buicks here anyway (I don't think). But the market they're targeting with the Buick is China, not the US.

Can't edit so will respond to myself. Seems there's a video that might define 'most hazardous'? Don't know as doesn't play for me when I click on it.

I've read the article, but unfortunately it's not that good. The IT security practices seems to be conflated with general nuclear alarmism, which sadly is unsurprising given the article's source. The "most hazardous" comment, for instance, may or may not be true - there's simply no source or even definition for the statement whatsoever.

The IT security stuff sounds like the standard if somewhat depressing normality of utility organisations. It is absolutely worth of reporting on, and absolutely should be addressed. Diluting the article with standard anti-nuclear bias though...it doesn't help.

You are merely floxinoxinihilipilificating at this point, I feel.

The problem here is it's about local news mostly. The national/international chains will likely survive in some form, but they won't be uncovering the corruption in your town council or dig into what's being done about the terrible road condition at the junction just near the high street.

News is consolidating true, but it's also more homogenised and bland. Outrage about the same subjects, and all channelled towards those subjects. I'm in the UK - the number of kids who have a strong opinion on US domestic politics but none on their own is ridiculous, and it's because the media they use is dominated by large US chains.

So yes, the 'monopoly on the truth' model is broken forever and good riddance. But that doesn't necessarily mean there aren't problems elsewhere.