The convection currents around deep sea volcanic "vents" do the same job. Panspermia and abiogenesis are not mutually exclusive, despite the "either or" argument manufactured by the mass media.

I think panspermia is a long shot, but given the length of time and the size of the universe it's almost certainly happened somewhere at sometime. Volcanos could also be a mechanism for single celled life to leave a planet. It's said that rocks as large as a houses were blasted into obit by Krakatoa and some types of lichen have survived on the outside of the ISS for more than a year. The landing on such an interplanetary flight would be very difficult to survive since the rock is likely to vaporise on impact. Even if it survived and landed on a habitable planet, the locally evolved life forms would more than likely out-compete it by simply eating it.

AFAIK, in the US, the C64 itself had become the de facto successor to the Vic 20 anyway, purely because it was being sold so cheaply there.

I also understand that this meant C= weren't actually making much money on them, and this is why Tramiel was forced out (i.e. he won the 8-bit computer market, but it was mostly a pyrrhic victory.) But that wasn't the end-buyer's problem...

At any rate, I think that by the time the C16 came out in late-1984, compatibility with the Vic 20 wouldn't have been that big a selling point- the latter was yesterday's machine by then. C64 compatibility *would* have ensured its success, but then it'd have just been a redesigned C64 and probably not have had the manufacturing cost savings.

Yes, the Plus/4 was pointless, totally overlapping the C64 market without compatibility. As I said, the chipset was never intended for a midrange machine like that originally. Even the C16 was probably too close to the C64's forced-down price to really have a chance of success; the only clear gap in the market below the C64 (that would warrant an entirely different architecture being launched) was for something like the C116, i.e. the original plan. But I don't know if that would have sold in the US anyway.

Was "Trust Fund Wurzels" already taken?

The STe was clearly designed to close the gap between the "vanilla" ST (and STFM) and the Amiga, which had come down in price by that point. It might have worked... had Atari directly replaced the STFM with the STE at the same price when it launched.

Problem was that- almost certainly due to Jack Tramiel's penny-pinching short-sightedness- they charged more for the STe and continued to sell it alongside the STFM. So anyone buying an ST because it was cheap would get the STFM, and anyone who had a bit more to spend would have gone for the Amiga, whose superior power was already taken advantage of by existing software.

Hence there was no reason to buy an STe, so no-one bought an STe, so no-one developed software to take advantage of it, so there was no reason to buy an STe.... vicious circle.

Had the STe become the base model, there would eventually have been enough in circulation to make it worth supporting. They didn't, and it flopped. The STe *did* eventually replace the STFM circa mid-1991, but too little, too late- the ST's terminal decline had already started by then.

Assuming you mean the 8-bit Atari 400 and 800 (and its compatible redesigns, the XL and XE series), I did pretty much the same thing- was an Atari fanboy, but ended up with an Amiga. When one knows a little more about the "Commodore" Amiga and "Atari", it all seems a bit silly.

The major irony is that the Amiga developers included a number of ex-Atari staff- most significantly Jay Miner- who had worked on the 400/800 and the VCS/2600 before that. It represented (some have argued) a continued thread of architectural design that the 400/800 had significantly improved upon from the VCS, and had the same state-of-the-art custom chipset approach as its predecessors. (Indeed, just as happened with the 400 and 800, the Amiga was originally meant to be a console, before it evolved into a computer).

Also worth noting that "Amiga" was originally an independent company and it was only later bought by Commodore (after some legal wrangling with Atari, who'd had some involvement with them).

Meanwhile, Jack Tramiel had left Commodore (after falling out with the management), bought Atari Inc's computer and console division (i.e. the one that brought us the VCS and 400/800), which formed his new Atari Corp. The latter was a very different company to Atari Inc. (very obviously a much more shoestring operation). The Atari ST was designed by a different team after Tramiel had sacked most of the old Atari Inc. engineers, and very much reflected the "new" Atari; affordable, but much more off-the-shelf parts.

Atari Corp continued selling the XL and XE (cost-reduced versions of the 400 and 800), but they didn't design it; they merely milked the profits from a design they'd inherited while they focused on *their* Atari ST.

So... which was really the "true" successor to the Atari 400 and 800? By any measure, it was the "Commodore" Amiga. Who cares who made it? I briefly owned an ST because I couldn't afford an Amiga, but I ended up selling it and buying the latter a year later.

Devil's advocate: If there were no Devil then there would be no need for the ten commandments.

But the point remains, no one is FORCED to believe in the statue. I disagree with the intent that you feel it is somehow forcing you to believe

Would you feel the same way if it were core principles of Scientology? Would that not represent a de facto endorsement of the tenents of Scientology?

the 10 commandments have been on state capitols for as long as this country has been around, its nothing new

And this bit of hypocrisy is long overdue for abolition.

one does not have to believe in god to respect others.

Quite correct. And believing in god does not absolve you from respecting others either. Using public funds and public property to promote your religion is unequivocally disresepectful to citizens who think differently.

in other words, you do NOT have the right to not be offended anymore than someone of a different faith/non faith

A hindu, buddhist, or pagan would be just as troubled by state sponsored proselytization.

There are dozens of commandments in the old testament, more than a few on the correct treatment of slaves, women, cattle, and other "property". Strict Jews expect all of them to be known and obeyed. Christians narrow it down to ten, and George Carlin managed to get it down to two, but rule based morality (including western law) really all boils down to one golden rule found in virtually every religion - "do unto others".

The new pope is just better at PR. Let me know when his bishops start enforcing progressive policies in their dioceses.

Sin or fallacy? I've never met anyone who believes that believing in a deity is a sin. I've met plenty, myself included, who believe that believing in a deity requires at least one fallacy.

While they (like Tramiel's Atari Corp. did later on) probably did too many overlapping things at once, it's only fair to point out that the apparently pointless introduction of a new, C64-incompatible architecture for the C16, C116 and Plus/4 family did supposedly start out for sensible reasons. According to the WP article, Jack Tramiel was paranoid that (as they'd done in many other industries), the Japanese would swoop in and undercut everyone with ultra-cheap consumer-oriented machines. That's why the chipset is inferior in many ways to the older C64 design; its original purpose was to be much *cheaper* than the C64 to manufacture, and apparently, the rubber-keyed (i.e. low cost) C116 was closest to the original intent.

However, the perceived threat to the home computer market never materialised (*), Tramiel left Commodore and the management was left with a chipset they didn't know what to do with. Presumably, for political and business reasons it was better for management to launch *something* rather than write off the chipset, but this would explain why the decision didn't seem to make sense- by the time the machines came out, the chipset's raison d'etre was past and management had to do something, so shoved it in some would-be midrange machines that overlapped with the established C64.

(*) Ironically, the Japanese took over the US market another way, by launching the NES and everyone buying them for gaming instead of home computers.

Yes, this is correct. Technically, I guess it could depend how one interprets

Was the BBC truly a "home computer"? I'd say yes, though it overlapped the educational market too, but one could argue the point.

And perhaps it could have meant "(40 and 80 column displays) BOOLEAN-AND (dual processors) AND (three operating systems) AND (128k memory via MMU)".

That said, this is probably overanalysing. The BBC Micro wasn't that successful outside the UK, and the US tech industry (well, the US in general!) tends to assume that itself == the worldwide situation. So my suspicion is that Herd probably wasn't aware of it, or at least of it being a "home computer" (if it was).

Edit; sorry, should read "The C65 wasn't developed until circa 1990-91".

Whatever the merits or demerits of the two machines is irrelevant; the C128 came out in 1985, whereas the C65 wasn't developed circa 1990-91.

C64 diehards have an obsession with the C65 and Commodore's perceived mistake in abandoning it, but despite the latter's numerous crap decisions, I'm sorry to say that in this case they were absolutely right.

The C64 was still selling as a budget option circa 1991 (*) viable due to sheer momentum. The 16/32-bit Amiga was not only established as the successor, it had already taken over (in Europe, at least) and was already nearing *its* own commercial peak(!)

Trying to release a (sort of) new 8-bit format by that point, even a very good one, would have made absolutely no sense, flopped horribly and stood on the low-end Amiga models' toes, mudding the waters pointlessly.

They could have sold it as cheaply as the C64 (i.e. the high manufacturing costs of a new machine selling at the same price as a "wringing the last profit from established cash cow model"), but what would the point of that have been?

The C128 at least came to market when there was still *possibly* a gap in the market for a high-end 8-bit machine between the C64 and the new (but still very expensive) Amiga.

(*) Apparently C= were still making them when they went bankrupt circa mid-1994(!)

THe 6502 was an amazing processor. the Apple II was also a 6502. Unlike it's near contemporaries, the 8086 and Z-80 (and 6800), the instruction set was reduced. It had only 2 data registers (A,B) and two 8 bit address registers ( X Y) and fewer complicated ways to branch. Instead it effectively memory mapped the registers by using instructions like, offset Y by A, treat that as an address and get the byte at that location. Because it could do all that in one clock cycle, This effectively gave it 256 memory mapped registers. It also didn't have separate input lines for perifprials, and instead memory mapped those.

Nearly every instruction took a microsecond. Thus while the clock rate was 1 Mhz, it was much faster than a 4 Mhz 8080 series chip since those could take multiple cycles to do one instruction. Few memory chips (mainly static memory) could keep pace with that clock rate so the memory would inject wait states that further slowed the instruction time. The 6502's leisurley microsecond time was well matched to meory speeds. Moreover, on the 6502 only half the clock cycle was used for the memory fetch. This left the other half free for other things to access memory on a regular basis.

The regularity of that free memory access period was super important. it meant you could do two things. First you could backside the video memory access onto that period. On the 8080s using main memory you could often see gltiches on video displays that would happens when the video access was overridden by the CPU access at irregular clock cycles. As a result most 8080 series based video systems used dedicated video card like a CGA or EGA. Hence we had all these ugly character based graphics with slow video access by I/O in the Intel computer world. In the 6502 world, we had main memory mapped graphics. This is why the C64/Amiga/Apple were so much better at games.

This regular clock rate on the main meory had a wonderful side effect. It meant you could use Dynamic memory which was faster, cheaper, denser, and MUCH MUCH lower power than static memory. With the irregular access rates of the 8080 refreshing a page of dynamic memory requird all sorts tricky circuitry that trried to opportunistically find bus idle times to increment the dynamic refresh address, occasionally having to halt the CPU to do an emergency refresh cycle before the millisecond window of memory lifetime expired. As a result, the 8080 seris computers like Cromenco, Imsai, altair and Northstar all had whopper power supplies and big boxes to supply the cooling and current the static memory needed.

So the C64s and Apples were much nicer machines. However they had a reputation of being gaming machines. At the time that didn't mean "high end" like it does now. It mean toys. the Big Iron micros were perceived as bussiness machines.

Oddly that was exactly backwards. But until Visicalc, the bussiness software tended to be written for the 8080 series.

I think it was this memory mapping style rather than formal I/O lines to dedicated cards for periphrials (keyboard decoders, video, etc..) that lead apple to strive for replacing chips with software. they software decoed the serial lines (rather than using USART chips) they soft sectored the floppy drives rather than using dedicated controller chips, etc... And that was what lead to making the macintosh possible: less hardware to fit in the box, lower cost chip count, lower power more efficient power supplies.

Eventually however the megahertz myth made the PCs seem like more powerful machines than the 68000 and powerPC.