Steve Jackson Games Forums - View Single Post - 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae]

cvannrederode · 03-21-2016, 01:55 PM

9) While most people are saying "PC", the Wintel machine had not cemented it's dominance yet. Other options that she may have:

Commodore Amiga. The Amiga 2000 was a top model at the time, and included a lot of expansion options.

The Atari ST is also an option. Especially for someone into the Music and "Demo" scene.

An Apple Macintosh, either an SE or a Mac II if she was more upscale.

Also on the Apple side, she could have a IIgs, but a Mac would be more hipster.

As far as PCs go, IBM was still in their first generation of PS/2 systems, which had just been released in 1987. Only the highest of high end systems ran with 80386's, most folks made do with 8086/8088 machines, or might spring for an 80286.

You could still make do without a hard drive for day to day use. DOS was at version 4, Windows was only at version 2. Most PC work was at the command prompt, while the other machines listed all had fully realized GUIs.

Online work was with a modem, and given the area, long distance calls. BBSs were still a very big thing, Compuserv was the biggest name in what would become online services. Quantum Link had just changed it's name to America Online in Oct or Nov 88 after launching "PC Link" in August. GEnie was around also. Dial in speeds would be 2400 bits per second at most. ARPANET was just starting to become the Internet, but Berners-Lee wouldn't start work on HTML for another couple of years. She'd be much more likely to use CompuServ or GEnie or even FidoNet for "Email".

03-21-2016, 01:55 PM	#20
cvannrederode Join Date: Apr 2015 Location: Pennsylvania	Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae 9) While most people are saying "PC", the Wintel machine had not cemented it's dominance yet. Other options that she may have: Commodore Amiga. The Amiga 2000 was a top model at the time, and included a lot of expansion options. The Atari ST is also an option. Especially for someone into the Music and "Demo" scene. An Apple Macintosh, either an SE or a Mac II if she was more upscale. Also on the Apple side, she could have a IIgs, but a Mac would be more hipster. As far as PCs go, IBM was still in their first generation of PS/2 systems, which had just been released in 1987. Only the highest of high end systems ran with 80386's, most folks made do with 8086/8088 machines, or might spring for an 80286. You could still make do without a hard drive for day to day use. DOS was at version 4, Windows was only at version 2. Most PC work was at the command prompt, while the other machines listed all had fully realized GUIs. Online work was with a modem, and given the area, long distance calls. BBSs were still a very big thing, Compuserv was the biggest name in what would become online services. Quantum Link had just changed it's name to America Online in Oct or Nov 88 after launching "PC Link" in August. GEnie was around also. Dial in speeds would be 2400 bits per second at most. ARPANET was just starting to become the Internet, but Berners-Lee wouldn't start work on HTML for another couple of years. She'd be much more likely to use CompuServ or GEnie or even FidoNet for "Email".