General interest computing questions

[Baseley09]

Few things popped into my mind this morning id like to know about if anyone knows....

At what point did Motorola drop the ball on home computer processing? At some stage they were surely the don having their chips in most consoles & computers......how did Intel muscle in on PC's, before the Pentium came along were intel making home CPU's, if not, who? Werent Motorola in conjunction with IBM producing power pc items for mac?

Also about Operating systems, while we were using DOS, was there any alternative? When Windows launched, was it the first OS to use such a GUI? Was there anything else before it, I mean a full on OS not something like XTree Gold running in DOS?

Come on nerd powers, unite!

 

[kernow]

windows 3.1 ran on top of dos as a shell

there were loads of other command line operating systems around the same time as DOS. loads better too cough

 

[Takumaji]

Motorola did not drop the ball on home computing, it were the makers of home computers who stopped using their chips.

At it's high-time, the M68K was the first choice of many computer and embedded systems designers because it was comparably cheap, not that hard to code and reliable, unlike AT-based systems which were a bit more powerful but very expensive and thus mainly used in business.

And yes, there were graphical OSs before windows, like GEOS and certain GUI-based frontends to IBM mainframes like AS/400, they weren't used as "client OSs", though.

Then there was the Amiga Workbench and the old Macs (the predecessor series called "Lisa") which had mouse-driven GUIs way before the early Win 2.x versions came out (which looked like DOS anyway). Apple started with home-/end user computing workstations as early as 1982.

 

[Rade K]

Few things popped into my mind this morning id like to know about if anyone knows....

At what point did Motorola drop the ball on home computer processing? At some stage they were surely the don having their chips in most consoles & computers......how did Intel muscle in on PC's, before the Pentium came along were intel making home CPU's, if not, who? Werent Motorola in conjunction with IBM producing power pc items for mac?

Also about Operating systems, while we were using DOS, was there any alternative? When Windows launched, was it the first OS to use such a GUI? Was there anything else before it, I mean a full on OS not something like XTree Gold running in DOS?

Come on nerd powers, unite!

XTree Gold - brings back a lot of memories. If I remember correctly, my friend used to use XG to boot games like Rise of the Triad, LORD, and a whole slew of Lucas Arts games. Brings back memories of a time before Windows 95 - where computing was a different experience from home to home and business to business.

All I remember about Windows 3.1 was how slow and painful it was to use. Say what you will about Windows 95 and its current variants, but it really made using a PC easier, if not a less intelligent experience.

 

[Takumaji]

Heh, look what I've found, here's the first computer with a graphical OS/GUI from 1973 - behold the Xerox Alto:

Corresponding Wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

Hey, tate screen eh, would be nice to build some sort of super-retro shmup station with it!

 

[eek]

There is just not much love for RISC based cpus on the home computers. Read this and you'll get a general idea: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC#RISC_and_x86

RISC stuff (powerpc and others) are used elsewhere. Fairly popular in embedded systems. Car ecu, cell phone, pda , etc, mostly run risc based processors. Take a look at Motorola's spinoff embedded company Freescale. Flight computers I've seen (space type) use Motorola's stuff too.

 

[Rade K]

Heh, look what I've found, here's the first computer with a graphical OS/GUI from 1973 - behold the Xerox Alto:

Corresponding Wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

Hey, tate screen eh, would be nice to build some sort of super-retro shmup station with it!

Lol - a couple nerds stole the idea and made it better.

r