On Tue, Jun 7, 2016 at 2:15 PM, chrisjpf33--- via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
I guess I only really disagree about the timing. I don't think that particular era in computing drew the line that you suggest.
by all means no, I didn't want to make it sound like that. The consumer appliance market did not replace the other markets. It just what any other call a fork in the market. Those products enabled this. And this fork created a large amount of revenue for those 3 companies because they built an effective customer service to help those ordinary people who were not experienced in computers. Just as all other people needing an auto shop to get their cars fixed.
I think that before and after that time, people took an interest in the inner workings of their computer. At the very least, people had to understand cable connections, commands, file systems, modem baud rate, etc. I agree that people didn't have to be experts like in the mainframe days, but they certainly needed more skills than today. If I were to guess, I think that the mindless consuming of computers didn't really start happening until the Internet.
As I mentioned, there were still the hobbyists which took advantage of these appliance computers, just as in the homebrew days. -- that didn't stop anyone. Dan