Re: Linkdump No 117, or "Thoughts on Computer Snobbery"
Thu 30 July 2026
Andreas writes,
The Amiga turns 40 this week. I had an Amiga 500 as a kid, some time in the early 90s. And I remember being made fun of for having an Amiga, because PCs were supposedly so much cooler and better and whatnot. But the first time I visited a friend who had one of those amazing PCs and he proudly showed me his games with their EGA graphics colour palette and the PC speaker sounds I thought, are you kidding me? This is the thing you're going on and on about? Have you even seen an Amiga? I was truly underwhelmed by that.
I had a similar experience in High School, except with the Mac, rather than an Amiga (I drooled over and literally dreamed about the Amiga's impossible 4,096 color graphics, but that's a different topic!)
My Mac SE definitely didn't have more colors than the CGA displays that were popular at the time (I literally never saw an EGA display. Most everyone I knew went from CGA directly to VGA, as far as I know). It was mono, rather than four-color. But CGA's pick of colors was flipping ghastly, it's not like you could pick any 4 colors out of 65,536, or 256, or even 16.
So, while my Mac was limited to black and white (ok, fine, FINE, black and really light blue 😄), it was higher resolution (yes, even higher than 640x200 mode. (512*342)/(640*200)=1.368, or 36.8% more pixels!), the pixels were square (you'd definitely care if you ever had to rotate an image!), and dithering gave a serviceable approximation of grayscale. From across the room. Squinting. IYKYK 😁
Furthermore, the Mac had an amazing GUI with a consistent design language (well, until 2000 or so, at least!), rather than a hodgepodge of CLIs, TUIs, and badly-designed bespoke graphical interfaces in DOS.
I couldn't understand my DOS friends' smug feeling of superiority.
The funny thing is, if you gave me a Mac SE and a PC AT (roughly equivalent and contemporary hardware) today and said I'd have to use one of them and only one of them for a solid year?
I'd pick the PC in a heartbeat.
A PC would be so much more useful to me. Now, I'd be over the moon for the opportunity to use a classic Mac for a day. But for a year? Maybe not. Even if I was given access to dev tools like THINK Pascal, the PC just seems so much more utilitarian to me. BASIC isn't a wonderful language (particularly the gnarly 80s versions, particularly Microsoft's version), but there's something very immediate and useful about it. And once I get tired of its limitations, DOS comes with DEBUG.EXE! I can write code in x86 assembly! (Which... again, isn't wonderful, but it's very useful!)
Note: please understand that I'm not accusing Andreas of snobbery. Even if he feels the same today as he did in the 90s, we all have the right to like what we like and not like what we don't like!
Category: Tech
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