Don't you think it's weird that in the early 80s many countries had their own computer they designed and made. Pictured is Australia's. Even India had one ('based on the England's Acorn). But in a few years Mac's and PC's took over.It all aligned with neoliberalism taking hold and countries not investing in themselves but selling off everything to global corporations / privatisation.
>weirdooh quite weird very weird hot take very telling quite weird of you to say what a weird take odd take very telling that you would have such a weird take
>>108783858I think it's weirder that CPUs have been the same for almost 15 years except adding cores and yet no western country took this as a hint to start making its own chips.A 4 core x86 CPU that's locally made would be good enough for 95% of everything you do on a computer...
>>108783858because why waste money and talent building something that already exists? you arent going to build a better one. let some other chump country do all the leg-work
>>108783858No it is not weird. Kit computers had been a thing since the early 70s. The Apple 1 was a kit computer. Sinclair was selling kit computers my mail order. This was about the time Taiwan started breaking into manufacturing boards and assembling components. You also had a very nice selection of relatively inexpensive CPUs available. You take some enterprising and entrepreneurial natives in a country who have assembled a few kits. They design a system and either order parts and put them together locally, or have them assembled in Taiwan or Hong Kong and sold in retail shops. Under the hood it could just be a C64 or Sinclair clone. This would make it compatible with an existing library of software. Also, government tariffs on imported American or UK micros could make it appealing to have a domestic licensed version of micro developed in the US or UK or Japan.
>>108783858The 8-but micro era of the late 70s and early 80s was the Wild West era. In 1984/85 when the Mac and Amiga arrived on the scene with their Motorola 68K based CPUs, it became the 68k vs Intel for several years. I think you are trying to connect dots that don’t really exist. There was a time when the Motorola 68K was the dominant CPU. It was in Arcades and video game consoles (Sega Mega Drive) it was in the Amiga and Macintosh computers. It was fast and powerful. And it was very inexpensive by the late 80s.You saw so many 8bit micros prior to 85 because chips like the Zilog Z80 had gotten cheap. It was really about what was cheap and powerful, and what got adopted by devs.
OP I think you are confusing the transition from the 8-bit micro era to the 16/32-bit era. I’m guessing you are a zoomer so it is forgivable that you weren’t there. There was a time in the 80s when every retail store sold some different 8-bit games console or 8-bit micro PC. But then it all crashed and the world moved on to better things
>>108786026Yeah tariffs and protectionism would be a big factor
>>108786101What do you mean by confused
>>108783858Back then you could build a computer out of off-the-shelf components.
>>108787255Which you can't do now?
>>108787265You can build a computer around a microcontroller and a bunch of components but it's mostly a hobby project, it won't even be close to a Raspberry Pi in capabilities.
>>108783858It was just a bunch of clones of clones of clones of clones.Everyone used a 6502,Z80 or copied a design 1:1.
>>108783858>it's another generic Z80/6502 reference design
>>108787477the CPU dictates a lot of what you can do and all Z80 box are going to be rather similar
>>108787506Yeah they all did the same shit as 1000 other machines built out of the same American/Japanese parts and still needed vendor-supported software packages because the I/O map was slightly different
>>108787530it was mostly the flood of nearly identical CP/M business computers. dozens of manufacturers had the things and they were like an early form of appliance computer meant for novices to do office work on.
>Z80 because its cheap and can use DRAM on it's on>TMS9918 because it's cheap and can use DRAM on it's own>some multi tonal beep solution
