Not bad. I don't like its tone of approval, TBH.

I much preferred the

« raucous bazaar, teeming with variety. »

I hate the way the PC

« the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that »

I really did not like...

« he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »

That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.

It's a very American viewpoint. I only discovered in recent years that in the rest of the world, the Amiga and ST did much better than at home.

I was a kid when this happened. The Mac launched when I was... 15 I think?

To a rounding error, nobody owned PCs in the UK. They were extremely expensive business machines. Nobody owned Apple II either, and Macs were for the seriously rich.

We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about. We aspired to Camputers and Elan and Memotech.

Nobody _wanted_ office equipment. Would you offer a child a stapler to play with? That's how fun the PC was.

Amigas were huge and very desirable and seen as a gift from the future -- see this article from 2 days ago:

https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-t...

If you couldn't afford an Amiga, then the ST was a worthy competitor.

They were not some flop, some footnote of history. You can still buy new Amiga compatibles today from loads of vendors...

https://www.apollo-computer.com/v4standalone.php

https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/

The ST OS became FOSS and there are multiple modern versions:

https://emutos.sourceforge.io/

https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources

And don't neglect the Acorn Archimedes which stomped on both.

Its OS is FOSS now.

https://www.riscosopen.org/content/

Runs natively on Raspberry Pi. Other compatible new machines are being made and sold:

https://shop.elesar.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&pr...

Sinclair's QL hardware still has compatible machines made today:

https://www.specnext.com/sinclair_ql-qs/

https://sinclairql.net/djw/q68/index.html

This stuff was nothing to be banished to a footnote, dusty unsold boxes with weird names or whatever.

The IBM PC, Part 1: Arrival