Big-ticket items like a new computer were way down the list. My oldest brother was a freshman in college, and tuition was priority number one. He had to scrounge for work, and my mom had to start a career too. My father was one of thousands laid off from their well-paying blue collar industrial jobs at "the GE.” My dad joined GE straight out of high school, and 25 years later it was all he knew. Only GE's plastics division-which, by pure coincidence, is where Welch got his start-was spared. Next in line was the defense business, sold to Martin Marietta for three billion dollars. First to go was GE’s electric transformer factory, which was raided, closed, and left to rot. Jack started his professional life in my hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, but fond nostalgia didn't stop him from lopping off various parts of the city's industrial apparatus and selling them to the highest bidder. True, that old C64 was becoming more obsolete every day, but two thousand dollars-in early nineties money-was a tough ask for a working-class family like mine, because General Electric CEO and cartoonish supervillain Jack Welch was busy destroying tens of thousands of lives in his ruthless quest for efficiency and profit. Actually replacing the old Commodore was difficult from a financial standpoint despite its growing obsolescence. If you wanted to replace your aging Eighties machine, you could get an IBM compatible, or you could get a Mac, or you could sit back and not complain because there were starving children in other countries who didn't have any computers at all.Īs I mentioned a few episodes back, my family kept a Commodore 64 as our primary computer until nineteen ninety-seven.
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Other companies had switched to making their own IBM PC clones… if they hadn't given up on computers entirely.
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Acorn hadn't dropped out of the desktop market just yet, but was finding more success in licensing their ARM architecture for portable devices. Commodore was in a death spiral, and Atari had already crashed and burned. High powered RISC workstations from Sun, Silicon Graphics, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard had completely overtaken the high end of the market. IBM compatibles were number one in home and business computers, with the Macintosh plodding slowly behind them.
The unpredictable and chaotic market for personal computers had settled into a respectable groove. Now let's jump forward to 1993, when I was in grade school. In previous episodes, we looked at two pivotal computers from 1983, when I was a baby. Welcome back to Computers of Significant History, an analysis of the history of computing in terms of how it affected the life of one writer/podcaster.
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