@00:23 When you look at the comparison chart between the Tandy and the IBM, you see that Big Blue offers a computer that will work... barely, with stripped down peripherals. The demos you would see, just like when you buy a newly built house, are with all the periherals and trinkets thrown in: max RAM, top tier everything, etc.... Nothing has changed in over 40 years: if you want to buy a Macintosh laptop or desktop, the lowest price posted will give you a working computer, but with bare bones capability, and if you want it to run "fast", then you have to buy the extra ram, storeage, more CPUs, etc... IBM and Apple have excelled in ripping off their customers by overcharging them and then making them buy the whole equipment all over again in a few years when they become "obsolete" and neither support nor parts are available anywhere.
That's only _somewhat_ true of modern day Apple. 1980s IBM was selling computers without a video adapter, without an operating system, without any IO, and with just one floppy drive in an outdated standard. If you buy the cheapest MacBook today... yes, it has 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, which are rather laughable in this day and age, but it is actually usable. It has an OS, it can connect to the Internet out of the box, and despite the specs are very modest, it will do just about everything you'd expect a computer to do. Yes, Apple's upgrade pricing is abysmal. But it is a difference between not having a usable computer at the base price, and actually having one.
@08:40 Oh come on VWestlife! It's only 2400 Miles! 🙂 That would mean i have to refill my tank about 13 times to get there and back (625km or 388mi per tank, a bit lower than the actual range). Also it would take about 48 Hours to get there and the same Amount to get back (at 80km/h or 50mi/h average speed). Quite a ride for a monitor.... AND: Nice Video as always! Thanks!
I don't really think so. Blue just happens to be a nice contrasting color against a white background without being too garish, and also making them underlined (which most web browsers don't do anymore) makes the links visible on a monochrome monitor.
3:00 Fun Fact: That is the same STB Systems that was purchased in 1998/99 by 3dfx, the former's acquisition being one of the reasons for the latter's downfall.
Can't lie, I would have been really bummed in the mid 80s as a kid to get a family computer that had text mode only graphics. Those text games were a throwback to the late 70s. It would have felt like going backwards, especially around 85 since that was the year the Amiga released.
4:45 I'm not sure I agree with this conclusion. One can make capable text-mode-based UI applications, where color-coding can improve efficiency or draw immediate attention to a status, e.g. in real-time monitoring, which I'm sure existed in the mid-eighties. Perhaps a niche use, but if a monitor pops up, say, a bright red window with yellow blinking text, you're quite likely to quickly spot that from a distance, even if you're not directly looking at it.
Certainly is quite the mashup of standards, which I suppose at the time were barely considered to be "standard", but I suppose of all you needed was to see what you were doing, then it did the job, kind of like the old NHS glasses we used to have back in the day, cheap & ugly, but worked... :P
You said to display underline on MDA, you tell it display blue. Is there a similar method for blink or reverse text, is there a color you tell it it to display for each of those? Also, some early MDA cards were wired for color. Do those also show the underline text as blue when attached to an appropriate monitor?
"non-standard" mean IBM compactivity, there was no "standard" at all. Botth IBM and TANDY was save lot of money it there was sit in same table, and make one.
Thought I was looking at Ceefax from the thumbnail
One minute ago is crazy.
FAST !!!
@00:23 When you look at the comparison chart between the Tandy and the IBM, you see that Big Blue offers a computer that will work... barely, with stripped down peripherals. The demos you would see, just like when you buy a newly built house, are with all the periherals and trinkets thrown in: max RAM, top tier everything, etc.... Nothing has changed in over 40 years: if you want to buy a Macintosh laptop or desktop, the lowest price posted will give you a working computer, but with bare bones capability, and if you want it to run "fast", then you have to buy the extra ram, storeage, more CPUs, etc... IBM and Apple have excelled in ripping off their customers by overcharging them and then making them buy the whole equipment all over again in a few years when they become "obsolete" and neither support nor parts are available anywhere.
That's only _somewhat_ true of modern day Apple. 1980s IBM was selling computers without a video adapter, without an operating system, without any IO, and with just one floppy drive in an outdated standard. If you buy the cheapest MacBook today... yes, it has 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, which are rather laughable in this day and age, but it is actually usable. It has an OS, it can connect to the Internet out of the box, and despite the specs are very modest, it will do just about everything you'd expect a computer to do.
Yes, Apple's upgrade pricing is abysmal. But it is a difference between not having a usable computer at the base price, and actually having one.
@08:40 Oh come on VWestlife! It's only 2400 Miles! 🙂
That would mean i have to refill my tank about 13 times to get there and back (625km or 388mi per tank, a bit lower than the actual range).
Also it would take about 48 Hours to get there and the same Amount to get back (at 80km/h or 50mi/h average speed).
Quite a ride for a monitor....
AND: Nice Video as always! Thanks!
12:14 Could this be where the idea of making links blue and underlined came from?
I don't really think so. Blue just happens to be a nice contrasting color against a white background without being too garish, and also making them underlined (which most web browsers don't do anymore) makes the links visible on a monochrome monitor.
OMG, I'd fogotten about GW BASIC. I wrote so many games in it.
3:00 Fun Fact: That is the same STB Systems that was purchased in 1998/99 by 3dfx, the former's acquisition being one of the reasons for the latter's downfall.
My grandad bought a Tandy 2000 back in the day but unfortunately the computer got burned up in fire about 10 years ago.
@15:53 - Is that the first flash application ever written?
Can't lie, I would have been really bummed in the mid 80s as a kid to get a family computer that had text mode only graphics. Those text games were a throwback to the late 70s. It would have felt like going backwards, especially around 85 since that was the year the Amiga released.
4:45 I'm not sure I agree with this conclusion. One can make capable text-mode-based UI applications, where color-coding can improve efficiency or draw immediate attention to a status, e.g. in real-time monitoring, which I'm sure existed in the mid-eighties. Perhaps a niche use, but if a monitor pops up, say, a bright red window with yellow blinking text, you're quite likely to quickly spot that from a distance, even if you're not directly looking at it.
Certainly is quite the mashup of standards, which I suppose at the time were barely considered to be "standard", but I suppose of all you needed was to see what you were doing, then it did the job, kind of like the old NHS glasses we used to have back in the day, cheap & ugly, but worked... :P
You said to display underline on MDA, you tell it display blue. Is there a similar method for blink or reverse text, is there a color you tell it it to display for each of those? Also, some early MDA cards were wired for color. Do those also show the underline text as blue when attached to an appropriate monitor?
Very bizarre cards. Great video as always.
I got a chuckle outta Viper. The ship is quite phallic!🤣
Yay, new vwestlife video.
Y E S - retro computer video video!
11:56 maybe that's why the web uses hyperlinks in blue and highlighted? just a thought.
5th comment :D
Tandy was so non-standard machine, that many games have a tandy mode 😂
"non-standard" mean IBM compactivity, there was no "standard" at all. Botth IBM and TANDY was save lot of money it there was sit in same table, and make one.
Actually the reason so many games had a "Tandy mode" is because the IBM PCJr was far too unsuccessful for the game publishers to call it "PCJr mode".
Hoooly cr@p! $4,250 1984 bucks is worth $12,876.64 in 2024. That was an expensive @$$ Radio Shack puter'