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In my last article we covered the 70s and 80s where video games and computers started to have a key role in our lives. In this article we continue our journey in the 90s and into the new millennium where Graphical User Interface became standard along with the PC and the Apple Mac as a must for superb imaging processing.
The first GUI (graphical user interface) was invented by Xerox and introduced for the public by Apple and later Microsoft.
At the time, Apple and IBM clone PCs were very expensive, most of us never managed to experience the GUI interface due to the fact that the market was still based on eight-bit machines.
In 1988, machines such as the Amiga, which I consider the first multimedia computer, and Atari ST dropped their prices drastically and became accessible to most families, making it possible to expose us to a similar GUI interface with superb graphics and sound.
Programming was easy and most of us used to code our own games and programs on these two machines.
In the beginning of the 1990s the computer market collapsed due to the number of computer manufacturers on the market.
Nintendo took this opportunity to boost its sales in the video game market, with the SNES or as we know it Super Nintendo. Other companies such as Sega and later Sony – with its famous PlayStation – saw potential in video games and tried to take the market with better graphics, sound and accessories.
Where other countries were facing a crisis in the computing market, in Malta, computer sales were still high, mostly for the Commodore Amiga 500, Atari ST, and the Commodore 64 with its new package and case. Sales in video games were also high especially the SNES and Sega Mega Drive; some families had both a console and a computer in their homes.
In 1994, the market was so bad that certain companies went bust. One of these companies was Commodore.
The launch of the C64C (Commodore 64 Console), which was a complete flop, and the Commodore 65, an enhanced version of the Commodore 64 with a 3.5” drive which never made it in the market, pushed the company into a situation where it was not able to sustain itself and the shareholders pulled out, which doomed the company. Companies such as Amstrad, which a decade before bought Sinclair, had to pull out from the computer market due to financial losses.
Atari kept on going but by the end of the 90s Atari decided that the home computer market had reached its end and pulled out from this section.
The PC market was always dominant in the business section but in the mid-1990s the PC industry started to increase its sales in the home market due to competitive prices. The introduction of Windows 3.1 from Microsoft helped in such a way to attract the home user to buy a PC. Microsoft was producing a GUI OS (operating system) way back in 1985 with Windows 1.0 but the interest was so small that people did not even know that Microsoft produced such a GUI OS at the time.
The fatal blow for home computers came with the introduction of Windows 95: By that time there were around eight computer shops in Malta, but the number increased to 12 in just six months.
The home computer crisis helped the PC and the Mac to grow in popularity, as people were afraid that no software house would continue to support a machine whose manufacturer went bust.
In Malta it was a different story. Although sales dropped, the Amiga 500 was still sold by Commodore UK and Italy and was on sale in Malta until 1996, where the PC was the only available option due to its large software library and the introduction of the internet with Netscape and later Internet Explorer.
The beginning of the millennium saw the famous Millennium Bug, which in my opinion was a bit of a hoax to sell software. We all remember that the problem was that past the 1999 date the year counter resets itself to the first year contained in the bios. While this did not affect the new generation computers, old computers built before 1992 suffered from this bug. All types of disasters were prophesied such as planes crashes, loss of bank transactions, power cut and bank ATM’s failures. None of this happened.
The only millennium issues we had were with Microsoft Millennium or ME OS, which were replaced by Microsoft with Windows XP after only 14 months from its launch. The ME version was the first Microsoft OS with limited access to MS-DOS in order for a faster system boot time.
In the last few years the Apple Mac gained a lot of popularity especially with their design and structure. In the future we will see drastic changes that will impact the way we interact with the computer, especially with the new consoles being released and their superb graphical motion with the new type of graphical processing unit (GPU) that started being introduced recently.
Maurizio Banavage is the curator of probably Malta’s largest private collection of vintage personal computers.