A Tale of Two Adverts - The advent of the PC in 1992

Following on from my last post, at what point did it appear likely, nay, apparent, that the PC would surpass the Amiga and ST in the UK to become the home computer of choice (if you could afford one)? 

I'll use these two adverts from Dan Technology Plc from the March and September 1992 issues of What Micro? to put forward my thoughts. There are plenty of other advertisers that could have been used, and while Dan were never the cheapest, nor were they the priciest either. A note on the prices, by the way: where accompanied by a figure in brackets, the first amount is excluding VAT, the second is inclusive at the going rate. Where a figure is quoted without a corresponding bracketed figure, that is VAT inclusive. 

Dan Technology ad - What Micro? March 1992

Dan Technology ad - What Micro? September 1992

The first advert is typical of its contemporaries: lots of numbers and quite a few hidden items (£50 extra for DOS and £57 for Windows added to those headline prices, for example), but I want you to check out the "bundle" price for that 12MHz 286 and the 386 above it, a cheeky little 25MHz SX number. 

That 286, packing 1Mb of RAM and a 40Mb hard drive with a 14" VGA display and MS-DOS 5.0 comes in at £588 ex VAT (so £690-ish for the average punter). The 1Mb 386 with a 125Mb hard drive and a SVGA display rocks in at £947 ex (£1,112). That also comes with DOS but Windows would bump the total to £1.004 (£1,183).

Now we fast forward six months, and that 286 is still... £588 ex. Not that surprising, monitors and hard drives hadn't dropped that much in price. The 386 though, that is something else. Although the hard drive is down to 100Mb, you get 2Mb of RAM, DOS and Windows for £774 (£910). And that, gentle reader, is an example (and 200 of Her Majesty's golden beer tokens) as to why the PC was becoming more popular in 1992. They were getting cheaper and becoming better value. 

As for the then-current machine of choice, the Commodore Amiga, it seemed almost untouchable. It was long established, had plenty of support, and pretty much offered what it had (barring a half meg memory upgrade) since 1987, except now for a cheaper price and some bundled software. The ST was a decent second place, but had lost momentum against good ol'chicken lips, and Atari's focus was switching to the potentially more lucrative console market. 

In that combination lay the problem. Your basic Amiga in 1987 was the Amiga 500, and Atari had the STFM. Fast forward five years and your STE still ran the same 68000 albeit with a blitter for display shenanigans, and the A500 was phasing out for the A600 (to many, a retrograde step), but neither Commodore nor Atari had done much to advance the tech in their low-end systems. The likely 1987 DOS machine you'd have bought would have been an Amstrad PC1512 mono display with a single floppy, and you'd maybe have change from £500. Yet if you wanted a hard drive for your PC, the mono model was priced by dealers at around £869 (£1,000) for a 20Mb offering, and CGA colour lofted that to £1.029 (£1,184).

Computer Express (for ST and Amstrad prices) - ad - Practical Computing July 1987

You could, of course add a hard drive for an ST, which would have been seen as an expensive luxury unless you had a specific reason for it, but as you can see from the dealer price, that would have put your single floppy STFM bundle up to £784 (£901). The Amiga had not yet graduated to hard drive storage yet, and to be fair, it didn't matter at this stage in our story. Yet my point, such as it is, remains: for a general home computer in 1987, the Amiga and ST were better value and more capable than the DOS PC. In 1992, much less so. 

News section - What Micro? March 1992

In the PC world, scale of economy (particularly in the US, where neither Commodore nor Atari really cracked it with their 16-bit offerings) and competition (unlike having a single company supplying you with hardware) played a part in forcing prices lower, nowhere more obvious than in the CPU arena. The history is a little complicated (and rather lawsuit heavy), but basically by 1992, Intel was competing with AMD in supplying 386 chips to PC manufacturers. AMD had been selling a 25MHz version since early 1991 and Intel only responded in early '92. As you can see from the bar charts, the expectation was that the 486 would soon hit the mainstream, and since Intel would have a brief monopoly on that generation too, it made sense for them to push faster and more lucrative chips on to the market. It also helped that the 386 was a genuine technological improvement over the 286, thus aiding its popularity, especially with the release of Windows 3, and the 486 was faster again (very simplistically speaking). 

March 1992 - remember to add £57 onto that price for Windows.

September for the whole kit and caboodle.

As an aside, check out the difference in 486 systems between March and September 1992. That 486SX 20MHz with 4Mb of RAM and a 125Mb hard drive with Windows for £1,381 (£1,622), compared to 25MHz chip but with practically the same spec otherwise for £923 (£1,085). Let me be clear, that was still a ton of money back then - the BoE inflation calculator puts those inc VAT amounts at £3,500 and £2,350 respectively, but prices were dropping and dropping in a serious way. Indeed, whereas the 8086/8088 seemed to stick around forever since the days of the original IBM XT (and Amstrad were still trying to hawk such machines even in early '92, some nine(!) years after the grandaddy of all DOS PC's landed in Blighty), the 286's position as the de facto entry-level CPU was relatively brief, and as noted above, Intel's defensive measures against competitors made the 386's time in the sun seem similarly fleeting. 

First Computer Centre ad - Amiga Format Feb 1993

Let's go back the then-extant 16-bit home computers. Whilst 1992 would see spec increases announced for both formats, only Commodore managed to get any serious numbers into the hands of consumers, and even then, the new machines were more expensive than their predecessors. The A500 had dropped to around £299 before being discontinued, and its replacement, the A600, debuted at £399, or £449 with a hard drive. The A1200 retook the £399 price point, but getting an HD-equipped version took the price to over £600 for 40Mb of storage. The AGA display capabilities were a step up, but still lagging behind the PC. 256 colours were great and all that, but even a barely above basic spec PC equipped with 512kb of VRAM enabled the Super VGA resolution (800x600) at 256 colours. Not many games utilised this yet, but for productivity work, having that in Windows (albeit rather slowly for many users), was something the Miggy could never match out of the box. If you did want to include a dedicated display for your A1200, adding a Philips CM8833 Mk2 monitor took the A1200 HD put another £225 on the bill, so for a total of £825 or thereabouts, you had your Amiga set up. (The prices from the ad above are slightly later than the two PC magazines used for this article, but this adds confirmation to my point - PC prices did not suddenly go up over the 1992 festive period, thus making the value comparison even more valid). 

Silica Systems ad - ST Format December 1992

As for Atari, the Falcon, although a cracking machine, began at £499 minus a hard drive, and to properly spec it out with extra memory and some storage would, at least in its early days, set you back £899 (4Mb/65Mb), yet still no monitor. Now look back at the 386 from the September issue. £910. 

Of course, the Amiga and ST were facing other competition as well. Sega and Nintendo had delivered 16-bit console gaming to the UK masses (the 8-bitters were around in the late 1980's, just nowhere near as popular as the corresponding 8-bit computers, which to their credit were still selling software units in decent numbers well into 1992), and by the time Christmas of that year arrived, you could get a Mega Drive or a SNES for under £130 a piece. 

Special Reserve ad - Mean Machines Sega December 1992

Special Reserve ad - Computer and Video Games November 1992

The PC had reached a point where, spec for spec (excluding a sound card for gamers), it was better value than the comparable Amiga or ST spec, and the overall proposition of the PC had improved immensely. And since the PC had been a much stronger platform in the US for home users, there were many more titles from that market designed for the PC that the Amiga and ST just couldn't handle (looking at you, Wolfenstein 3D, never mind Doom the following year). Or, if they could, the ports were heavily constrained. The PC could now display more colours (until AGA), had a greater capacity floppy drive format, but also came with a hard drive as standard. I can't be the only former Amiga owner who begrudged swapping up to 10 disks in some adventure games. There again, even if you could afford a hard drive for your Miggy (and I certainly couldn't), you had to rely on the developers permitting hard drive installation, and that wasn't a given either. Justifiably, by 1992, a hard drive was becoming an essential purchase for any home machine, rather than just a nice quality of life improvement option.

One must not forget the effect of Windows 3.0 either. It worked, mostly (you had to be there!), and gave PC owners the option of a graphical user interface for the serious stuff, with DOS underpinning it for games. Personally, I think Win 3.0 looks terrible, and ran like a sloth on anything other than a very speedy 386 with at least 4Mb of RAM, but there again I also think the aesthetic of RISC OS trumps any other OS of the time (and kinda still does, but what do I know?), but compared to what the ST or Amiga desktops looked like, Windows in 800x600 could arguably be described as the more seemly way to operate a computer. There again, pretty is as pretty does... but that didn't matter as Microsoft were well on their way to cementing their DOS dominance with control of the PC GUI-based OS market too. 

I.S.C ad - Personal Computer World November 1987 - last item in Specials. 

On the whole, both the ST and Amiga had been left too long at their 1987 specs. It made them cheaper than a corresponding PC, but they lacked standardised hard drove support and, both a blessing and curse, the lack of requirement for a dedicated monitor. Both of these requirements were expensive add-ons in the 1980's. For example, in 1987, adding just an EGA card and monitor to an existing PC was more than the ST cost! But as '92 rolled in though, EGA had gone the way of the dodo, 256kb VGA was your very basic display adaptor, and hard drives didn't cost a small internal organ. Meanwhile, good luck word processing on your Amiga and that 14" Alba TV...

I know, I know, the Amiga and ST in the UK were predominantly games machines for that generation, but considering the low-cost home computer market was being squeezed from one side by dedicated games consoles that could, in some cases, perform wonders the computers couldn't, and by the PC from the other which could do more technologically advanced gaming than consoles and perform the traditional role of a home computer much more ably than the 16-bitters, there was little room for manoeuvre by either Commodore or Atari. 

This isn't a dig at any particular format, merely just highlighting that whilst Commodore and, to a lesser degree, Atari made bank on their most successful products, they failed to develop them any further than strictly necessary, seemingly too focussed on each other. In the background, the DOS PC evolved, improved and, most importantly, became relatively cheaper at an increasingly blistering pace. It was here, in 1992, that if you included a hard drive and monitor across all three options, a PC could go toe to toe value-wise against the established home machines. 

Then we get to the fact that neither Commodore nor Atari had the resources to fight this battle much longer. Atari pivoted (back) to consoles first but it was too knackered at this point to fight off either Sega or Nintendo, never mind the new 3DO and Commodore's own CD32. Not that Commodore's console was a saviour either. A decent machine, no doubt, but the established players in the 16-bit world had mass and inertia on their side. Newer entrants, such as Atari and 3DO, were banking on their "next-gen" offerings, and sure, for a time, they looked tempting. However, by 1994, Sony's PlayStation became a known quantity and, well, we know how that ended... And no, at the risk of repeating myself, I do not think Commodore UK would have had a snowball's chance if they'd acquired the remnants of Commodore International in 1994. Just keeping the existing A1200/A4000/CD32 machines going would have taken a lot of their funding, and developing custom hardware would have been a huge gamble at the very least. Consider this point: the AGA chipset was already two years old (from a consumer point of view) when Commodore Int went bust. Say another year to get a new chipset out of the door (at an unknown cost to the end user), all the while maintaining the platform on increasingly dated 680x0 processors. The nascent PowerPC chips would have been the perfect "next-gen" option, but that would have been very pricey. Meanwhile, the Windows PC moves through the 486 generation towards the Pentium, adding Windows accelerator cards to ensure users could experience a smooth, high resolution desktop, Apple begin their move to the aforementioned PowerPC, and the console war becomes blindingly simple as Sony takes the market by storm, even, eventually, in Japan, where the Saturn put up a good fight. There was no room for a player like "successor to Commodore" outside of a slowly decreasing number of adherents. Consumers had moved on, and that's before we get to the PC's mass-market moment, Windows 95. Say what you like, but Microsoft made sure everybody knew it had arrived, and there was nothing to stop that bandwagon. 

The tipping point for the PC over other home computer formats in the UK can be defined by many things: graphics, sound, processing capabilities, yet here I've hopefully given some justification that 1992 was the year everything aligned for DOS/Windows powered desktops. It would take time, but I consider that year to be the fulcrumt at which the general consumer could peek into an issue of What Micro? or Computer Shopper (amongst many other computing magazines the UK had back then), and decide that the PC had more to offer, for both immediate needs as well as those in the future, and once on that path, there was little reason to go back. No matter what Commodore, Atari (or Acorn) released, it could never have been "better enough" (a contentious term if ever there was one) to move the needle in the UK, never mind the other mass markets, and certainly not in the US. What these two adverts demonstrate is that the PC's price/value ratio was improving beyond the ability of other formats to compete, a gap that would only widen as time passed. It would be a long while before a bare bones useable PC would reach the price point of what the Amiga and ST had retailed at, but by then, it didn't matter. The split between a home console and a reasonably priced home computer had been set and would remain so for years to come.