The same double-sided 3.5' floppy disk, for instance, would hold 720K in an ST (or a PC), 800K in a Mac, and 880K in an Amiga.Īll three architectures were swamped by the PC and its open ubiquity, aided by the fumblings of Commodore, Apple, and Atari management. (There are more, of course, but these three are the ones that were successful through a wide range of markets, which the Lisa and NeXT cube, for example, were not.) Despite all using the Motorola 68000 at their cores, there were few compatibilities between the systems. In particular, the advent of the graphical user interface and 16-bit microprocessors birthed three separate systems purpose-built with graphical capabilities in mind: the Apple Macintosh, the Commodore Amiga, and the Atari ST. This state of affairs was established at the beginning of the mass personal computer market with the Commodore PET, TRS-80, and Apple II, and was accepted as something of a fact of life.
Before about 1993, when the PC hardware standard finally took a commanding lead over its competitors, it was standard for different computer manufacturers to have completely different operating systems, software bases, and communication methods. In the early days of computers, compatibility between systems was not as big an issue as it is today.
