Excellent comparison! I often think of the mobile world now as being very much like the early years of the personal computer. As noted the TRS-80 had a ROM O/S built in, but if you wanted to do "real" stuff you often ended up doing workarounds or hacks. For example, I wrote code to hack the O/S on the TRS-80 Model I just to get a blinking cursor because I couldn't see very well where the cursor was on the screen. Or when I wanted to do special characters for technical writing, I had to create my own fonts. Or when I wanted real sound output, I had to design and build my own sound synthesizer board, and write driver software for it to manage the waveforms. Graphics required converting the coordinates into a character location and showing the character with the dots in the right place. For games you had to address the video memory directly to get performance, and anything fast had to be in machine code. There were many other hacks that I've forgotten completely, but it was very much like what we see with mobile devices now -- you can "almost" do a lot, but it takes a lot of patience, knowledge, and sometimes expense to get it to work decently.
We complain about desktops now, but they are pretty mature and solid in retrospect. We have convenient ways to move data across computers, we have world wide networking with the internet, we have "plenty" of memory and storage capacity, we have USB standards, we have all kinds of 3rd party and open source software to do basic kinds of tasks. Etc etc.
Give mobile computing a chance to mature in similar fashion and we will see something comparable. Not the same, and we will always find limitations in mobile devices that we don't have to deal with on the desktop, but it will get so much better and so much cheaper. I just hope it doesn't become ad-ridden and security compromised. Even on the desktop, we used to know exactly what was happening "behind the scenes", but now it seems like a cat and mouse game for software to get you to share more info that you like and install more processes than you want, and so forth. The mobile device like a PDA used to be a shelter from such things until the smartphone came out with hidden auto update systems and internet connections and so forth. But I digress. What I'm really trying to say is that we all have to realize that mobile computing is in it's infancy, which is exactly what I was trying to say - mobile computing is the bleeding edge. But it's maturing somewhat. You can see that by the fact that it's pretty good if you stick to the basic features. Just like early desktops when you stuck with character based word processing or Lotus 1-2-3 or VisiCalc. Just like solitarywolf says... think of early desktops and you can pretty much sum up where we are with mobile computing. I can't wait to see what it's like when it matures!
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Originally Posted by solitarywolf
There isn't much difference today than there was in the 80's when the TRS-80 series, Comodore 64 & 128, Timex Sinclair, TI 99, etc all were out. Back then we also had to "figure the workarounds". These computers didn't even have an OS installed. You had to load it each time you booted up.
These companies are out for one thing. To advance technology? No. They want your money before the next company beats them to it.
-Seth
San Francisco, CA
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