The Lost Age of Personal Computing

How small engineering firms built the future — and monopolies slowed it down

The 68000 Workstation Era (The Part People Forgot)

In the early 1980s, before IBM PCs dominated every desk, serious technical users often worked on small, fast, engineering-oriented machines rather than “personal computers.”

Around 1982–84 I was using an Empirical Research Group system built around the Motorola 68000 processor. The machine cost roughly $10,000 — expensive for a microcomputer, but trivial compared to mainframes — and it could outperform Unisys Census Bureau mainframes on seasonal adjustment of economic time series.

This wasn’t magic. It was simply good engineering: a clean 32-bit architecture, efficient compiled code, a fast variant of UNIX 5 called Idris and UNIX-style tools.

Ironically, it took more than a decade for mainstream Microsoft/Apple desktops to reach the same level of real computational performance.

In other words, the future already existed in 1983 — and then progress stalled.

The Golden Age of Small Innovators

The 1980s and early 1990s were filled with small, brilliant, engineering-driven companies that routinely outperformed the giants.

Examples:

Borland – Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, lightning-fast compilers that made Microsoft tools look clumsy

WordPerfect Corporation – WordPerfect 5.1, still arguably the most efficient word processor ever made

Novell – NetWare, vastly superior networking to early Windows

Commodore International – Amiga, years ahead in graphics and multimedia

Atari Corporation – Atari ST, affordable 68000 power and professional MIDI studios

These weren’t marketing companies. They were engineering companies.

Their software was smaller, faster, cheaper, and often dramatically more reliable than anything coming out of Redmond or Cupertino.

How the Monoculture Formed

Instead of winning by superior engineering, Microsoft won by contracts and bundling.

Operating systems were pre-installed. Office suites were bundled. OEM deals locked out competitors. File formats were intentionally made incompatible.

It became less important to be better and more important to be preloaded.

Innovation slowed because monopoly removes pressure to improve.

By the late 1990s, most of the smaller innovators were gone or absorbed.

The Cost of Monopoly

When competition dies:

Software gets larger and slower

Hardware requirements balloon

Users lose control

Engineering gives way to marketing

Modern operating systems illustrate this perfectly. A present-day desktop OS requires thousands of times the memory and CPU power to perform tasks that 1980s systems handled easily.

This is not progress. It is bloat.

Why This Matters Now

In the 1980s, the United States could afford to waste ten years because we still had the technical lead.

Today, that luxury may not exist.

If progress stalls again while Microsoft or Apple chase corporate fashion — or ship things like Windows 11 that users actively avoid — then the next breakthrough might come from Japan, India, or somewhere nobody in Silicon Valley is watching.

History shows that innovation usually comes from small, hungry engineering groups — not monopolies.

The next revolution may already exist somewhere in a garage or a small lab, just like those 68000 workstations did in 1983.

Conclusion

The personal computer revolution was not created by giants.

It was created by small teams of engineers building fast, elegant tools.

The giants mostly arrived later and consolidated the market.

If we want real progress again, we should stop worshiping monopolies and start paying attention to the small, sharp people working quietly on better ideas.