Is the C64 too different to A8 to ever have meaningful comparison?

[kogden]

Basically impossible to say the same in a 6502 / 680XX / PowerPC succession, though... Wait! unless I get a hold of my WinTel emulators!

 

Um..... PPC macs ran 68k code faster than a 68k mac. Intel macs ran PPC mac software until very recently.

 

If you do it right, it can be pretty seamless.

 

Fact is, it's taken a *LOT* of sales and R&D dollars for the Wintel platform to evolve over the years and it was almost a decade after the 386 that they finally got a 32-bit OS out of Microsoft. And it's interface was a blatant crappy clone of MacOS classic. In fact, Linux was more functional than Windows on Wintel hardware for a couple years.

 

Everybody gave Win95 credit for "changing the world" when the only thing it changed was folks married to legacy crappy business DOS apps could finally have a reasonably functional GUI.

[Faicuai]

(...) If you do it right, it can be pretty seamless. (...)

 

(...) And it's interface was a blatant crappy clone of MacOS classic. (..)

 

Everybody gave Win95 credit for "changing the world" (...).

 

Notice that nowhere at this point has "sheer innovation" been used to describe the PC story.

 

Instead, it is more of a sustained / relentless evolution that HAD to provide a viable channel to its already ample (and loyal) base of developers and users, most of them running office & productivity applications like spreadsheets, word processors, data base managers, back-office applications, main-frame terminal emulation (IBM 3270), etc.

 

Also remember that Mac's interface is, in turn, yet another "copy" of what was already developed in Palo Alto's research lab... and THANKS to Jobs (and later Gates) such effort was saved from a SURE crash-and-burn final (Xerox had NO F-CLUE of what to do with all the mighty stuff they came up with). I also see the C-64 mirrored on this very same picture, with respect to the A800: no real breakthroughs or structural innovation, per se, and three years later (!).

 

And yes, Win95 changed the world... of PC users, of course... which happened to be (and still are) the vast majority, though.

[Keatah]

Business is all encompassing. It provides a driving force you cannot repel against.

 

I could introduce the notion that 3DFX (and to lesser extent Creative Labs) were major forces in getting the "multi-media" and 3D pc gaming era underway. But in reality it was just business, business was sticking its greedy little fingers into the platform with the intent of finding a way to sell even more product.

 

Business. The unstoppable force that shaped wintel.

[Keatah]

When I need serious work done I'm going to get hardware made by the same guys that powered NASA and the moon missions in the 60's and 70's. While it might not be made by the same assemblers they had back then, the hardware will have the same familial subtleties and design philosophies as that old archaic equipment.

 

In its time it did fantastic things, and I expect no less today.

[Keatah]

And furthermore, you tell me when superior hardware and speed have overcome other less tangible and less visible (on paper) aspects like great software, design philosophy, support, and marketing?

 

Uhm yeh like ..err cough cough!

[55five66six]

Well.. There are some things that are close enough that we can compare. (IE: Sound, CPU, Graphics)

 

So far, I like the POKEY vs the SID when it comes to sound and music. (not flamebaiting here).

 

The CPU are both 6502 based, although the Atari's is close to .79 MHZ faster. Both the VIC-II and ANTIC are pretty impressive for the time.

 

I guess in the end, it comes down to personal preference. Both are able to be modded heavily, both had subsequent versions that were nifty and both had great production runs. Both also changed the world... and both are better than an Apple II.

 

To be honest, I have reverence for both units.

[Keatah]

I guess in the end, it comes down to personal preference. Both are able to be modded heavily, both had subsequent versions that were nifty and both had great production runs. Both also changed the world... and both are better than an Apple II.

 

mmkay.. whatever

[55five66six]

mmkay.. whatever

 

We may disagree.. But I do like your signature.

[atarian63]

 

Notice that nowhere at this point has "sheer innovation" been used to describe the PC story.

 

Instead, it is more of a sustained / relentless evolution that HAD to provide a viable channel to its already ample (and loyal) base of developers and users, most of them running office & productivity applications like spreadsheets, word processors, data base managers, back-office applications, main-frame terminal emulation (IBM 3270), etc.

 

Also remember that Mac's interface is, in turn, yet another "copy" of what was already developed in Palo Alto's research lab... and THANKS to Jobs (and later Gates) such effort was saved from a SURE crash-and-burn final (Xerox had NO F-CLUE of what to do with all the mighty stuff they came up with). I also see the C-64 mirrored on this very same picture, with respect to the A800: no real breakthroughs or structural innovation, per se, and three years later (!).

 

And yes, Win95 changed the world... of PC users, of course... which happened to be (and still are) the vast majority, though.

Edited September 7, 2013 by atarian63

[atarian63]

Notice that nowhere at this point has "sheer innovation" been used to describe the PC story.

 

Instead, it is more of a sustained / relentless evolution that HAD to provide a viable channel to its already ample (and loyal) base of developers and users, most of them running office & productivity applications like spreadsheets, word processors, data base managers, back-office applications, main-frame terminal emulation (IBM 3270), etc.

 

Also remember that Mac's interface is, in turn, yet another "copy" of what was already developed in Palo Alto's research lab... and THANKS to Jobs (and later Gates) such effort was saved from a SURE crash-and-burn final (Xerox had NO F-CLUE of what to do with all the mighty stuff they came up with). I also see the C-64 mirrored on this very same picture, with respect to the A800: no real breakthroughs or structural innovation, per se, and three years later (!).

 

And yes, Win95 changed the world... of PC users, of course... which happened to be (and still are) the vast majority, though.

[Keatah]

Notice that nowhere at this point has "sheer innovation" been used to describe the PC story.

Define and quantify "sheer innovation"? Can't do it? Let me cite this example..

 

When you get into custom solutions you also get vertical solutions. While these are typically very good at solving one or two problems, they offer no flexibility or long-term adaptability. Remember 3DFX and the GLIDE API? It solved the problem of 3D gaming on the PC, but it couldn't adapt to 2D environment. All sorts of retarded kludges were tried, including hardware hacks, to allow GLIDE to enter the professional market. But in the end, the less-sophisticated, more-bloated D3D and DirectX won out. In other instances OpenGL fit the bill. But the innovative GLIDE was too innovative to be put into a widespread commercial environment.

 

There's plenty of "sheer innovation" in the PC world. Most of it is in the refinement of standards and manufacturing techniques. Things behind the scenes. And a lot of the "That's Incredible" whizz-bang wizardry you see and read about in press releases has to be tested, refined, toned-down, tweaked and polished and all that, before it becomes a robust product.

 

In the refining process, the magical propaganda claims you'd initially interpret as "sheer innovation" are watered down and toughened up for real-life application. Reliable. Solid. I prefer things this way.

 

Look how hard the Amiga failed. It excelled at a few things, but all that "sheer innovation" in the chips and stuff ultimately became a liability whereas the PC's more pedestrian and "uninspiring" hardware infiltrated every nook'n'cranny of industry.

[TMR]

Look how hard the Amiga failed. It excelled at a few things, but all that "sheer innovation" in the chips and stuff ultimately became a liability whereas the PC's more pedestrian and "uninspiring" hardware infiltrated every nook'n'cranny of industry.

"Failed" is a pretty harsh word for a machine that lasted several years, shifted a lot of units and was used for everything from games to running internet connections...

[Keatah]

I have no love for the Amiga. In fact it owes me.

 

And the Amiga peripheral market was the very definition of "vaporware". I remember all my buds doing the Apple and PC route and here I was acting like a retard, doing my very best, to extol the "virtues" of the Amiga, only to get laughed at. Besides, when I needed stuff for it I couldn't just go down to Computer City or Comp-USA and buy things like I could for a PC. Not even the mom'n'pop shops could help me much either.

 

But as soon as I got into the PC everything was just fine. Very much like the Apple II market I had come from.

[high voltage]

"Failed" is a pretty harsh word for a machine that lasted several years, shifted a lot of units and was used for everything from games to running internet connections...

And television, remember the good old Chart Show, anyways best selling 16-bit computer in Europe, can't be bad.

Edited September 7, 2013 by high voltage

[TMR]

I have no love for the Amiga. In fact it owes me.

That's more a personal opinion rather than anything else though; a machine doesn't become a "failure" if it doesn't serve every person's needs and there were enough sold that we have to assume it did most of the things asked of it. My first internet connection in late 1995 was on an A1200 with an '030 and i was already using it for games, desktop publishing, ray tracing, listening to music, drawing pixel art for C64 code... some of those jobs were transferred to a Windows PC over the next couple of years but i only stopped using the A1200 for pixel art around 2004 but it still took a couple of years to find something to properly replace DPaint IV AGA on Windows and i had to write some of the converters myself.

[Keatah]

The Apple II, being my first CRT-based computer at home, introduced me to tons of concepts like printing and buffering, parallel and serial stuff, programming, loading-saving, using a real genuine loud & heavy HDD, modeming, telecom & BBS'ing, disk drive operations, gaming, typing, data backup operations and other technical skills. Not to mention word processing, database, spreadsheets, and scientific computing with Fortran.

 

Sounds like fun!

 

The Amiga, too, introduced me to a lot of graphical concepts and operations. Things like digitizing color imagery from a video source, Deluxe-Paint II and PhotonPaint conventions, multi-tasking, color-ASCII BBS'ing, Z-modem protocol, working with an operating system that had to load parts of itself as you progressed through an activity. In fact it was on the Amiga that I learned the basis of a lot of present day "photoshop" skills.

 

The frustrating part was if I wanted to expand these capabilities it was nigh-impossible for a bratty teen to do so. No local store had anything "Amiga". And for a while I felt that all these things I learned on the Amiga were useless.

 

I also knew how to customize Apple II applications inside and out, forwards and backwards. I wasn't in the mood to re-learn all this for the Amiga, knowing it was going to be a short-lived platform.

 

And when I got into the PC platform I thought how primitive everything was. It was like starting over. And waiting till the rest of the market caught up with my skills and the capability of the Amiga. It was something like 4 years between doing Deluxe Paint II on the Amiga, and then using PaintShop Pro on the PC in the same capacity. But by then it was only a matter of time before the PC steamrolled everything.

[TMR]

The frustrating part was if I wanted to expand these capabilities it was nigh-impossible for a bratty teen to do so. No local store had anything "Amiga".

So the issue is the shops rather than the Amiga? Over here i could get pretty much anything i wanted and by the time i finally retired the old '030 A1200 it had SCSI, a CDROM, two hard disks including the internal, a 14K4 modem, video digitiser, flatbed A5 scanner...

 

But eventually something else had to come along and replace it, that's the way things go. i knew the writing was on the wall when Windows 95 arrived to be honest, even if i wasn't happy about it.

[oky2000]

Look how hard the Amiga failed. It excelled at a few things, but all that "sheer innovation" in the chips and stuff ultimately became a liability whereas the PC's more pedestrian and "uninspiring" hardware infiltrated every nook'n'cranny of industry.

Well if that is the case then perhaps you could explain why Super Stardust on Wintel requires over a 120mhz Pentium CPU and £200 audio ISA card and £200 blitter equipped VRAM PCI card to match the gameplay experience as well as audio visual sophistication of said game running on a £299 Amiga 1200 with no enhancements? It is even hard drive installable too so you can't even poke your tongue out at the disk loading times. This is ignoring the fact that most technical people were still pulling their hair out trying to get the game to work on Windows 95 with CD-rom access drivers and sound card drivers conflicting each other lol.

 

An Amiga 1000 from 1985 runs Lotus Turbo Challenge II perfectly, and on NTSC models it is faster and smoother than Outrun on Sega Genesis. And yet to run that game on a PC you need a 1992 32bit 486 25+ Nhz CPU ie a machine costing £2000+ released 8 years later.

 

At what point is a PC port of Shadow of the Beast 1 perfectly done possible for the same price for new hardware as a £399 Amiga 500 512k machine? Exactly

 

The Amiga's load balancing is far superior to any Mac or PC commercial OS sold at any time before the turn of the century (and for most of that they didn't have multitasking at all in most cases) and cutting and pasting between the clipboard with Digi-view and Digipaint 3 was a real creative persons dream that could not be replicated in the late 80s on any other platform, Mac's were still overpriced monochrome units for under $4000 in the 80s and forget PCs and their ZX81 user interface DOS with totally stupid File Manager/Program Manager interface of Win 1-3 kludged on top.

 

Deluxe Paint 3 did things no other paint package ever done during the life of Commodore or ESCOM by integrating the animation, the 2.5D operations and the painting operations into one package at the initial design level (and what else would you expect from the man who wrote 3D studio right after because he knew he had created the perfect pixel art and animation package and could never improve on its perfection...his quote not mine).

 

I think you are getting caught up between the talentless products written for Amiga by greedy software houses most of the time and the actual hardware capabilities. I can play a MOD of Zoolook that is indistinguishable to 99% of the population from a 128kbits MP3 rip from CD...1985 technology this is going up against next century technology!

 

So how can a machine that can animate at 25fps, reproduce any 4 sounds you can record simultaneously, display to full broadcast resolution in 1985 in multiple territories, time itself to the electron gun of a CRT tube even more accurately than a 2600 VCS, include a GUI multi-tasking OS that before XP MS had no answer for in any way, at the start have defined multimedia formats for audio samples, music, still images, animations etc fail? Dumb consumers buying inferior EGA PCs costing 500% more that's how.

 

The fact Commodore were stupid enough not to market it for most of summer 86 to summer 87 at all is the reason it failed in the USA (in the UK we buy on specification not brand names hence many A1000s went to doctors, professionals and art studios here in the mid 80s who would rather use pen and paper than a PC with Windows 286 for quadruple the cost). DTP via Atari's genius SLM+Mega being the exception which is EXACTLY where the 90s 'windows laser printer' idea was stolen from. Postscript laser printers alone cost more than a Mega 4+SLM804 package and this custom way of printing using the computer's memory and CPU was a massive price performance advantage.

 

Now if you were trying to expand your A500 to something worth thousands in the Mac/PC market with internal slots then you bought the wrong machine and is as futile as trying to use Mario Paint on a SNES to do the work of a Quantel Paintbox lol. In 1989 I had a 9mb Amiga 2000 with 030 card and realtime digitizer and genlock and was making 250 frame anim brushes via Dpaint 3 75% size of the full screen and making my own fighter battle sequences from grabs of Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers in COLOUR overlaid on live video backgrounds and dumped back to YC capable semi-professional analogue video recording equipment. There wasn't a single $10,000 PC on the planet that could match my A2000 in 1989 even for the memory inside it alone. I even had an internal flicker fixer too so it was perfectly useable for every possible serious or gaming use. The auto-booting drives were lightning fast too and it was a dream system to use for everything. Sure it cost 50-60% of the price of a similar Mac but it was seriously more powerful in any way than any Mac II. IIRC also the first 128mb capable desktop PC was actually the Amiga 3000 (or 4000 but the cards work in 3000s too) and even if a PC in 1990 could have it installed the OS could not use it full stop. Ditto for Macs too I bet.

 

Also the first example of games like Kinect does was done with a similar setup using two Amiga 1000s and some custom scripts to allow kids to swat the huge cutesy bugs on the screen which they can see themselves on whilst standing in front of a camera. Only an fool would call a machine that can replicate Kinect style gaming 3 decades earlier would argue otherwise.

 

The only problem with the Amiga way of doing things (ie revolutionary custom hardware....something even late 90s PCs needed to compete with the PS1 for 3D performance) was Commodore sitting on their ass for 6 years and then needing to pull out a similarly revolutionary chipset for the next decade after all the chipset designers had left in disgust at how their 'baby' was treated. NOTHING ELSE. The Hombre chipset by Dave Haynie would have given you a computer as powerful as the Sega Saturn BUT with the accessibility of something you can program at home thanks to the fact it was not a console but a home computer. The Amiga was the intelligent/creative users dream in the UK due to the hardware, the OS and some revolutionary packages for the machine like Dpaint 3.

 

Today nearly 2 decades after the death of Atari and Commodore it is not viable to use custom hardware (because development in the home computer market stopped with Acorn/Atari/Commodore in mid 90s) but playing Doom on a Jaguar proved even in the mid 90s a well programmed and designed chipset in a bespoke architecture pissed all over x86 in £/performance. How much was a 1994 Pentium 75 and how much was a Jaguar? Exactly How much was a Voodo 3D equipped Pentium 166 PC vs 1995 PS1 on launch day to play Colin McRae Rally?

[oky2000]

So the issue is the shops rather than the Amiga? Over here i could get pretty much anything i wanted and by the time i finally retired the old '030 A1200 it had SCSI, a CDROM, two hard disks including the internal, a 14K4 modem, video digitiser, flatbed A5 scanner...

 

But eventually something else had to come along and replace it, that's the way things go. i knew the writing was on the wall when Windows 95 arrived to be honest, even if i wasn't happy about it.

And even if not in the shops you could get some amazing systems via mail order from people like White Knight Technologies. Commodore UK even set up specialist groups for people wanting to do professional things like 24bit desktop video in realtime digitally.

 

Window's 95 was just about good enough (yet vastly inferior to OS2 Warp) so big companies didn't have to throw away x86 architecture, for home use the death of Atari/Commodore and Acorn was a much bigger factor. You had 2 choices left...Macs (as Gordon Harwood mail order pushed) or PCs. It's easy to compete when you have only one competitor and they are hell bent on only selling to overpaid fashionista twits who want to check their emails on £2000 machines than real users like those that were praying for the missing link between Amiga 4000/030 and Amiga 1200 (which was actually in the works but they chose to try and get back in the black with the CD32...not enough money for both machines).

 

Amiga 3000 case, A1200 + 2mb FAST ram + 28mhz 020 + 3.5 IDE drive space and detachable keyboard for £500 as proposed would have wiped the floor with that £999 386 shit on PCs, WIPED THE FLOOR. I saw the demos in 1995 running on Win 95 showing multitasking....they were MORE JERKY than the Fred Harris demonstration of multitasking on the Amiga 1000 in 1985 lol it made me laugh but also sad as I knew with no competition other than overpriced Macs that home computing fun was DEAD FOREVER now

[Markdvdman]

Indeed, PCs rule the roost due to the big magnates buying power.

 

Acorn failed MASSIVELY in marketing and price with the truly wonderful Archimedes range. It is such a shame we are all on PCs now, with not much options (for PROPER work I mean!).

 

As for the topic itself the C64 and Atari 8 bits each had their pros and cons. I love the both of them, although personal preference was for the Atari, simply as I had one at the time, but also wanted a C64 as my mate had one

[Magic Knight]

So the issue is the shops rather than the Amiga? Over here i could get pretty much anything i wanted and by the time i finally retired the old '030 A1200 it had SCSI, a CDROM, two hard disks including the internal, a 14K4 modem, video digitiser, flatbed A5 scanner...

 

But eventually something else had to come along and replace it, that's the way things go. i knew the writing was on the wall when Windows 95 arrived to be honest, even if i wasn't happy about it.

I agree - In the UK especially and probably Europe, there was absolutely no problem getting Amiga stuff in stores. The peripheral/mod market was well and truly up and running by the time Escom re-birthed the A1200 for a while and although i missed the first half of the Amiga period, the latter half was still a golden era for pre-pc dominance (with the ST)

 

The ST was no different for availability, but software was notably starting to play second fiddle to the Amiga over here and that was frustrating having begun with the ST first in the 16 bit era..

[thorfdbg]

The trouble with the Amiga back then was that CBM failed misserably in addressing professional business solutions. The computer was laughted at as gaming machine, and CBM did nothing to sell it in the pro market. It was kind of popular in the professional TV production due to its genlock capabilities, but that was about it.

 

Second problem was that it was never as open as the IBM machines. Every idiot could clone an IBM PC, there was nothing sophisticated in it. But to clone an Amiga, you would have to clone the custom chips, which would be outright impossible. And the Os was tightly coupled to the possibilities of the chips and was not designed to abstract its functionalities away.

 

Third problem was the complexity of the system (for its time). At a time the PC worked with the stupidity of ISA expansion cards which had jumpers and basically an 8080 bus, the Amiga had autoconfig and boot-roms, which meant too much man-power for the average hardware development house (back then) to comply to.

 

Then later, all the good ideas from Amgia were taken over: PCI introduced autoconfig. File formats like WAV of MPEG took the IFF file format, all with only slight modifications. It was a machine truly ahead of its time, with a management truly behind its time.

[carmel_andrews]

The problem here is, the consumer buying from the mainstream market...That's why the ST/Amiga/A8 and C64 falll by the wayside and allowed the PC and windows to steamroller them out of existance

 

Point being is, the other formats should have tried making, developing or creating new markets for their platforms, like we have now with the internet(web), emulation and homebrew development

 

I accept that we didn't have the web/internet (in the way we know it now) back then and homebrew development, but that isn't any excuse for not trying to open up or make new markets for this or that platform at that particular point in time

 

The point being that these companies we once idolised just simply forgot the very people that actually purchased their hardware, they thought they 'understood the market', no one does, the only people that understand the market is the end user....the end user is the market, what these companies were failing to do is integrate the end user with the strategy and vison that company had for it's particular platform or format

 

The point being the if companies like say Atari, understood the market...they would'nt have crashed and burned so badly and caused the so called 'game crash' of 1983/4, since if they knew the market, they would'nt have been releasing crap games by the bucketload, they wouldn't be letting people that didn't understand technology and getting technology into the market (software or hardware) get involved in marketing or any element in product development and most importantly wouldn't initiate business methods/practices that drove the very people that designed the product that got the company where it was, out of the company...lest we remember of course that Atari as well as commodore never really recovered after the crash and tramiel leaving commodore

 

If these companeis we speak of, i.e Atari,CBM, Amstrad (who owned sinclair) etc really understood the consumer and how the consumer thinks, they would'nt have been wasting time trying to undercut eachother and trying to compete cheaply in the market, they would have tried finding new ways of extending the shelf life of said platforms/formats so that it could be enjoyed by future generations...and the way you do this is by finding new markets (like the internet, software based emulation and homebrew development and suchlike)

 

I think we can all aqgree that after the crash the likes of Atari and commodore were largely living off of fresh air, yes the ST and Amiga did offer something, the problem was the people (companies) making and marketing the product, just like the A800 and c64 did offer something...The problem these companies had is that they got too blinded by a little initial success and didn't see things long term

 

Remember that Atari only got into computers when Miner/Decuir told Ataris' management that the VCS architecture was only good for 2 or 3 years before Atari needed to get a new concept into the market

 

And Just to point out, commodore only got into the low end market because the chief hardware designer (Chuck Peddle) Kept dragging his feet on the development of the Colour Pet system (i.e. the Pet system that was supposed to use the vic chip)

 

I was told the only reason why Amstrad bought out sinclair was so it could force UK developers and publishers to publish games for the Amstrad platforms as well as Sinclair (the point being that since amstrad owned sinclair, it could litterally drop the platform the next day and also still be the pre eminant Z80 based platform in UK since the MSX really wasn't much of a competitor) and publishers/developers obviously saw that amstrad basically had the UK games industry by the balls which is why Amstrad was reasonably well supported

 

I accept that the likes of Amstrad and commodore did attempt to upscale the product with new technologies i.e. pet to vic 20 and vic 20 to c64 and c64 to the unreleased c65 as well as Amstrad going from the pcw to the pc and cpc to the cpc plus, Atari on the other hand largely failed in that extent (you can blame warners management for that for turning down miner's idea for a 68000 based platform)...The problem is though unless you are trying to find new markets/avenues for your upscale product it's pointless going for the same market again since it allows other companies to out tech you and your largely selling to the same people that already own your previous offering, by opening up new markets (like we have now with emulation, internet and homebrew development) you create new opportunities that otherwise wouldn't exist for that or this platform

 

Essentially by trying to compete with the PC or Mac the likes of Atari, Commodore and Amstrad etc simply didn't stand a chance, if they only found or developed these new markets and avenues and exploted them way back when, we'd still have the likes of Atari and Commodore in some element of what we once remembered them as

Edited September 8, 2013 by carmel_andrews

[Jetboot Jack]

carmel_andrews - that makes NO sense whatsoever!

 

sTeVE, confused!

[toad]

I have no love for the Amiga. In fact it owes me.

 

And the Amiga peripheral market was the very definition of "vaporware". I remember all my buds doing the Apple and PC route and here I was acting like a retard, doing my very best, to extol the "virtues" of the Amiga, only to get laughed at. Besides, when I needed stuff for it I couldn't just go down to Computer City or Comp-USA and buy things like I could for a PC. Not even the mom'n'pop shops could help me much either.

 

But as soon as I got into the PC everything was just fine. Very much like the Apple II market I had come from.

 

I remember upgrading my Amiga 1200 to a 68060 processor - which was very expensive, only to discover the overall experience was still dog slow. Sure the CPU was powerful - the 68060 had some punch, but then I was bottle necking on crappy AGA graphics. And while everyone else had their browser and tcp/ip stack for free - I had to buy those things too, and they didn't work well. Even if I could code on the Amiga - and had an attachment to it, it was just making my internet experience miserable.

 

By chance I came across a used - old PPC Mac. It was night and day better on internet browsing. I was in heaven and never looked back. On an i7 iMac right now.