Mun kone on parempi kuin sun romu

Suomen konesotien vaiheita yleisönosastosta internetiin

Kirjoittajat

• Petri Saarikoski
• Markku Reunanen

Abstrakti

"My Machine Is Better than Your Scrap": Finnish Machine Wars from Readers' Letters to the Internet

The history of competition between various computer manufacturers has been documented relatively well. Computer users and the media have called these market rivalries "machine wars", referring to a situation where usually two dominating computer models compete hard for a market share. In addition to the commercial wars, private users have also engaged in similar battles throughout the history of home computers. Two well-known examples are the conflicts between Macintosh and PC owners, and the Commodore Amiga vs. Atari ST fight in the late 1980s. In this article we take a look at these wars from a Finnish hobbyist perspective through three case studies that document the situation in the 1980s, the emergence of PC gaming in the 1990s, and the current conflicts between different video game consoles and computers. Based on our observations, it seems that machine wars are an integral part of the home computer culture and that their nature has changed surprisingly little during the last thirty years.