Its hardly fundamental, how people categorise things is completely up to them alone. I doubt the ISO has determined what decides the difference between a console and microcomputer & i doubt they ever will as there is not much point. And its not like we all have to obey the organisation even if they did/have.
WTF?
This has to be most convoluted defense ever, and just for being plain wrong.
So, if I were to categorize myself as black, I'd suddenly become one? I doubt that the ISO has determined me as white, either. Like it or not, we can NOT categorize things as we please. Or if we do, we'll have to face the reality that we might have categorized them wrong.
There is massive difference between microcomputers and consoles. You can play games with one. With the other one you can play games, you can program
(believe it or not, I used to program quite a bit on my MSX), you can visit BBS' or Internet
(Internet would be more of later Amigas' thing, BBS' being C64's). One has a keyboard, other one does not. One had image editing programs, video editing programs
(you do understand that Amigas have been used in commercial TV-productions for subtitling? Their video toaster was way ahead of its time - and the larger ones were used to design and render the CGI for Babylon 5, for example), word processors and... well, basically almost everything modern PC has - the other had none of these.
You do that with SNES, and then I'll agree that they are the one and the same thing.
To stereotype something as a microcomputer just because of the way it was designed without any consideration as to what it was & will be used for is rather stupid.
What you say? How exactly were they designed "without any consideration as to what it was"?
The only truely acceptable stereotype for a object / item really is the name it has been given or none at all.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I thought that I had been saying that all along. Geez.
They have been known as microcomputers
(or computers of some flavor) since their birth, up to this day. They have been marketed as such. Why can't you accept that they are computers, and consoles are a different beasts altogether?