20th Anniversary Of The PC

cmowire writes "I didn't realize this till I was debugging a stock database and saw the PR piece, but today is the twentieth aniversary of the IBM PC. IBM has a tribute page."

Comments

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Nater]

Etiquette, not Latin.

MicroSoft, Microsoft, and change.

[_Sprocket_]

Praise Microsoft for helping open up the PC hardware market.

MicroSoft deserves credit for a major change within the growing personal computer industry. It took it a while from happening. But it sent ripples throughout the industry, forcing established giants to take notice, and enabled MicroSoft to be come the giant that we know today.

In the early period of the microcomputer industry, it was all about hardware. Computer companies were hardware companies. Software packages (applications as well as operating systems) were almost comodities - they were offerings that facilitated the selling of hardware. And while the operating system, or the killer app, might have been key to selling hardware - software companies weren't power houses.

MicoSoft played that game. Most accounts show MicoSoft as being a small company doggedly nipping at the heels of giants, digging up business. They provided software to everyone from the makers of the Altair, to IBM, to Tandy. And when IBM fumbled control of the IBM PC platform and clones sprung up like mushrooms? More business for MicroSoft. And their business exploded as the industry took off.

Suddenly, computer hardware became a commodity. Microsoft was now the gatekeeper to this commodity hardware. What they did... what they decided... was suddenly very important to even the giant hardware manufactorers.

Microsoft helped legitimize the software industry. Software companies could stand on their own with legitimate products. Even the most conservative consumer didn't blink at paying a large sum of money for a shrinkwrapped box that contained just a manual and some media (even paving the way today where its legitimate to pay for a download - no physical product at all).

Sure - software companies existed before and during Microsoft. Microsoft didn't introduce killer apps like VisiCalc and Wordstar. But Microsoft was an important part of that transition.

Or were they simply riding the wave?

One final thought. This week's news is full of debate over WindowsXP. Consumer advocates want to delay release of Microsoft's new flagship product. Industry pundits warn that this delay will cause millions of lost revenue in the computer industry. Only a small portion of that lost revenue would be Microsoft's.

Think about that.

Software, and Microsoft itself, is now so important that an entire industry of hardware manufactorers are depending on the actions of a completely unrelated software company.

It has been a profound change, indeed.

Re:68000 IBM PC

[nick-less]

Heh. PCs would run on G4s & AMD Athlons, and Macs on Pentium 4s.

I think PC would run on 68090's or something like that, if they never had the guts to change their cpu architecture when using Intel CPUs, why should they have done it in case they chose the 68k line.

PPC's would'nt have come to existence either.

Re:Back in my day...

[peter.koellner]

640kB of main memory? 80 column displays? What a waste! A True Computer (tm) does not need more than 48 K of RAM, and of course your floppies don't last longer than three months if you always punch a hole in them to use the flip side 128K !!!

Re:Other "advantages"

[[amorphis]]

I belive this is the quote of which you speak:

"If the automobile industry had progressed at the same speed as the computer industry, a Mercedes-Benz that cost $10,000 in 1960 would cost a penny today." - James Unruh, chairman and CEO of Unisys Corp., 1997
pithy

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[daverk]

Try Ctrl-Alt-Del unless of course you are using WinNT.

BTW-Anyone want to explain why the three finger salute to the IBM PC became the System Request key for WinNT even though the SysRq key has been there forever?

nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

Theres probably warehouses full of these things waiting to get junked. I still see them being thrown away.

Lack of innovation over the years

[Feng]

If you check out the timeline it looks like IBM might have started off on the right foot by bringing out all sorts of well designed and innovative products. Then about half way through they lost the plot (*cough* MCA *cough*) and towards the end of last decade markets more fluff than anything truly innovative. It reads more like a brochure than a timeline towards the end.

That's IMHO, of course.

Re:Lack of innovation over the years

[foonf]

Then about half way through they lost the plot (*cough* MCA *cough*)

The MCA bus was many things. Complicated, yes. Proprietary, definately. Unpopular, for sure. But from a standpoint of design and innovation it was probably the best thing that IBM ever did. A replacement for ISA was generally agreed upon as a need at the time the 386 came out, and if Compaq and others hadn't been selling ISA-based 386 systems for 2 years at the time the PS/2 came out, it might have been a success. It was well designed...it had PnP-like functionality, and more bandwidth than EISA (which was designed later as a response to MCA), in 1987! It wasn't really until PCI came along that a generally superior alternative existed (and who knows, MCA probably could have been pushed to higher clock speeds to catch up if IBM had cared to at that point).

Re:kids in future will be spoiled.

[Anonymous Coward]

No but Steve and Steve did when they put the logo on the Apple computers :)

Re:Happy Birthday

[Wonkothesane2k5]

Only if we make a holiday celebrating the birth of the mac, too.

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[rodgerd]

Not IIRC correctly - loopholes in BM's patents alowed cloning of the XT and AT buses.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[muffel]

Nobody would have a problem with your products not being original if

1. they were of decent quality (hey, maybe even good)
2. You didn't claim to be that super genius innovator

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Locutus]

MS-DOS: Bought QDOS for $50,000, which was in turn was a ripoff of CP/M
Windows 1, 2 and 3: Too crappy for comment.
Windows NT : Innovated directly from OS/2.
Windows 95 : MS innovated huge hunks of it from Apple and even bigger hunks from NeXTstep.

Now didn't Windows 95 get its user interface from HP's NewWave? For customers I couldn't get onto OS/2, I would install NewWave over Windows and introduct them to the idea of OBJECT. Not just desktop icon objects but DATA OBJECTs. The way the got the long object names was via an index file which mapped into the real names. I had heard that Microsoft hired the NewWave people from HP to help with Chicago. It was really funny to hear how badly the OS could use threads. There still isn't anything on the PC that does threads as well as OS/2. IMO

Windows 98: Win95 with the Finder ripoff replaced by a Web Browser innovated from Netscape.
Windows XP: Windows NT with just about everyone's (AOL, Real, etc.) product innovated into the Operating System.

Lob

Re:Reverse engineering the PC

[uebernewby]

Nope, he's right. There was no BIOS source code. There was, however, an extensive set of schematics. How do I know this? Well, my father didn't *buy* the technical manual with his pc, but because he got his first pc in a country with lax copyright enforcing (Indonesia), it was *given* to him along with his shiny, new peecee.

Incidentally, in said country, pc's were the first "personal computers" that gained any popularity ... no one (almost) had an Apple or a C64, but as soon as pc's came out (clones, mostly)the country went computer crazy. Still is, as a matter of fact - there's a large contingent of Indonesian Linux programmers (copyright laws have become stricter since).

Re:Aww

[Enthrad]

Well, that'd be four years, now.

Slashdot evolved from Chips 'n Dips in 1997... September or around then.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[ksheff]

and if it wasn't for MS the IBM PC (and its open standards) probably wouldn't be around today if it wasn't for them.

That's partially true since Gates insisted on being able to license it to other parties. However, I seem to remember a story that the only reason they did choose MS was because they couldn't get in contact with their original choice (Digital Research??). It also didn't hurt that Bill's mom was a friend of some IBM bigshot.

Microsoft played a role too

[yerricde]

In fact it was the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS

Yes, the Phoenix clean-room clone of BIOS contributed, but so did Microsoft's non-discriminatory licensing policy for MS-DOS. Most other platforms at the time ran a proprietary OS owned by the hardware maker; MS-DOS was just as proprietary, but it wasn't tied to the hardware like Apple II DOS 3.3 and later ProDOS, GS/OS, and Mac OS were. In fact, Microsoft originally offered a port of MS-DOS to Macintosh computers based on MC68000 processors, but it never caught on because the popular applications were binary-only for x86.

Praise Microsoft for helping open up the PC hardware market, but blame app vendors for not porting their apps to other archs. Also blame Microsoft for false advertising, as both FUD and its claims of standard conformance under "embrace and extend" amount to false advertising.

DISCLAIMER: On legal issues, all Slashdotters (myself included) should be treated as talking out their asses.

Re:Microsoft played a role too

[Anonymous Coward]

In fact, Microsoft originally offered a port of MS-DOS to Macintosh computers based on MC68000 processors, but it never caught on because the popular applications were binary-only for x86.

Realistically, the fact that MS-DOS was crap was also a major reason it wouldn't be taken up by Macintosh users. If you wanted those apps badly enough, or more likely didn't know enough to care, then you'd buy an x86 machine anyway. If you had actually made a choice to buy a Macintosh then it's unlikely that you had some bizarre liking for DOS.

Re:Microsoft played a role too

[MrBogus]

In fact, Microsoft originally offered a port of MS-DOS to Macintosh computers based on MC68000 processors, but it never caught on because the popular applications were binary-only for x86.

Well, I've never heard that particular tidbit in all my days of tidbit collecting, so I question if it's true or not.

On the otherhand, the first Mac port of MS Flight Simulator looked suspiciously identical to the DOS version, down to the fonts, so maybe there's something to it.

Re:Microsoft played a role too

[HeUnique]

It was EXACTLY the same few years later when Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1 and then 3.5X for other then X86 processors.. You could have get some apps at the beginning (I think I've seeb MS Word 6 for Alpha back then), but almost no other vendors wrote software for those non X86 NT version..

Re:house built upon the sand

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, but at least there are lots and lots of interrupts to assign to new hardware.

Cough.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[Jebediah21]

I know for a fact the Apple //e had such a feature. Ahh, to be 7 years old, fat, and playing video games on an Apple //e; rebooting with Control + Open Apple + Reset.

*sigh*

Now I'm 21, thin, and surfing the net on a homebuilt machine running Linux; rebooting with Control + Alt + Delete.

How the times change.

Oh My Gawd, They Killed CP/M

[Anonymous Coward]

Those Bastards!

Re:first IBM pc

[grumling]

I did! I did! Dad bought it at a hamfest for $350. Got the computer and all the drawings, manuals and everything to make it work, but no teletype until a few years later. Sitting in storage now.

Great machine. Still remember making the lights blink.

20 YEARS IS ENOUGH!

[Anonymous Coward]

20 years of AIDS
20 years of MTV
20 years of DOS

We must stop them! FOR THE CHILDREN!

Reverse engineering the PC

[XNormal]

I'm not sure about the original PC but the XT technical reference came with the complete schematics of the motherboard and all expansion boards and complete source code of the BIOS.

Re:Reverse engineering the PC

[Gill Bates]

No source code for BIOS - I can tell you that for sure.

As the previous poster mentioned, it was included in the Technical Reference manual. You had to purchase it separately, it wasn't part of the standard docs.

Re:Reverse engineering the PC

[HeUnique]

Well, I had an IBM XT

No source code for BIOS - I can tell you that for sure.

On MainFrame it was another story - you got some source code, but of course - not to your entire system

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[plavigna]

Yep, my Amstrad was a 8086 with one floppy drive; I didn't know that brand was popular here in the US (think it's a British comp). I remember using an application called First Publisher that came on two floppys, so that meant constant swapping of the disks. Fun stuff.

Re:Other "advantages"

[ameoba]

At the rate things are going, before long, you won't even be able to buy a gallon of gas for $2.75

Re:Other "advantages"

[kisielk]

Hmm I can just imagine it now, the open-sourced car movement GNUCars. A bunch of car developers trying to make cars and highways freely available to all, making the "car source" available to all. And of course, they'd have to compete with the proprietary car manfucaturers, and try to make their cars compatible with the others parts while the monopolistic car companies would influence politicians to keep their prominent positions in the industry. Hm.. this reminds me somewhat of the struggle to have electric/hybrid cars become more accepted in the marketplace...

Re:We called it the ZX81

[triticale]

You had an early one then, with 2114s (1k x 4bit) instead of a single static ram chip. The custom chip, which could probably be done now with an off the shelf programmable array (some would even include the ram) simply replicated the circuitry of the earlier model and added an interrupt timer for the video refresh.

PC jr Anniversary?

[daverk]

Anyone know when IBM site celebrating the 20th anniversary of the PC jr will be up?

Having been around when it was released I know it was one of IBM's proudest acheivements/moments(after leaving Microsoft with rights to the os, letting the BIOS be cloned, and buying the CPU from Intel).

Re:Is this really something to 'celebrate'?

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, even your sig is a troll

How many people started with the IBM PC original?

[yani]

Well the PC is the same age as me, 20 years old. I doubt many people would have predicted it of all the computers at the time to trigger such a massive computing presence at home.

My first computer was an IBM PC (the original), I can still remember what a luxury I thought it was to have two floppy drives so I could keep Dos on A: and play frogger off B:! Ah...the good old days ...errr... well frogger anyway!

I'd be interested to know what started most slashdotters fascination with computing, I doubt it was the IBM PC. Only reason I had one was because my parents were both accountants and you didn't use a Mac for accounting ;-)

A day that should live in Infamy

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO, the IBM PC set the industry back 10 or 20 years. (we still stuck with some of the limitations of that first design) The ONLY advantages it had over its contemporaries were the IBM name, an 80 column screen (B/W of course), and the fact that it was an open platform. It was somewhat of an engineering feat as it was created completely with off the shelf parts but it was neither elegant nor cutting edge. You can argue all you want about why it was so successfull but I think it's soley because it had 'IBM' plastered on the front. There were MUCH better computers available. About 6 or 7 years ago I was in Boca Raton for some IBM training and met several of those original 12 engineers. Unfortunately I can't remember which ones but one of them ACTUALLY APOLOGIZED for inflicting the IBM-PC architecture on the world. He said they never expected it to be such a sucess.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[kfg]

For further reference the IBM 360 that I was working on less than 10 years before the release of the PC cost $3 million, and you couldn't get a "video card" for it at all. Output was to an IBM Selectric typewriter, which we thought was pretty damn cool because we could * change fonts* by physically changing the typeball.

I think you underestimate the reticence of people to spend money on software at the time, *particularly* on an OS. As I've pointed out several times the real reason DOS won over CP/M was cost. DOS cost $40, CP/M cost $249. Even though CP/M was, at the time, the de facto standard people simply wouldn't pay $200 extra for an OS, even AFTER spending several thousand on hardware.

Remember, this is the same time era in which the FSF was born. People expected a computer to simply COME with both an OS and full development enviroment of some sort. The aforementioned IBM 360 had much of APL *hardcoded* into the cpu, not only was it free with the machine but it was literally impossible to uninstall.

I remember a company not batting an eye at popping $13,000 for a 386 server, and then putting up a fight for months over a few hundred dollars worth of software to make it actually useful.

Hardware is REAL. It sits on your desk or in your rack. You OWN it.

Software is invisible. It isn't REAL. More importantly you know, because the company that wrote it makes damn SURE you know, that you don't own it. You buy it and it isn't even yours. If you want to spend a bit of money and take a bit of time you know that you can hire a programer or ten to write a workalike that you DO own, whereas you arn't going to build a chip fab.

The cost of software has always been treated differently than the cost of hardware because software IS different. No one expects hardware to be free but there are now literally millions of people around the world wondering why software costs *anything.*

Particulaly an OS which, in practical terms, is really PART of the computer.

As for the fact that hardware for UNIX cost a premium over DOS that was *by design of the UNIX companies.* They wanted it to cost a lot, it wasn't inherent in the software. The more it cost the more "valuable" and "high tech" it was, at least in the marketing mind. They liked it that way. They made a mistake. Now they can't go back because, once again, UNIX has become free before they could retrench and make it cheap.

I stand by my point and suggest that if UNIX had been available for the 386 at the same price, or lower, than Windows Linux wouldn't even exist. The UNIX vendors blew it.

KFG

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[technos]

Umm, you're forgetting that all 16-bit ISA makers were already paying royalties to IBM..

word to your moms, i came to drop bombs

[WickedClean]

Computers were so much cooler back in the days before every jackass on the street had a compaq or an emachine with a bad hard drive and wanted you to come spend 3 hours fixing it in exchange for some cookies and kind words.

Back in my day...

[Rimbo]

...we didn't have no fancy-shmancy 32-bit computers with "true" color and multi-tasking multi-threaded GUI operating systems! We had EIGHT bits, and if you wanted any more than that you had to wait three days for a calculation! We had DOS and 640KB limits! We had four colors with our CGA graphics, including black and white!

And we LIKED it! We LOVED IT!

We didn't have any stinking free operating systems. We had to pay $100 for shitty old DOS, and we loved it! We thought it was great!

We didn't have DOOM, or Quake, or Unreal. We didn't have texture-mapped anti-aliased vertex-shaded full-color video games! We had ZORK with its text-only interface! And we liked it! We loved it!

We didn't have any "internet" back in those days, not in our homes. There was no World Wide Web or DSL/cablemodem connections to your home. We didn't even have 56k modems! If you wanted to share things with your buddies you had to copy it onto a 300K floppy, and boy, we didn't know WHAT we'd do with all that disk space! And if you wanted to connect to other computers you had to use a THREE HUNDRED BAUD MODEM!

And we liked it! We loved it!

I'm a grumpy old man, and I don't like the way things are today...things were a lot better with disk-swapping 80-column text wait an eternity to download forty K of files that would take up a large share of a floppy disk that would go bad in three months, with games that would take three or four minutes to load that were rarely worth the cost of the disks they were printed on and a stinking 640KB limit! And we loved those days!

Re:Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember I used to get nice deep gouges in my fingers from trying to pry the ISA cards out of my XT. It had nice unfinished sharp metal edges where the card slots were cut out. If you pushed through the slot to get some leverage you'd end up slicing your finger when it popped out. :-)

Re:Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

ahh.. but a LOT of people many a LOT of money that could have only happened with invention of the IBM PC. (Apple did help too)

Re:Back in my day...

[willith]

No, I think he's talking about Amiga. And damn but they were nice.

Re:Back in my day...

[Grim Grepper]

Gosh, this brings back memories. I remember having a 5.25" as my only floppy disk drive, using DOS. Hell, I'd never even heard of a mouse back then. Ah, and good ol' WordStar. That sure as hell didn't have a stupid paperclip.

I see all the people today complaining: "Oh, Windows is too hard. AOL is complicated. I'm confused!". And I think back to when I was 5 years old, using a CLI and installing my first SoundBlaster, configuring IRQs and DMAs. And today, some people need help installing a keyboard.

Re:Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

*shrug*

Back in my day, which happens to be your day, *I* had a fully pre-emtive multitasking operating system running on a machine full of co-processors with no such silly 640k limit. AND I had graphics capabilities that left most PC heads drooling.

It's a damn pity the IBM PC won the race. We've spent almost 20 years catching up to where we were back in the early 80's.

Re:Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

No kidding about the bloody knuckles! I have an old 286 board where the underside is covered in blood stains that occured as I was removing plastic standoffs.

Re:Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

You spelt whorehouse wrong.

Re:Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah well back in MY day:
We a 8 meg of ram was the size of a small wherehouse.
Disk plators made airport personell paranoid
and find a bug was a matter of getting rid of the poor moth that's now a mothkibob on the p2p side of the bootsector
OH and ARPA.net was deciding if MODEM tech was better than Opticalspectrumanalises tech given the "average" computers bandwidth....

Re:Back in my day...

[infinite_twilight]

indeed these days and in the future children will be rotten little buggers. When i was a year and a half, my parents bought an Atari (have no clue what model, with the cartridge putting in part in the keyboard and cassette tape drive). Soon afterward they taught me to play pacman, spent much of childhood doing such.. Later I advanced to Zork and Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy and loved it :) When I was 5ish, I began playing dungeons and dragons with my cousin (he was like 11 or so) over a bbs we had to phone into 400 km away, and we loved it. The slowness, or the fact that it was text only didn't bother us, we were excercising our minds and talking to other ppl who actually liked what they were doing as well and that was why we loved it. Unlike today. Icq used to be a communications utility, now it is just pap with thousands (dare I say millions) of stupid, sheep such as jocks and ditzes who use AOL thinking its the best thing since sliced bread, just msging -anyone- looking for some cyber. The internet is being ruined by the sheep who have never known the coolness of being the only comp-interested person you know to have a computer of some sort that is -not- a mac, or being beaten up by classmates for being the only one who did assignments on a computer with spell checker, or played any of the classic games. Instead, their minds are feed the pap and do not even know how things used to, how things should be. Instead, they just go on flooding irc channels with "asl, wanna c ma pic?" and play their stupid games with none of the stimuli of those of yesteryear, such as the Sims and Black and White (granted there might be games out there which are mentally stimulating, I have been told to play Baldur's Gate, just haven't found a copy yet). Guided games (either in its nature or throw possible actions to take) ruin ppl's minds in their simplicity. Oh for Pandora Directive or Crystal Caves! ~me

Re:Back in my day...

[Trepidity]

I was agreeing with you until I saw the sig. "Progressive New Wave" - what the hell type of hippie shit are the kids coming up with these days? Old-timer my ass!

Re:Back in my day...

[Waffle Iron]

Not to mention that we'd scrape our knuckles to bloody shreds against lead-coated IC pins trying to insert and extract option cards, so we could try endless permutations of DIP switch settings in the vain hope of getting the machine to boot. We didn't have 'plug-and-play'. We didn't need it.

Re:Back in my day...

[jfunk]

Progressive and new wave music were popular in the 70's and early 80's.

If you are into progressive, like I am, then you *are* an old timer.

(also note the ancient form of emphasis I used up there, from the BBS/USENET days)

Re:Back in my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. I remember all this (and I'm just a young fella).

I remember my dad coming home with an XT in '83. We were special. We had a *1200* baud modem, and it was *INTERNAL*. We had a whopping *4* colors available, a 10 meg hard drive, and 640kb of ram.

My dad later told me it set his company back 10 grand for that pc. Amazing.

Don't forget Pr0n in MacPaint. I think my first Pr0n pic was Loni Anderson in 2 whole colors (black and white). LOL!

Re:Back in my day...

[JBowz15]

You has 8-bit computers, with DOS, and 4 colors?!?

Back in MY day all we had were big rocks. And we sat around and watched the rocks because you just never knew what those rocks might do. Them rocks are tricky like that.

You kids have it too easy these day... Bah!

Re:Digital

[triticale]

In fact there have been two other companies called Digital Research. Back in the CP/M era, Digital Research Computers (aka DR of Texas) sold hardware, including the "Big Board" CP/M machine, to hobbiests. Apparantly Xerox licensed or purchased this board to run in systems they marketed.

More recently, there is another company by the same name marketing LS120 drives (another great standard hurt by installed base).

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Anonymous Coward]

Ofcourse its all in the definition or "original" but I think BeOS (its free and 50MB, or 1 cd for a couple of bucks with load of apps). Sure its has a hiarchical filesystem and a gnu cli just like a unix [look/feel/taste/smell]-alike but the database likeness with and mime filteype of this journaling filesystem and the relation of the cli to the gui ( scripting with hey ) and just the really fast gui with a nice look and feel may all be microsoftishly "inovated" from others but there is no way you can use this combination without this little voice in your head whispering "I have never seen such a cool os before, it must be new"
which makes me believe :

Yes BeOS is a new os

first hand held computer

[netnic30]

and the first hand-held computer that you could build yourself was the kim (remeber that one)??

Re:Happy Birthday

[rchatterjee]

Yeah, that'll be great, we'll go out for drinks, the PC will finally be old enough to have to have one. Though i shudder to think what a drunk PC will do. I hope it doesn't do something stupid like install Windows ME on itself while in a drunken Stupor.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[brocktune]

Ditto. My first computing experience (ignoring the six-digit calculator given to me as a child) was with the original IBM PC in 1982. 64k of memory, monochrome display (no graphics), came with DOS 1.1. I was 14, and had my first part-time job programming (in BASIC) a year later.

Games were the original Adventure (ported by Microsoft), Zork I and other early Infocom games, and "Friendlyware", a set of fairly imaginative games in BASIC that used ASCII characters for graphics. In 1984 I bought a CGA card for $300 that I'd earned mowing lawns and coding simple databases. I didn't have enough money for a monitor, so I connected the CGA card to a television set using an RF modulator. The display was completely illegible at 80 columns, so I ran DOS at 40 columns. ("MODE CO40" anybody?)

1982: parents bought IBM PC for ~$4500
1986: bought used PCjr for $900
1988: bought 10 Mhz XT clone for $1700
1990: bought 386SX/25 for ~ $1900
1992: bought used 486/33 motherboard for $400
1994: bought P/133 for ~$3200
1997: bought P2/333 in pieces for ~$2100
1999: bought P3/700 for ~$1700
2001 (last week): bought P3/1000 for $600

Christ, I sound like one of those old farts talking about punch cards. Somebody stop me.

It's 20 years old...

[Strangely Unbiased]

...And it's STILL using the keyboard controller to access RAM over 1MB.

Re:Reminds me of a Dilbert...

[Anonymous Coward]

Evidently Katz still visits that era. At least we left l999 behind, and were safe for a year (unless he called it 2ooo), but now it's 2ool! Aieee!

Bah! Stupid digital punk kids!

[root]

In my day we didn't have digital computers. We had analog computing! That's right, we used resistors, capacitors, inductors, op amps, and other discrete components, hand wired on a plug board to solve each of our differential equations. No lost precision to this "sampling" bullshit. Our circuits had INFINITE PRECISION! Apply power, wait for the system to stabilize, and read the answer at the output terminals on the multimeter needle (no digital multimeters either, you pansys). Digital? Bah! Saturation and cutoff were considered improper operation modes of transistors and was something we worked hard to avoid happening. It is only now that you digital punks are realizing the benefits of analog and how we had it right all along. Your early 110 and 300 baud modems were fully digital. You could HEAR each bit go by. And you were so pleased with yourselves until you discovered that that was as about fast as you could go with digital, right? With 1200 bps you introduced FOUR signal levels (sounds like analog to me) representing 2 bits each at your maximum 600 baud digital signaling rate to make 1200 bps. Note I use baud and bps correctly, unlike you digital wusses. How many signal levels does a 56K modem have? It's a fucking analog spectrum and yet you still won't admit that our generation figured out the good shit long before you were born! Ah for the good ol days. And the Doors LP spinning on the turntable in the lab. That's probably another device you've never used. Now you're cramming silicon into your cars like cattle lining up to die. Well, when the EMP comes, my generation will still be on the road in our 55 Chevy pickups that have this wierd carbeurrated engine and mechanical points vibrator system. Maybe I'll stop to give you a lift. Maybe. Note. No paragraph breaks. In my day, keeping messages as short as posible was of paramount importance. No one wanted to pay line charges to read blank lines, you wasteful digital fruitcakes.

Re:Bah! Stupid digital punk kids!

[Lars T.]

With 1200 bps you introduced FOUR signal levels (sounds like analog to me) representing 2 bits each

Four signal levels representing 2 bits sure as hell sound digital to me - though not binary

Re:Bah! Stupid digital punk kids!

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, when the EMP comes, my generation will still be on the road in our 55 Chevy pickups that have this wierd carbeurrated engine and mechanical points vibrator system.

Heh, that reminds me of some show I was watching recently where they were developing these little cars on wheels that were shot out from the front of a police car and emitted an EMP under the engine to stop the car. I wonder what they'd do with old classic cars? Back to the old trusty spike strip I suppose.

Re:Bah! Stupid digital punk kids!

[norton_I]

Heh, the funny thing is, quantum computers (if they can ever be built) are analog computers. And the great thing is, it looks like we can still do normalization on them, solving the only problem that makes digital computers preferable to analog ones.

I also think it is funny how the supposedly "revolutionary" fuzzy logic from a few years ago was really nothing but an attempt to emulate an analog control circuit with digital microcontrollers.

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Nater]

You never did Latin at school, did you?

Just enough to be dangerous... or so the saying goes. Thanks for the link.

Hubbell Space Telescope?

[icqqm]

I see IBM still hasn't mastered the spell checker

Re:The Real infor on MS

[leviramsey]

Windows NT - innovated from OS2 ?? what are you smoking - it owes more to X windows than that (hint - what happens when NT crashed - i dumps core) the back end is similar in many ways to Unix - ...

Erm.. NT is actually not only "innovated from OS/2", it is completely based on the OS/2 codebase. (You might remember in the early days of NT those "OS2!SYS" error messages that kept coming up... What are you smoking?

NT is also heavily VMS based. Microsoft hired away most of the VMS development team to do NT. The thing is, NT3.x really doesn't suck. Unlike later versions of the OS, it actually ran the GUI in userspace, among other things.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

All your installed base are belong to us.

Personal Computer Origins

[_Sprocket_]

It's the 20th anniversary of the first -IBM- pc, not the PC. The altair was made in 1975 or so, was it not?

I've been pondering the personal computer over this the past week. TechTV had asked if IBM was responcible for the popularity of the PC. While most people keyed on "PC" as being "IBM PC" and debated IBM's role in introducing the product line... I thought of "PC" as "personal computer" and thought back to a series of home computers before and after the IBM PC.

I had thought of the Altair... but dismissed it.

I see the label "personal computer" as denoting a consumer device. The Altair was a microcomputer for the home enthusiast. But it required an electronics hobbiest, and perhapse a mathmatics enthusiast, to put togeather and enjoy.

Apple was the first to realize the personal computer - not only a pre-constructed motherboard, but one that included a keyboard, a video driver (and a slick hack, at that) all in a custom plastic case. Granted - it may have taken a computer geek to appreciate it at first. But it paved the way for a killer app (the spreadsheet - VisiCalc, if I remember right) to make the personal computer a standard fixture in offices. And once it was in the office, the personal computer began showing up in households that otherwise wouldn't have had a computer.

I make it sound like the industry WAS Apple. I don't believe that. IBM had an important role. But that role was not origionating the "personal computer".

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[MrBogus]

Well, think of the period between when the i386 chip started shipping in PCs (1987), and when most PC start shipping with a real protected mode OS (ummmm, Win XP ships later this year?).

MS and IBM were dinking around with OS/2 and Win 3.1. Later on Novell bought UNIX and essentially buried it. There was plenty of opportunity for Unix in the market, but SCO wanted premium dollar. It shouldn't have taken a college student to find a way to create a PC Unix that could be obtained on a MS-DOS budget.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[leviramsey]

Windows 1, 2, and 3: Too crappy for comment

Hey! IMHO, Windows 3.11 was the last decent MS OS until Win2k (as far as a client OS goes)...

Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers. ?

[q-soe]

Thats your opinion and it may very well be correct (i wont argue with it)

But you miss the point a little - IBM created the PC market in the corporate sector. The innovators (and there were legion) built great computers but corporates wouldnt buy off a company that might go broke (many of them did, MITS, IMSAI, Commodore etc) but they knew IBM and they knew their systems - they had their Mainframes in the data centers and machine rooms and their minis in accounting etc, so they trusted the name and bought the PC's for their staff based on the fact that IBM had been there for many years and they were a corporate company like them and knew their business.

Apple made a better product but they played on the touchy feely, hippy ethos too much for the corporate market (and they didnt want that market, didnt care about it till after IBM entered the marketplace really)

I would say that i started my career on thos 'retarded' mainframes and they were the best on the market (name me one competitor at that time with superior mainframe systems)

I wont comment on the keyboard etc as it is a matter of opinion - and with the keyboard its true as is the expandability (IBM knew nothing about expandability as they were used to telling customers what they were getting not the other way around) And i would like to know what written and real basis you have for the IBM paying off DR comment - as it is a matter of record that MS paid $50k for the DOS - they didnt write it thus if it was stolen its not their issue (not to mention that most DOS'es were copies of CP/M at that stage anyway just as most BASIC was a copy of Bill Gate's original Altair one.

But remember this - no IBM PC means NO pc as we know it - the rise of the PC on the corporate desktop led to the modern market place we have and enjoy - a market needs volume and real volume in those days could only come from business and big business had the most momey and staff - IBM didnt persue the cloners as they thought hardware wasnt worth it - thank god.

I would be interested in asking your age (i just like to see how many of the 30+ guys are still out there in this industry) as it has an impact on the mainframe computing opinion but im not flaming you as you have a right to say what you think - after all linux is all about freedom of choice and right to think different!

Re:Other "advantages"

[david duncan scott]

I could be wrong, but I think there were horse-drawn rail vehicles somewhat earlier. Rails could (and still can) support a great deal of weight and don't turn to mud when it rains.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[kfg]

My, we're a spunky little bag of teenaged testosterone tonight, arn't we?

KFG

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[Anonymous Coward]

"The Atari 1040 ST was the first computer that sold for under $1/K "

Except for the Apple IIc, Commodores, and previous Atari products.

oh the irony

[Anonymous Coward]

And to think the PC lagged behind all other architectures for a full 15 of those 20 years. Damnit, I want my 2GHz Amiga 20,000!

Microsoft:ALL YOUR INSTALLED BASE ARE BELONG TO US

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft:ALL YOUR INSTALLED BASE ARE BELONG TO US Score 5: Funny!!

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[Anonymous Coward]

That video page is broken, why can't they just put a simple link to an mpeg?

Re:house built upon the sand

[kfg]

Indeed. Either/or Microsoft/IBM are generally given credit for the computer economic 'miracle.'

In fact it was the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS that let the Genie out of the bottle and let the clones out of the lab to ravage the land and the netscape, and yet this event, the KEY event in the development of the PC as we know it today, isn't even mentioned in most short histories of the development of the PC.

KFG

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[fermi's ghost]

I always thought it funny that the original PC model number was 5150.

This is the same code used on police two-way radio for "Mental case, not responsible"

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Detritus]

Wrong.

There was CP/M-86 and the UCSD p-System. Both of which were substantially better than PC-DOS. The problem was that PC-DOS was cheaper than the competing operating systems, so people bought it. PC-DOS 1.X was a warmed over port of CP/M-80, and the Microsoft development tools (Hey Bill!) were complete pieces of shit. I quickly gave up on PC-DOS and switched to the UCSD p-System, which had a Pascal compiler and operating system that actually worked. The UCSD p-System later died of self-inflicted wounds.

Re:kids in future will be spoiled.

[jacobcaz]

• You're that old and you're still trying to appear 31337 by depicting the roman numeral "II" using inverted square brackets?

You're so stupid you don't know that it was actually Apple "]["?

Hmmm - who's 1337 now?

Fuckin' anonymous coward...

Re:Should we mourn for the Home Computers them?

[drsoran]

Well, two off the top of my head are PCI (adopted by Apple in their Macs and Sun in their Ultrasparcs) and ATA hard drives (ditto). As for beige boxes with floppy drives... I really don't see why Mac people have such a hang up on what their computer looks like. I just stick my computer in the corner and never even look at it unless I'm loading a CD-ROM in it. My computer could be orange and green for all I care. I actually happen to like beige for what it's worth though. What would you prefer we had?? Cheap translucent plastic garbage like the iMacs and G4 towers?

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

The "es" plural form is Germanic in origin. The "ii" and "ae" plural forms are Latin.

And why do you insist on calling others "moron" when it is you who lacks knowledge? I think it would be best for everyone if you left ./ for a while and grew up a little.

Re:first IBM pc

[Anonymous Coward]

"The PC is by far the most widely used and most important architecture in use today" thats what scares me. the crappiest architecture( if you can call it that) is the most important

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...who cares about the "es" form? Did you imagine that anybody here was talking about it? We weren't, and you obviously don't know dick about Latin. Point us to a Latin reference where they talk about this mysterious "ii" ending of yours.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[visualight]

That was damn funny. I wish I could of seen it.

Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers.

[kson34]

It was designed to be mediocre for a reason. IBM made a lot of money selling mini computers back then, and the previous PC designs came close to performing almost as well as the mini-computers. IBM didn't believe that the PC would take off in the way that it did (they didn't really see the PC market as that big of a market, and they where right until Visicalc came out), but it did believe that the PC's might take a huge bite out of its very profitable mini-computer market. Why would anyone spend $100,000 on a mini-computer when you can get something that performs almost as well for $4000? That was the mandate that was delivered to Phil Estridge, and he managed to stall the development of PC's for 5 years and allowed IBM to milk a lot of money out of companies purchasing mini-computers.

Date's off by one, but cool nonetheless...

[x136]

Actually, the twelfth is the twentieth anniversary.
The 5150 (along with the Apple II, the original Mac, and the Compaq Portable, among others) is one of the greats. Without it, who knows how long it would have been before the PC industry took off?
Congrats to IBM.

BTW, it's also the fortieth anniversary of the beginning of work on the Berlin Wall. (Insert your own joke here) :)

Re:BS alert

[Anonymous Coward]

no that was Al Gore. or maybe Bill Gates helped

Any one have working ones?

[mcdade]

Funny thing, we still have some working XT's with those 8088 chips and no harddrive. I think one of those units has a 20mb drive (damn, my video has more memory than that!).

You know what, the stuff still works, and it connects to the net via an ISA network card, 10baseT and some old tcp/ip dos based software. Even have the orginal green and amber screens. Mind you they have some burnin, and the units weigh like 30lbs.

who else still have them??

Re:Happy Birthday

[Anonymous Coward]

Yay!!!!!!!!!! The birth of the most famous *proprietary* computer system in the world. I don't think I nor any penguins would be celebrating. To tell you the truth, the only reason that the Macintosh survives today is Microsoft's funding (monetary or in kind) and the fact the MacOS is better than Windows. If Bill Gates turned on Apple, they would die quickly. Bill Gates has always loved the Mac. Besides numerous quotes, he has released many programs (IE, Office, etc.) for it.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[msaavedra]

I started with the same type of computer as Linus Torvalds, the Commodore VIC-20. As a small child, I spent hour upon hour writing amazingly cheesy programs for its built in BASIC interpreter, and saving the best of them to a glacially slow tape drive. Unfortunately, I never gained the type of skill that Linus did.

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[trash eighty]

yeah they were called PC1640 over here, we got one as our first PC. interestingly the power unit was in the monitor! it was fun using GEM Desktop on it!

we upgraded the hell out of that machine! fitted a 30MB hard drive (on a card!), 3" floppy drive, joystick interface. it lasted a long time... even got Windows 3.0 on it... running in CGA mode.... *nice*.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[Spoing]

[Unix] cost $2500 minimum, CP/M was one tenth that and PC-DOS was one tenth THAT. Had the UNIX guys taken the PC seriously and realized the potential market and priced accordingly, about $50, we'd all be using UNIX today and not having to dual boot. *MS itself would have used UNIX had it been financially feasable.* Indeed, "Quick and Dirty OS" was a quick and dirty ripoff of UNIX needing a few years more development.

I like your rant, but this part is not true.

Hardware costs were the main issue; DOS+apps ran (poorly) in 640K. Unix+apps required a minimum of 2x that amount and a fair more power. As for a cheap *nix, there was Coherent for $100...though it required a 286+ to run it. Once again, we're back to hardware costs.

Only reciently, in the past 4~ years, has hardware become insanely cheap and the cost of the OS and other software is becoming a major factor.

For reference, I'm about to buy a video card with 512 times the amount of RAM on it then I had on my first computer. The 64mb card costs ~$110 new while the 128k PC originally cost ~$3,000 used.

OS/2

[techmuse]

Odd. No mention of OS/2 for the PS/2...

Re:OS/2

[Anonymous Coward]

...with a start-up sound from Carry...

They're all going to laugh at you!

Little did they know that the MCA bus could move objects with great force at great distances.

The anniversary

[Jailbrekr]

of a 16bit computer that should never have gone past 16bit.

The anniversary of endless problems due to backward compatibility. Of stack faults and buffer overruns.

The anniversary of failed standards.

*Sigh*

The anniversary of the PC. Cheers!

Re:The anniversary

[Anonymous Coward]

Two points

A)Babylon 5 sucks( yes, we know you were trying to be 'leet' by mimicking the title voiceover of B5)

B)Stack faults and buffer overruns have nothing to do with whether a chip is 16 bit or not. Chips don't automagically start running in protected mode when you jump to 32 bit, you know. Where do you come up with this crap?

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[sheldon]

It used to be when the Mac trolls came along you'd ask them if they could multitask, play stereo sound and have color pictures and they'd shut up.

Of course that was back when I owned an Amiga.

Apple has never really created anything innovative, they just stole it from less well known people like Xerox so it looked original.

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi, it's me again. Are you a different imbecile, or are you the original moron that I replied to? Now pay attention this time, you stupid shit: The Latin language doesn't have a "ii" plural form. Jesus. Where the fuck do you simpletons come up with this garbage? Has the educational system really sunk so low?

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[trentfoley]

And, just when things were getting fairly compatible, there was IBM's Micro Channel and "The Gang of Nine"'s EISA. Thank God for PCI.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[bungo]

To tell the truth, I couldn't tell it was meant to be sarcastic either. It was only until I
read one of your later posts in the thread, then went back to your earlier comment that I reasized
that you were being sarcastic.

It is so true that are large number of semi-informed people believe that MS is the entire
computer industry, and nothing ever existed before. I say semi-informed, as non-informed
people, like my wife for example, didn't realize that there was even a difference betweed MS and a
PC, but when given a little information, she started to understand.

What I've encountered far too often are people who only came to computers after the IBM PC and
MS were already on top, and have learned a little on how the PC works, have become their office
PC guru (because they're actaully seen the control panel before, not that they actually
understand how a computer works). Theses people seem to swallow everything from MS and take it as
gospal and don't want to hear any herasy that MS is anything else but the creator. There are people
like that even here on /.

So, to stop flames against you, try to make yoursarcam a bit more over the top or add a
smiley.

You're just too subtle, almost troll-like.

Re:The Real infor on MS

[muffel]

Windows NT - innovated from OS2 ?? what are you smoking - it owes more to X windows than that (hint - what happens when NT crashed - i dumps core) the back end is similar in many ways to Unix - ...

Erm.. NT is actually not only "innovated from OS/2", it is completely based on the OS/2 codebase. (You might remember in the early days of NT those "OS2!SYS" error messages that kept coming up... What are you smoking?

Windows 98 - I'll give you that one but it is much more than that - it was next generation tech that continued stability and useablity enhancements.

"next generation"? Ok, you might have fooled some until this point. "next generation" by itself sounds very much like a marketroid who doesn't know what he's talking about and doesn't have anything substantial to say. But "next generation" used in the context of Win98? -- That just gave it away. Thanks for playing. (And say hello to Bill...)

Digital

[Anonymous Coward]

Digital Research's original name was Intergalactic Digital Research. It wasn't a very serious endeavor, Then the money came rolling in, and "Intergalactic" was removed. Gary Kildall was President and author of CP/M

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, you again, leave the stupid fuck (or fucks) alone, virii sounds cool. Latin's dead anyway.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

As an aside have you noticed that depending on the circumstances MS attacks Linux either for being "Old" tech OR "Too new and undeveloped"? Cute, huh?

Huh? Just because something is based on old tech doesn't mean that any particular implementation of it is mature. I guess you think all the CS students who have to write their own OSes are producing mature OSes just because they're basing them on old designs? It's really not that hard to figure out, dunce.

Earlier IBM PCs

[ho9509]

IBM had the (overpriced, approx. $15000) 5100 out in 1974. Ran Basic or APL and had a tape drive. Also, one could make a case that VM/370 offered the first PC. Each system user got their own virtual IBM 360 or IBM 370. And a virtual 360/370 is much better than most real PCs or Macs.

Re:By Coincidence...

[unitron]

Actually they could publish the schematics and a bunch of other technical info which they have to create anyway, and nowadays no doubt are doing on computers instead of drawing boards, and put it all on a CD and include one with each unit, and I for one would be glad to pay an extra buck or two for it.

Most widely used architecture?

[NortonDC]

The best selling 32-bit microprocessor family, at least as of 1999, was ARM. Paul DeMone has a solid article with plenty of historical and technical detail.

Re:Most widely used architecture?

[VAXman]

The best selling 32-bit microprocessor family, at least as of 1999, was ARM. Paul DeMone has a solid article with plenty of historical and technical detail.

Of course, since only a tiny percentage of ARM processors power personal computers, it is irrelevant to a discussion on personal computers.

Re:Same old, Same old

[de Selby]

...with a bunch of extra registers
<P>
I wish.

Re:Perspective

[DreamSynthesis]

"I remember being the coolest kid in the school 'cause my modem could be pushed to 450 baud instead of the usual 300!"


Man, at my high school I just got beat up by football players whenever I mentioned the words "modem", "cpu", or "code"... I did score a few dates tho (I guess they went in for the geeky type). heh heh heh.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Skuld-Chan]

Oh everything from MS is crap - and they stole everything from apple anyhow.

Is anyone else sick and tired of this simplistic way of writing off 20 years of revolution?

Thats right - IBM PC's and their clones are everywhere - and if it wasn't for MS the IBM PC (and its open standards) probably wouldn't be around today if it wasn't for them.

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if "virus" existed in the Latin language, how the fuck would "virii" be the correct plural form of it? I must've missed that day in Latin class where they went over replacing the "us" ending with "ii." Moron.

What if...

[snadsnad]

Macs had become the king of the computer industry?

And Kansas City Standard data on audio cassettes!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which Commodore didn't support!

Re:Of course "Color displays are for game machines

[homer_ca]

And don't forget CP/M. One could argue that Apple, Atari, and Commodore were home and hobbyist computers with limited business usage (40 column displays don't cut it for word processing), but CP/M ruled the business market in the late 70s-early 80s with lots of different hardware manufacturers and decent compatibility between brands. Remember the Osborne, Kaypro, Northstar, Xerox?
The two biggest things about the IBM PC were the 16bit CPU that broke the 64K RAM barrier and just the fact that IBM was endorsing the very concept of a personal computer.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I'm just the opposite. Ah to be 7 years old, thin, and writing Basic programs on my C64 again... now I'm 25, fat, and surfing the net and playing games on my homebuilt machine running Linux. :-)

Take a look at the Obsolete Computer Museum

[myov]

There's some great info on the Obsolete Computer Museum

Same old, Same old

[daverk]

Twenty years ago IBM released a home computer based on a crippled cpu, and a crappy os.

Sure have made a lot of progress since then. (Same crippled cpu with a bunch of extra registers, same crappy os with a bunch of extra libraries.)

All IBM did was ligitimize the desktop single user computer to large businesses and ended up giving away most of the store.

Re:Should we mourn for the Home Computers them?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read your comment a half-dozen times over, and I still don't have a fucking clue what you're babbling about.

100% Pure Marketing

[rbeattie]

I understand this news is cool from a "I remember when" point of view, but really why is the 20th anniversary special? Why not wait until the 25th? or some other number? It's just marketing.

I can see that IBM's attempting to remind everyone that they created the standard that we all use today. Along with their Linux campaign it seems that they're trying to send the message that they're back to their roots of computer development.

It's quite a PR machine. I don't know how many articles I've seen online, etc.

Anyways, I worked at the Boca Raton campus back in the early 90s before they closed it and it was pretty cool to be there at the birthplace of the PC. At one point they were pumping out millions of PCs there... I still have a poster I picked up there of the Charlie Chaplin PC ad.

Out of business in two years?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, thats what my asshole PHB has been saying every year since 1995... and Apple's still around. He's an idiot -- whats your excuse?

VM too

[jkorty]

Also, UNIX (at that time) required a VM, and a good VM didn't show up until the 386 came out.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[kfg]

And where would we be now if Xenix had cost $50?

Where do you think BSD and Linux would be?

Remember the time frame we're talking here, a decade before FreeBSD and Linux even its earliest crudest form were even available.

KFG

Re:wrong!

[HeUnique]

MS Payed them $20 million, and told them they would give them a cut for each copy sold...

A cut from $0 ... hmm.... I lost my calculator around...

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[MrBogus]

Yeah, what killed the market for any sort of advanced operating system on the PC until very recently was the price of memory. Given that you could have a productive DOS system with 1MB or less (and XT clones with that amount of memory were still being sold up until 91-92 when Windows started to get popular), the economies of scale never ramped up, and most PCs were sold with the tiniest amount of memory possible. (Even today, with RAM prices in the toilet, consumer box shops are selling 1.5Ghz systems with only 128MB.)

Anyway, the lack of RAM pretty much killed the market for OS/2, NT, and Unix, and allowed Windows 3.1 and later 95 to walk away with the prize. The comprimises involved in that are still buring users to this day.

Re:stupid brats...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's right, you're wrong. Now stop wiping your nose on your sleeve, sit up straight, and finish your fruit loops. The school bus will be here any minute.

Nah, I walk to school. If I pass by you guys sitting in the gutter begging for spare change, I'll be sure to toss you some of my milk money.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[flynt]

As opposed to Linux, which has made huge inroads in originality, striking advances in graphical user interfaces, etc...

Seriously, what would qualify as an "original operating system"? Can you name one? Can you tell me what features it has that can't be traced back to some prior development?

Re:Happy Birthday

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on, a Mac holiday would mean something to three percent of the population at most. Even Martin Luther King day has a bigger appeal than that.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[ClipDude]

Yeah, he was in a group interview/session to commemorate the anniversary along with Bill Gates, among others. David Bradley said that while he chose the keys, Bill is the guy who made them famous.

Then he said "When you used it for NT logon. That's what I meant."

Re:The "good" old days?

[kfg]

What are you talking about? The IBM Selectric ball typwriter that was the output device on my computer always ahd upper and lower case.

That's what you get for abandoning tried and true technology for some upstart that wasn't going anywhere.

KFG

Re:Old ADS ( Xerox 820 II and Microcornucopia )

[Locutus]

that was a Xerox 820 II and not the 820. That 820 II was way faster since it ran at 4MHz instead of the 2.5MHz of the plain 820. ;)

all your installed base are belong to us

[TeddySwinton]

lameness filter post aborted filter lameness aborted post MICROS~1: ALL YOUR INSTALLED BASE ARE BELONG TO US

Re:house built upon the sand

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey pinhead, the guy's post wasn't so much about the joke, but about the decision to use shitty, cheap off-the-shelf components like 8086 when there were so many better choices.

Re:68000 IBM PC

[nr]

Maybe Intel would'nt exist today if they chosen Motorola.

Re:This a lie PC existed since 1973

[Anonymous Coward]

Altair -Kit computer with registers - NOT A PC in fact a glorified calculator (and most HP sci calcs at that time out calculated it)
Micral - Same Thing and worse than the altair
and lest someone else say it so was
The Sol
Pro Tech 800
etc etc etc

and several hundred others

Altair - Box of bits with 256k or ram (thats k NOT KB) too small to even hold basic in memory and with no data entry but registers on the front
MICRAL - same as above and only ever sold 500 pieces
Apple II - yep ill give ya that one - but they didnt call it a PC and dint intend it to be known as one

IBM PC - Supplied with Video Display, proper (if shitty) keyboard, Disk Drives, all cables, pre assembled and warrantied and backed by the largest computer company in the world

Hmm know which one id buy

IBM invented the PC marketplace by being a name that was known and trusted in business - read some history child (yeah i know youre under 20)

Re:What would those be worth today?

[daverk]

Worthless obsolete relic. Enough said.

Where we were. Where we will be...

[skinney]

It interesting to think that it took 20 years to get this far. How far will we be with computing in the next 20? Staggers the imagination.


Long live the PC and /.

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, dick, the 'saying' goes "a little learning is a dangerous thing."
As in:
"A little learning is a dangerous thing;
drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
and drinking largely sobers us again."

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Nater]

Virus is a Latin word meaning poison. Virii is therefore the correct plural forms, although using a variety of forms is sometimes considered amusing among certain groups.

Virii
Virusen
Virusim
...

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[phaze3000]

You never did Latin at school, did you?

There's an excellent page on why the plural really isn't virii which should explain it for you..

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Nater]

Wow. I leave a thread for a day and look what happens. Everybody starts calling everybody else names.

There was a good link posted in another part of this thread... this one. I read it, I learned, I found out I didn't know what I thought I knew, and no one had to call me an imbecile or a moron or a stupid fuck to do it. You should all take a lesson from phase3000.

BTW, he was right... I've never had a formal lesson in Latin in my life. Everything I learned I learned from Slashdot.

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

bitch

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

The plural of "virus" is "viruses." "Virus" is not Latin, so "virii" is incorrect. Fag.

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would I wanna take a Latin lesson from some dumbass ./er?

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[david duncan scott]

As exemplified by your apparent belief that only one comment has ever been made on the subject.

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Auckerman]

"It interesting to think that it took 20 years to get this far. How far will we be with computing in the next 20? Staggers the imagination."

Let's take a look...

1. Operating systems will ship with virii to save us the trouble of getting ourselves.

2. You will need 20 Ghz just to create a text document, and people will think nothing is abnormal about this.

3. You will need at least a gigabit ethernet line just to get a receipe from the internet. People will think nothing is abnormal about this.

4. You'll need to sign your soul to your OS vender just to swap your graphics card.

5. You'll pay a tax that goes directly to Music/Movie companies to pay for the pirating. The pirating will still be illegal. (yes I know this is true now, to an extent)

6. Despite the faster lines world wide, downloading a text document will still take a few seconds.

7. Your OS vender will disable your OS when you don't make your monthly payment. After 2 months your account will be canceled and your files deleted.

Re: Test sounds

[Jebediah21]

hehe. Remind me of the Mac LC's we had in high school. By pressing command + control + power you would reboot, but if you kept pressing the command and power while it booted it would play a little test sound. The teacher thought I was breaking them. It didn't help when one of them showed a sad mac face. Luckily a reboot fixed all.

Re:And what a crufty piece of crap it was, too.

[VAXman]

The PC only barely achieved parity with contemporary systems, and PC architecture systems lagged behind contemporaries for over a decade. It wasn't until he mid-ninties, with PCI and 32 bit processors that PC hardware caught up with where the like of the Macintosh and Amiga, never mind real workstations, had been years before. First of all, when the IBM PC debuted it was the technologically the best personal computer available, if only because it was 16 bit and could address 640k, while the others (Apple II, TRS-80, Kaypro, Commodore 64, etc.) were only 8 bit and could only address 64k. This enabled much serious business applications to be written for the IBM PC than the other computers. Workstations started to become available by around then, but were much more expensive. It wasn't until several years after it debuted, that it was surpassed in some aspects by Macintosh and Amiga. Although it's true that PC's took a while to catch up (though I'd place the parity date closer to the early-90's than the mid-90's), for the past several years they have even outpaced the high-end workstations in terms of features and performance.

640K? Luxury!

[Anonymous Coward]

I had 128K with a SixPack add-on board for a total of 256K AND DAMN GLAD TO HAVE IT!

Happy Aniversary Personal Computer!!

[ioman1]

Just imagine what computers will be like in the next 20 years!

Re:And what a crufty piece of crap it was, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

can't run a PC off a serial port).

Huh? Explain in English .

Reminds me of a Dilbert...

[myov]

I don't remember it exactly...

Someone says that their first computer was an XT.
Dilbert then says that his computer was so old that he needed to use 1's and 0's to use it.
Wally finally says that he needed to use magnets, and he didn't even have 0's.

Re:Reminds me of a Dilbert...

[kfg]

Bah! I just use Othello chips and manually set the bits to either black or white.

Of course my frame rate in Quake is a bit slow, but it scales almost infinately.

KFG

Re:Reminds me of a Dilbert...

[brocktune]

I remember the same joke setup, but the punchline was, "You had 1's? We had to use lowercase L's!"

it's come a LONG way

[hahnar2k]

Well that's my comment. The pc has come a LONG way since it's humble begginings.

Re:house built upon the sand

[Surak]

In fact it was the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS that let the Genie out of the bottle and let the clones out of the lab to ravage the land and the netscape, and yet this event, the KEY event in the development of the PC as we know it today, isn't even mentioned in most short histories of the development of the PC.

I respectfully disagree. They KEY event, the KEY enabler of the development of the "modern" PC as we know it today was Micros~1's success in convincing IBM to allow Micros~1 to license PC-DOS (renamed to MS-DOS) to other computer manufacturers...i.e., to allow Micros~1 to give IBM a more or less non-exclusive license.

Without that event, Rod Canion and the boys at Compaq would *never* have even bothered reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS. PC-DOS was not sold separately at that time. You had to buy an IBM PC to get PC-DOS, and making a product that revolved around pirating PC-DOS wouldn't have been a very viable business model for Compaq.

I wonder if CNN will do special on PC Jr's B-day?

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember "the peanut"? Casette drive? Chiclet keyboard. Ooo baby! The affordable PC for the rest of us. No wonder the Mac conquered the consumer PC market in the mid 80s.

What really pisses me off is how the media equates the "IBM PC" with "first desktop computer consumers could afford". Um, Apple anyone? The Commodore PET? It wasn't all hobby kits and front panel switches before IBM's machine.

More revisionist bullshit. I suppose in 2005, CNN will cover the "invention" of the window, icon, mouse, pointer (WIMP) environment with Microsoft's windows. X Windows? Macintosh? Xerox? Whuzzat?

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[Anonymous Coward]

The real fun was doing the control + open apple + closed apple + reset sequence to kick off the self-test, complete with really horrible noises from the Apple's squeaker.

Freaked out the dumbass computer teacher, it did.

"WHAT DID YOU DO TO IT?" ... and a few seconds
later the test finishes and it boots the usual way, giving the indication that nothing is wrong.

Re:first IBM pc

[Maniakes]

According to http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml, the first personal computer was the Berkeley Enterprises Simon, which shipped in 1950.

Can't run a PC off a serial port

[yerricde]

You can't run a PC off a serial port. The BIOS software on most PCs expects a keyboard with a PS/2-style interface and a memory-mapped text display and will fail POST if it doesn't find them. This makes it much harder to use a PC as a server, as you can't just hook up a vt100 and get into BIOS setup like you can with most other workstations.

Re:Can't run a PC off a serial port

[Craig Davison]

Try http://www.realweasel.com/

It's an inexpensive (compared to the price of a computer with a built-in serial console) add-on that gives any PC with an ISA slot serial console capabilites.

Re:Aww

[Nastard]

I really wish I had mod points right now. This is one of the funniest things I've ever read on /.

-Nastard-
Posting as myself to incourage moderation of parent.

Taiwan, ROC responsible for the PC's success

[Andy Tai]

The IBM PC-compatibles owe their dominance to the hardworking, energetic people of Taiwan, Republic of China. While Taiwan's economy took off, Taiwan also provided the actual manufacturing of low-cost machines to flood the market. While Taiwan is not known for its own brands, the majority of PC companies sold products MIT or "made in Taiwan." A small island provided the essentual foundation (common components) to enable many companies, large and small, to sell essentially the same products under different names and the competition keeps the price in check, so PC can beat the alternative architectures and be affordable for the common people.

Whether it's a good thing, that Amigas, Ataris, etc. lost out because they cannot compete with the PC clones made in Taiwan, cost wise, is a matter of debate.

Re:Should we mourn for the Home Computers them?

[Anonymous Coward]

He means that wintel sucks ass and that without Apple coming up with new ideas M$ and friends would still be using QDOS. Name one orginal thing that wintel has brought to the computing arena? Couple that with the fact that M$ has held back innovation and open standards and there really is not much to celebrate (unless you actually think that beige boxes with floppy drives are still fresh and exciting).

Re:Old ADS

[Gill Bates]

More history and old adds, from an ISV perspective. I worked there in the 83-86 timeframe doing tech support.

Check out the notes for the add from 82, and the comment about being Microsoft's first casualty.

Re:The Real infor on MS

[Anonymous Coward]

"The thing is, NT3.x really doesn't suck"

Only if you define suck purely on where the window server runs.

They left out the punchline...

[Eigenray]

One computer expert illustrates the rapid advancement of personal computing by estimating that if the automobile business had developed like the computer business, a Rolls-Royce would now cost $2.75 and run three million miles on a gallon of gas.

It would also crash every day!
Ha ha ha ha ha . . .
Okay, I'm done.

Where would be now....

[slipgun]

Where would we be now if the DMCA had been in force in 1981?

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[kfg]

Not a nit pick, but an addendum.

It illustrates an interesting point though. Back then there were literally hundreds of companies with Digital in their names somewhere. It never occured to anyone at the time that someone could claim to have sole title to the word Digital in their comapny name.

Indeed, the courts of the time would dismissed such a claim without hearing it.

My, times have changed.

KFG

Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers. ?

[MrBogus]

A reference to MS-DOS 1.0 containing CP/M code is here: http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/msinc.html#dr :

DR's Gary Kildall sat down at an IBM PC supplied by IBM and, using a secret code, got it to pop up a Digital Research copyright notice.

I've never seen any confirmation of this story, but it does line up with vauge Usenet ramblings and so on. Apparently the guy that Paul Allen bought MS-DOS from was building it as a part-time project. He didn't have time to rewrite all of the utility software, so he just transcoded some CP/M utils from 8080 to 8086 asm. The 'secret code' was probably a DEBUG statement or an easter egg.

Even More History.

[small_dick]

I've heard the orignal "IBM PC" was wire-wrapped on an S-100 board.

Also, IBM desperately wanted to use CP/M as the OS, but Gary Kildall (of Digital Research) shunned their reps, so IBM ended up using MS/DOS, which was purchased from Seattle Computer Systems by Bill Gates for $50,000.00 (it was called QDOS, "Quick and Dirty OS"

Corrections, please, if any of this is wrong...

Re:Even More History.

[kfg]

I'd only add this addendum that most people these days don't remember. By the time the PC was released a deal HAD been reached with Digital and you could have your PC with either PC-DOS OR CP/M.

Why don't people remember this? Because CP/M cost $240 and PC-DOS only cost $40.

Ok, big business might have popped for the CP/M because it was standard at the time, and a few did, but most didn't because it just so happened that right at that same time Digital was introducing the next generation of CP/M that * wasn't backward compatible* with CP/M.

Ok, so if you were going to have to scrap all of your software *anyway* it made sense to buy the cheaper OS as long as it did what you wanted it to.

If the PC had been introduced either one year earlier, or one year LATER Digital would still rule and only a few of us old timers would even remember that MicroSoft had even existed.

On such twists of fate does history turn.

KFG

Re:Even More History.

[phillymjs]

Dunno about the S-100 thing, but the rest is pretty on-target.

All accounts that I've read have Gates directing the IBM people to Digital Research, because at the time Microsoft did languages and Digital Research did OSes. Unfortunately, when IBM came a-callin' on Digital Research, Gary Kildall was not in the office and his wife refused to sign IBM's NDA.

IBM eventually returned to Microsoft, who reached an aggreement to license DOS to IBM before they secured the rights to it from Seattle Computer.

Read more about it:
Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer
Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire

~Philly

Interesting...

[foonf]

There is only one mention of OS/2 in their entire timeline. And it looks like it is almost accidental. They don't seem to want to mention it, even now that it is safely buried.

TiBooks are really overpriced!

[Anonymous Coward]

MacOS X *is* better than any version of Windows, I'll give them that, but they had to go and screw themselves with the proprietary overpriced hardware. The Titanium looks nice if the high end version was about $2500 and the lower end versions were more like $1200-$1500. I can get a PC laptop with the exact same specs as the high end version for under $2500 these days. They want to rape you nearly $4000!! What are they smoking? I bought a Dell Inspiron 4000 with a PIII-600, 64 megs of ram (upgraded to 256 for $130 from crucial.com), 20 GB hard drive, DVD-Rom drive, ATI Rage Mobiity 128, modem, etc. for $2500 last November. They're trying to sell a 500MHz G4 with 256 megs of ram, 30 GB hard drive, DVD-Rom drive, same video card, modem, ethernet, for $4000! That's just crazy. Then you have the overpriced ibooks. Why not make the low end version about $500 and compete with the WinCE machines? Then you have to get around the limitation of ONE button mouse? What the hell.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[q-soe]

I think this is aimed at my post as it quotes from it so i will reply (nicely and not flaming or trolling)
1. Said that windows was the first PC market ready GUI - read the post
2.It worked compared to the PC based competition (umm OS2 V1 Anyone)(and commenting on OS2 comes in my case from having supported it - by the time they got to warp it was a great product - but too little too late)
3.Maybe, maybe not - i see similarities in it to both so i'll concede that one may be a matter of opinion - i didnt say it was UNIX i said based on - and thats the thing about OS2 as well - maybe im wrong, hell i may be - so im human
4. I said commerically uasable - even the nicest linux and UNIX advocate wouldnt admit that X win was ready for realease to the world then - it was in Universities sure but not in general use - i agree on the client server side sure - but i dont agree with the click here stuff - windows is what you make of it and use it for - i use Linux and Win at work and home and they each have uses - i love Linux servers but am frankly scared of what my corporate desktop users would do to linux desktops and the support costs involved.
5. I never said Linus stole or in any way violated the BSD copyright - just as MS paid for its purchase of QDOS (and the legalities of what is a more than 15 year old sale are not for us to comment on - it was legal then and would be today - and as for the ripped off mac argument - well ask steve wozniak woz@woz.org about it - MS did no such thing in win 1 and had a license to use the features after all.
6. I dont consider software and OS's to be a religious crusade but i respect people who do - YOU will ALWAYS have a choice. And im not defending MS as you put it - I work in this industry - have done for more than 10 years and i dont FEAR anything that MS may do or otherwise - the PC industry grows and changes yearly - 10 years ago i was s sytems operator on IBM RS mainframes, then a Sys Admin on UNIX, now i'm an MIS manager - the one thing i know about this industry is Change is constant - Novell once were king in the Network OS area and now their money comes from other fields - why, they lost some ground to MS yes but the fact is they STOPPED INNOVATING ! new changes to the OS came too slow and people grew tired of the same old thing, saw a company that was interested more in Border Manager and other things and went to other solutions. Unix was proclaimed Dead and now its not again, Thats the thing about Linux i love -the constant innovation and change - but its also the reason why Linux isnt winning the hearts and minds and the corporate desktop - no stability in their eyes means large support costs.
7. True true and you are like me - my first PC was a BBC Micro then a Trash 80, C64, Amiga, Epson PC, IBM and thus on - i have run things including GEM, Deskworxs and many other OS'es - i meant this point as a question to the young guys.

And thats it - i love a good post and i wish your replied to mine and given a user name as yours is intersting - I dont agree with some of the comments but damn it thats what lifes about - I wont be using XP either BTW - my company wont be buying it for Min 2 years and we have some major concerns about it - as do a lot of corporates - it will as always end up winning in the home market - which pains me as i would love to see a usable and stable and 100% foolproof alernative from the Linux, hell any camp !

it's Hubble

[Anonymous Coward]

They misspelled the name of the Hubble Telescope.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[Skuld-Chan]

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 - which was that little black computer about the size of a small textbook with 1k of ram (had a 15k upgrade cartridge) and no floppy drive (used audio tapes - I don't think disk drives were even an option with this thing). I still have this thing somewhere. As I recall it had command completion (by hitting like function and a hotkey), a basic prompt with a cursor that was always at the very bottom of the screen, a membrane like keyboard (was the pits to type on) and a black and white video mode. I also had frogger for it actually :).

My second machine was a Commodore 64 - which at first only had a tape drive (datasette), then I had a 1541 - which was way cooler then tapes since you could just pop the disk in and not worry about rewinding or pressing play etc. I still have this thing too... Oh and I had several versions of frogger for it too.

My third computer was an IBM XT (actually it was an Everex XT with an Amber screen) - with a 20 meg hd, but it wasn't as good as playing games as my C64 - plus the C64 was much more fun to hack with for some reason despite the fack the XT had 640k or ram and a hard drive. Maybe because it was all monochrome. More likely it was because the C64 could do colour (games were much more fun then :)) and sound - and my XT without major funding couldn't do either. (anyone remember "simcga" for hercules monochrome graphics cards?)

wrong!

[ArchieBunker]

Uhhh Microsoft licensed parts of IE from NCSA Mosaic if you read the about box. I also believe that Xerox PARC first came up with the idea, then Apple, then MS.

Re:wrong!

[ksheff]

Actually, they licensed all of the original code from Spyglass (who got it from NCSA). Part of the deal was that Spyglass would get a cut from each copy of IE sold. Unfortunately for them, Billy gave it away for free and now they have been aquired by OpenTV.

Re:What would those be worth today?

[Sircus]

That's an XT, not a PC.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[kfg]

As I point out in other posts the PC at the time of release DID come with CP/M. . . for $250. PC-DOS was only $40. As always the consumer picked the cheaper product.

MS did not have a monopoly at the time as most people seem to believe. I think the real issue was the MS was a one trick pony. DOS was their one ticket to real profiability and they rode the pony hard.

Their competitors all viewed PCs as a side market that might not go anywhere and conservatively, and right so givent he knowledge at the time, continued to concentrate on those products and markets that made them they industrial giants they already were.

However, the point still is that the PC was available with CP/M from the day of release and had there been no MicroSoft there still would have been a PC based on an open architechture, a clone market, and multiple choices of operating systems, such as DR-DOS to run on them.

Just as if Daimler and Benz hadn't built cars we'd still be pretty much where we are today in the motor industry.

KFG

Re:Actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to David Bradley, another key contributor to the birth of the PC was Philip "Don" Estridge, who was the manager of the original PC project. Sadly, he died in a plane crash in 1985.

http://www.cio.com/archive/010100_estridge.html

http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,110 11 ,2216276,00.html

The Real infor on MS

[q-soe]

You know normally i try to resist the urge to comment on this sort of thing but im going to today. (note im not trolling or pushing the MS line i just cannot stand to see this stuff put across as the truth)

MS have never innovated. Hmm Bill Gates wrote the first BASIC for Altair Computers - considered the first of all 'PC''s - he did in on a legal pad in machine code, at 13 this was a guy who was hacking DEC OS code to find bugs in it for a place called C Cubed Computer Centre and at 14 he got caught hacking into a Control Data computer then linked into their network (called Cybernet) - he was known by his peers for those skills.

He wrote MSBASIC himself and he had written a DOS for pc'a however when IBM came calling they need a quick solution (BTW there are 2 very different storis on the QDOS thing - what is known is MS bought the OS in full so what they did with it is IBM's stupid fault for licensing it)

Now onto reality

Windows 1,2 - First and Second generation products but groundbreaking as they were the FIRST real saleable GUI's on the market (for the story behind the supposed theft from Aple/Xerox do a bit of reading - it was no such thing (Pirates of Silicon valley gets it very wrong)
Windows 3 - well may not be original (which i dispute) but it sure as hell worked and put the simple to use desktop on low cost PC's for all (note at this stage and even know the Mac is NOT low cost)
Windows NT - innovated from OS2 ?? what are you smoking - it owes more to X windows than that (hint - what happens when NT crashed - i dumps core) the back end is similar in many ways to Unix - OS2 is an IBM attempt to use the money they blue in a black hole called Taligent/Pink and it took them until Warp to even make it work - at which time the market didn't trust it anymore
Windows 95 - The similarity to apple is true - and covered under a license - but Next Step - well it has a kernel i guess - as for not original it was the only non unix (and considering the state of X at the time Unix isnt's a competitor here) GUI that worked as advertised (see comment on OS2) and it revolutionised the computer market place.
Windows 98 - I'll give you that one but it is much more than that - it was next generation tech that continued stability and useablity enhancements. And as for the web browser well yeah sure - just like everything is innovated off something else - Sorta like Linux is innovated from BSD
Windows XP - too soon to comment fully - yeah it has a lot of stuff - but it's a choice these days whether you want it or not.

Now im not saying MS is an innovative or good company (although read a bit about them and you might find some things out you didn't know) or that they are not a monopoly - only that you can criticise them for many things but if you do check the facts and learn about the history.

And my final point - how many of the people on here who use BSD/Linux Started off on a windows machine (win 3.11, win95 etc)??

Your choices in life change and so do your choices in software.

PS For more inforation on this and the very early days of MS and other companies read Fire in the Valley by Paul Frieberger and Micheal Swaine - ISBN 0071358927 - actually anyone who is into computers should read this and find out how all this got started.

Re:The Real infor on MS

[Spoing]

Windows 1,2 - First and Second generation products but groundbreaking as they were the FIRST real saleable GUI's on the market (for the story behind the supposed theft from Aple/Xerox do a bit of reading - it was no such thing (Pirates of Silicon valley gets it very wrong)

Clarification: Win1 & 2 were Word/Excel fishtanks; they only really existed to support those apps and not much else used them. This was very similar to a few different GUIs on the PC at the time, except that MS made Windows.

Re:The Real infor on MS

[HeUnique]

Regarding your comments about MS Windows 1 & 2 - Sorry Sir, you're wrong..

There was a product called DesQView (and a bit later - DesQView/X) that offered what MS tried to offer back then - a windows enviroment. DesQView did it with console (no graphics, or simple graphics), and DesQView/X - which was using back then a port of X11R4 X windows)...

Re:The Real infor on MS

[q-soe]

Yep and i have read about it and seen photos - there was also GEM from Atari and at least 3 others - none of the these however were general PC apps - they were not readily available to the market and i was not talking about X windows - yes there were several ports running X11R4 and some of them approached stability but no one will argue that X wasnt a readily available and stable system - MS marketed windows better maybe - but even you admit DesQview used console - thats little different to menu maker or many other programs - win was a GUI but you have a point - and it should be noted that i never claimed it was the only one

Re:The Real infor on MS

[HeUnique]

Forgot one more thing...

You call Windows 98 "next generation"? umm, how exactly is it next generation? because with Windows 98 they stuck you with MSIE 4 if u wanted or not, plus small modification - thats a next generation??

Sorry, not on my (and tons of people) book

Re:The Real infor on MS

[q-soe]

I already conceeded the similarities - and the OS2 errors are NT3.51 and that was and is a very different product to NT4 - VMS provided a lot of the staff and NT probably has a lot of VMS in it - and a lot of OS2.

Name 1 general easy to use marketed alternative to Win98 that offered the feature set and stability - NOTE most people dont care it was bundled with IE4 - (Please dont mention Linux - i know it was there and i was using Slackware at the time (still am) but Linux was not at that stage, and not really now, an OS that the unskilled home user could run on his PC - it was next generation - Windows 95 was Generation 1 and MS Considered (8 (any many of us who have to support it as well) 2nd Generation - it still uses DOS as its underpinnings and thats a problem but from a stability front (having supported Win95 in large numbers) the product was an innovation (NOTE by stability i dont mean uptime - i mean general day to day write a document etc for which Win98 is very stable)

I really dislike the fact that anyone who puts forward the view that MS are not the evil satan of the world and produce pus ridden products must be a microsoft apologist - i resent the implication that im either a sheep of the MS camp or a sheep of the Linux Camp.

So heres my story - i have almost 12 years WORKING in MIS and IT (not studying thats after school) durting that time i have worked as an IBM RS operator, supported and admined VAX's, MDIS pegasus, been an AT&T sys admin, have a novell CNA in 3.11 and 4.11, supported OS2 desktops and servers (In a banking environment) and run desktop support in govt and corporate in both Win95, NT 3.51, Win 98 and NT4 and NOW win2000.

I have 4 PC's in this home office, A notebook on Win2k, this machine - dual boot Debian and Winb98, a gateway server on Slackware 6 and an Apple PowerMac 9600 (i also have a 386 notebook somewhere on Win3.11) I believe in choice and different horses for course - Linux offers me a lot and i love working with it and learning about t - im teaching myself to write perl and java at the moment. But i still use Win2k and win98 ?? why.

I have 500 users under support who use Win2k desktops (and its a damn good product) - this is a corporate decision and one i wont argue with until linux can be made foolproof enough for the average user (dont bother ive looked and none are yet - some are getting close but) Our Server backend is split - Win2k Active Dir for our global wan with BSD firewall and web services - SQL and ORACLE DB on Solaris for ERP and Financials and Some NT4 hold ons - mainly terminal server running citrix.

SO i have to support and use a wide range of products - SAP, COGNOS, SQL, INGRES etc, and i work 60 hours + a week.

When i come home i like to surf the web with no fuss and play games - thats it and i use Win98 for that cause its easy - no pissing around - i use IE5 cause it does everything i want with minimal fuss - i have broadband so i dont want to mess around with plug ins although i use Opera for some things and Lynx as well (PC and LINUX)

I dont need to be written off as some sort of MS marketing drone by the likes of you - i respect your opinion and your right to express it - thats what /. and the Open Source community is all about - but i would aks if you can lay out your qualifications and role before you brush off mine.

OHH and PS i work for a Global Real Estate management and Banking services firm - not MS (although i wil say i wouldnt say no to a job with them, nor with Red Hat for that matter)

(Note im not trolling or flaming just defending my honor here and if you want to post a comment that is intelligent feel free, i will reply - if you want to flame me - well hell i can't stop you acting like a child can i ?)

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[kfg]

Indeed. Without MicroSoft there would be no such thing as a PC operating system. Why don't people get this?

KFG

Re:Slow news day again?

[unitron]

If you're going to post a story about how "...today is the twentieth aniversary of the IBM PC...", you might want to give a little thought to which day you actually post the story.

Re:By Coincidence...

[VAXman]

How many chips does the average computer have now, about four? They are all documented but it's less interesting than the original PC since fewer chips means you won't be able to see how it works and how the different functionality connects together. Plus, publishing schematics would add cost to building the system, and frankly very few people want it.

Re:And what a crufty piece of crap it was, too.

[triticale]

There were other 8088 based machines about at the same time, most of them better in all respects.

In fact, many of the other Intel-based machines did not run the 8bit-bottlenecked 8088 processor. My machine at the time was the Tandy 2000, which ran an 80186 at 8 mHz. Its 720k (80 track) 5-1/4 floppies were faster than the 10 meg hard drive in the XT clone at work. Most of the major software of the time was available in a version to run on it.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[reverius]

Whoa! Moderators, mod this up... actual information! :)

You've got some kicking hardware - then, and now.

I am very envious, especially of your Atari ST 1040 (specifically, the peripherals you had). All I had that was that great was a high-res (for the time) monochrome monitor. Don't remember the model.

If I had a modem, or even a HD for my ST I might have done more with it after I got a bit older. Instead, I got locked into the Windows world before discovering linux. (Then of course trying every distro in existence before dropping linux for BeOS) :)

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[MrDelSarto]

i'd guess because it is non trivial to catch ctrl-alt-delete in windows so it makes it less vunerable to processes that might run away. if you ever use the IBM 4690 OS that uses the sys-rq key to bring up it's "task manager"

Re:kids in future will be spoiled.

[KingAzzy]

Ah yes, I used to just about LIVE at this poor guy's house who had a PC when I was 14.. That ol' PC (sans HD) with it's trust Radio Shack 300 bps manual modem and I had some good rockin' times..

I remember discovering my first online porn -- ascii porn -- and printing ascii centerfolds out on 6 sheets of fan-fed dot matrix paper and smuggling them into school. I was cool -- if but for a fleeting moment.

MITS didn't go broke.

[jcr]

Ed Roberts sold MITS to Pertec for around eight million bucks. (And that was when $8Mil was worth at least $5M ;-)

-jcr

Re:BS alert

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a completely new design and code base, although it was constrained to preserve certain OS/2 and Windows interfaces via the subsystems architecture.

Wasn't that right before they created the Internet?

By Coincidence...

[po8]

My wife walked in just a bit ago with the manual set for my original IBM PC, which went to the dump just a few days ago, to ask me if I still needed the manuals. I paid extra for one of those manuals, to get the best part: full schematics. Yes, for those of you who don't recall, the original IBM PC came with the option of complete schematics. I built some add-ons for that box using that information.

How cool would it be if modern mobos routinely provided complete schematics and chip docs online? You know, so that you could build drivers?

My IBM PC served me for only a few years, but I had big fun with it during that time. I wish I could say I miss it.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[daverk]

Thanks, I have been waiting 20 years for someone to tell me that that key was actually a use for that key.

Re:I wonder if CNN will do special on PC Jr's B-da

[ksheff]

I remember the Jr very well. It was my second computer and was a work horse through high school and college. I still used it until about 92 or 93 when my office was flooded. I had replaced the 8088 with the faster NEC chip, it had 736K of memory, two floppies (a 360K and a 720K), and a 80M SCSI hard drive. It had the good keyboard though, not the chiclet one.

I can agree with you about the affordable part. The IBMs were expensive. A college friend had one of the original PCs. His dad originally paid $5000 for it. I originally wanted a Mac, but they were too expensive, so I had to opt out for a //c. I later traded the //c for the Jr.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[triticale]

My first computer was a Timex Sinclair 1000 - which was that little black computer about the size of a small textbook with 1k of ram (had a 15k upgrade cartridge) and no floppy drive (used audio tapes - I don't think disk drives were even an option with this thing). I still have this thing somewhere. As I recall it had command completion (by hitting like function and a hotkey), a basic prompt with a cursor that was always at the very bottom of the screen, a membrane like keyboard (was the pits to type on) and a black and white video mode.

They called it a 16k cartridge, but it mapped over the existing ram, so on my MicroAce (Sinclair clone) it was a 14k upgrade. It was a nice machine for keying in Basic code; easy to edit on, but the tape save was flaky (it used the same shift register as the video!-)and the keyboard was atrocious. Mine was heavily modified, with a 4k/8k (ZX81) basic selector, a 2 transistor amp to run composite video to an old surveillance monitor and a switch to invert video (black text on white background) and a full size keyboard.

That keyboard actually spoiled the computer for me. It had come off an old keypunch machine, and had these wonderful clicky mechanisms to debounce the keyswitches. The membrane keyboard was so bad that the software scanned repeatedly, and mine was too fast for it to see. I sure learned a lot about hardware from that machine. The edge connector was simply the Z80 processor pinout, so once I learned to buffer it peripheral projects were easy to come up with, and with the help of Don Lancaster's Cheap Video Cookbook I understood what every chip (there were maybe 24) in the thing did.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[Anonymous Coward]

The Atari 1040 ST had 1 MB of RAM. The ST model numbers indicated RAM built in: the 520 ST had 1/2 a MB, and the 1040 ST had 1 MB.

The Atari 1040 ST was the first computer that sold for under $1/K -- you could get a complete 1040 ST system, with an amazingly good monochrome monitor, for $700!

It's funny how the units change.

When I compare the machines I've owned:

1) Apple ][, 128 K RAM, 400K floppy disks, around $2K.0
1) Osborne Executive, 512 K RAM, 1.4 MB floppy disks, 8-bit Z-80, 1200 mps modem. (With upgrades, around $3K)
2) Atari 1040 ST, 1 MB RAM, 20 MB hard drive, Telebit Trailblazer 19,200 bps modem, 16-bit 68000. Ran Minix like a champ.
4) Powerbook Duo, 32-bit 68030, 4 MB RAM, 40 MB hard drive, 38,800 bps modem, MacOS, 17" monitor, 128 MB megneto-optical drive. Ran A/UX quite nicely, though mainly MacOS.
and now:
n) PowerMac G4/733, 733 MHz 32-bit G4, 1.5 GB RAM, 4.7 GB DVD-RW, 1600x1024 24-bit display, running MacOS X (AKA NEXTSTEP), on a cable modem.

Two things strike me about this. First, pretty much everything improved by about three orders of magnitude. Amazing. Second, I nearly forgot to own a "PC" the whole time. (I have a cheap PC for playing everquest and homeworld that I forgot to list)

Re:Butterfly keyboard?

[cheinonen]

No one since has made a butterfly keyboard I don't think. The reason is that the Thinkpad had a 10.4" screen I believe, which was big for that time. LCD's didn't get above 12" or so, where now we get 15.5" LCD's in our laptops. Since the screens are so huge, there is no reason to try to fit in a full size keyboard, since one will already fit. Maybe an ultra-portable could use it, but I can't think of one that does.

Actually...

[Shostykovich]

I liked the N&O's article better, it focuses on Dr. Dave Bradley. For those who don't know, he wrote the original bios code and, of course, "invented" control-alt-delete. Besides working at IBM, he's als an adjunct instructor at NCSU, and teaches programming and basic computer design classes.

Re:And what a crufty piece of crap it was, too.

[Peter Greenwood]

First of all, when the IBM PC debuted it was the technologically the best personal computer available

Not true. If anything, it was just about the worst. There were other 8088 based machines about at the same time, most of them better in all respects. 1.2MB floppies were available on some machines years before IBM got them going (and they used compatible diskettes that could be formatted as either 360K or 1.2M, as well). Everyone except IBM had built in serial ports; on the PC they were expensive extras. Some firms (Apricot as I remember, also probably others) were starting to bring out system manager software that gave you menu selection of applications about 5 years before Windows 2 started to appear on IBM compatibles.

The only thing the PC had going for it was that it came from a big company and was therefore "the standard" before it started. But that was enough - a sad example of human nature in action.

Interesting articles

[ronny_magic]

The observer newspaper ran two stories on this today, a roundup here, and an interesting comment by John Naughton here.

Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers.

[Christian Smith]

Intel had promised to supply IBM their processor, and signed AMD as their 2nd tier contractor to supply processors to IBM (boy, I'm sure some Intel execs are feeling really sorry for this now)..


Probably not. Without the PC deal, Intel may not have been the powerhouses they are today.

Re:November 1, 1983

[ksheff]

I stopped using it when I got a 386 in 1992(!) How many of you have used a machine full time for that long? :)

I have and it too was a PCjr. See my previous comment about it. I wish I still had it.

Butterfly keyboard?

[krokodil]

In the article timeline they mention Thinkpads
with butterfly keyboard. I never owen one but I think
it is very smart idea. What happened to them? If
there are any modern laptops with butterfly keyboard?

Re:Other "advantages"

[BLAMM!]

That's the one! Thanks. :)

68000 IBM PC

[Teratogen]

I read somewhere that IBM almost chose the 68000 chip for the original IBM PC, but in the end they chose the 8086 because it worked with more off-the-shelf hardware. I wonder how different a world it would be today if IBM had actually decided to use the 68000 chip?

Re:68000 IBM PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh. PCs would run on G4s & AMD Athlons, and Macs on Pentium 4s.

Re:Is this really something to 'celebrate'?

[daverk]

The IBM PC only delayed Linux and the OOS revolution about 10 years. It did this by sucking the wind(money) out of all the other systems(hardware and software) that were around at the time.

stupid brats...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not trying to be 31337. When he started working for a living, everyone was 31337 because user-friendly meant the machine didn't actually require you to use punch cards.

He's right, you're wrong. Now stop wiping your nose on your sleeve, sit up straight, and finish your fruit loops. The school bus will be here any minute.

Think different?

[Nurgled]

Erm, I was told I needed a Mac in order to do that...

November 1, 1983

[Pope]

I got a PCjr (or rather, my Dad bought one and I split time between it and my VIC 20) for X-Mas, 1984 during the IBM "fire sale": PCjr and 13" colour monitor for US$999.

I stopped using it when I got a 386 in 1992(!) How many of you have used a machine full time for that long? :)

As with the original PC which was crippled to avoid competing with their mainframe and mini computers, IBM intentionally crippled the jr to avoid competing with the PC, even though the graphics and sound hardware were miles ahead of the PC.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[Hes Nikke]

funny, there is a 3 button solute on my apple //c* open-apple (as it was then called) control reset! :)

yes the 3rd button on apples 3 button solute was RESET :)

i don't ever remember using it though :)

* I am aware the Apple //c came out AFTER the IBM PC (Piece of Crap) but there ARE older Apple //'s that i had access to in school that had the same 3 button solute.

Re:Other "advantages"

[kfg]

Of course that belies the fact that the car wasn't invented in 1960, it was invented in the late 1880s and by 1900 only the richest of the rich could afford one and the personel to keep it running, but by 1903 their engines had developed enough so that two poor bicycle mechanics could afford one to invent powered flight and the land speed record was faster than most street cars can go today.

By 1912 we had the four valve per cylinder double overhead cam engine that is now ubiquitous and the Model T Ford that sold for no more in real dollars than a Ford Taurus does now, and only a couple of years later the French were able to commandeer enough public taxi cabs from the streets of Paris to move an army.

The fact of the mater is that the automobile DID out perform the computer during the same period of its development.

Let's see how much the computer develops between 2060 and 2100. THAT will be a fairer comparison.

KFG

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[daverk]

IBM could have written their own OS or bought something better from someone else. Or they could have used CPM like most everyone else at that time.

Apple had their own OS (if you could call it that). So did Tandy(Radio Shack).

Imagine if the IBM PC had come out with an OS written by someone who had a clue(or at least a CS degree). Instead they went with a CPM clone which we still suffer with today.

The start of mediocrity in microcomputers.

[jcr]

Every PC before IBM's entry was the best work its designers knew how to do. Then came the IBM PC, whose design intention was to be mediocre crap, which would mop up a market segment by offering no virtues beyond the logo of the company that had retarded mainframe computing for the previous 20 years.

The IBM had its keyboard deliberately botched at the insistence of the DisplayWriter group, it used the worst of the available 16-bit processors, its memory map was carved up by people who didn't care about allowing for expandability, and the OS it shipped with was a dismal knock-off of CP/M, STOLEN OUTRIGHT from DR, (which theft was covered up by IBM paying off DR after they realized that Gates had sold them stolen work.)

The IBM PC was crap then, and ever since then it's been an anchor, retarding the development of computing hardware ever since.

Note to Phil Estridge, who ran the project for IBM: rot in hell, you mediocre son of a bitch.

-jcr

Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers.

[HeUnique]

Umm, worst processor?

Technically speaking? you damn right...

But do u know WHY they chose it? it's simple..

Back then IBM asked TI, Motorola, Intel and others if they can supply to them in big quantities their processor..

Motorola couldn't (they didn't finish back then their 68000 processor if I'm not mistaken), same for TI.

Intel had promised to supply IBM their processor, and signed AMD as their 2nd tier contractor to supply processors to IBM (boy, I'm sure some Intel execs are feeling really sorry for this now)..

Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers.

[ColdGold]

I was in the industry at that time and apart from jcr's attitude I have to agree with them. IBM sold on reputation and if you wanted best performance you went elsewhere. IBM computers didn't fall over though. Not once in my experience has an IBM mainframe died for no apparent reason. It was worth something then. The world was different.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Anonymous Coward]

> "Well, you proved that you don't have a fucking clue what you're talking about when you said that NT came from OS/2. Thanks for playing, though!"

Are you out of your mind?
Windows 1.0 first market-ready GUI? Uhm, Macintosh (128K) was around in early 1984.
Windows 3.1 -- "well may not be original (which i dispute) but it sure as hell worked". ROFL -- it sure did work, *occasionally*.
NT *not* derived from OS/2 code??? Hexedit a NT boot sector and look at the OS/2 references in it.
Uhm, NT dumps core like "X-Windows" on a crash? What exactly is a STOP (cough, TRAP) then? Can you fire up gdb on a NT memory dump?
NT back-end similar to UNIX? I'd bother responding to that if it wasn't so blatantly incorrect.

Windows NT is nothing more than Microsoft's divergence from OS/2, when IBM wasn't doing what MS wanted to do with it. The end result may be completely different, but don't think that MS didn't take what they wanted from their OS/2 "partnership" and run like the dickens with it.

> "and considering the state of X at the time Unix isnt's a competitor here".

Yeah, X was busy developing a client/server GUI interface, while Microsoft was busy animating the "Click here to begin" message. No competition at all, you are correct.

> "Windows 98 - I'll give you that one but it is much more than that - it was next generation tech that continued stability and useablity enhancements."

What marketing trap door did you fall down into? Have you ever *used* Windows 98? Maybe you don't expect much from the system you work at, but I do.

> "And as for the web browser well yeah sure - just like everything is innovated off something else - Sorta like Linux is innovated from BSD"

Sure, just like Linus takes Berkeley's code, slaps his name on it, and puts it on store shelves along with multi-million-dollar launch campaigns and yearly "upgrades". I see where you're going with this. Wait, no I don't. What?

> Win XP - "it's a choice these days whether you want it or not."

IN THE FUTURE, YOU MAY NOT HAVE A CHOICE.

If you let them, Microsoft will quite willingly take away every choice you have as far as your computing platform goes. That may be fine for you, but don't go preaching your MS-is-great-because-they-are-successful rubbish to people who actually know and FEAR what may easily happen to this industry in the future.

> "how many of the people on here who use BSD/Linux Started off on a windows machine"

Did Linux (or any other desktop UNIX) exist 15 years ago when I started using MS-DOS? And for the record, why does this even matter? MS-DOS was a necessary evil, a compromise between power and performance on our 8MHz machines of yesteryear. What other choice did you have besides talking to the system in machine language?

Now, Microsoft would rather spend your spare CPU cycles advertising to you, or generating Product Activation codes. No thanks. My productivity and my budget don't need it.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[nettdata]

Yeah, he was in a group interview/session to commemorate the anniversary along with Bill Gates, among others. David Bradley said that while he chose the keys, Bill is the guy who made them famous.

It was pretty funny... especially the look on Bill's face. :)

Perspective

[kristan]

This should give some of you young whippersnappers a bit of perspective.

Cue the usual reminisces from (not that) old people like myself. "You kids today have it easy. I remember when assembling your own PC wasn't an option - it was a requirement!" and "I remember being the coolest kid in the school 'cause my modem could be pushed to 450 baud instead of the usual 300!"

Re:Other "advantages"

[Anonymous Coward]

The first car was a steam-coach and was invented sometime in the 1700's (around 1760 I think).

$NaN is not "affordable"; doesn't work on PCI-only

[yerricde]

inexpensive (compared to the price of a computer with a built-in serial console)

They don't even list a price on their web site. They do give an e-mail address to request spam, but this behavior has always led me to think: "If you have to ask, you can't afford it."

any PC with an ISA slot

I haven't seen a new box with an ISA slot for the last couple years. From the website: "For those with no ISA slots at all, please sit tight as we expect to be shipping PCI before the end of 2000." It's almost the end of 2001. Does this fit f---edcompany.com's criteria for a "fuck"?

Kinda makes you feel old doesn't it?

[Mr.roboto]

I started out on one of those Tandy 1000s with 512 RAM, it was amazing what you could do without hard disk space. :) Man, we probably wasted hundreds of hours on that thing, playing all sorts of stuff before quake or doom or hexen or the likes were even ideas in someone's head. Ever since I've had some wierd deal with the 8088, I've got 1/2 dozen of em right now, I need to get some HDDs to throw on em.

Personal Computer?

[haxor.dk]

PC? Hey, that's Apple's crown, IBM. Hand it back. Had there been no Apple II, there wouldn't have been an IBM PC, either. (The Apple II opened the eyes of the IBm exec's to what market they had been denying the existence of). PC != Personal Computer. Try BC instead = Business Computer.

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[rodgerd]

The problem wasn't that IBM wanted licensing for the MCA bus (which was, indeed light years ahead of ISA; on a par with NuBus or Zorro-II/III), but that IBM demanded royalties on every ISA machine people had ever made if they wanted to use MCA pushed other manufacturers down the EISA route.

PCI and VESA didn't enter into it, they both came after that little tiff.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[foonf]

Other than Apple, all other competitors to commodity intel hardware have failed (and Apple, even though they are still marginally profitable, is still losing overall market share). Aside from Apple, the only successful non-Intel architecture is probably Sun SPARC (and it will possibly be the only one around in 5 years, if Intel has their way with Itanium). Sun has deliberately not targeted the low-end consumer market (because the margins are much lower...consider how much slower the Blade 100 is than a $2000 x86 box, which is what it would be competing with if it were marketed as a general-purpose PC, and what Sun would have to sell it for in order for it to be competitive in that market), believing instead that they can leverage their dominance of the high-end server space to move most users onto non-pc devices and render microsoft and intel irrelevant.

In the meantime, there are lots of people selling ARM and PPC based embedded server appliance. It would be no problem to build an ATX motherboard with similar components, for end-users to run Linux or BSD, and I would buy one (and a few other people also). But it still probably wouldn't be competive, overall, with the x86 from a price-performance standpoint. So no one is making them

And as it stands, even if you want free software and open standards, the best platform to run Linux, *BSD (even NetBSD), BeOS, QNX, OS/2, and soon even classic AmigaOS is the cruce hack that is the Intel/AMD x86.

Re:kids in future will be spoiled.

[Anonymous Coward]

You actually believe the Romans spelled the number 2 like that?

My God, you're even more far gone than I thought.

It's a disease. 533k |-|3lp.

Re:Aww

[Trollificus]

More like, "3 years of CmdrTaco - A Tribute Too Myself"

Happy Birthday

[linzeal]

Anyone else thinking about making this a holiday next year ?

Re:Happy Birthday

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow

Got any more good Valenti (that rat bastard!) quotes? Please post the source!

how far we've come!

[Defiant One]

As a former user of one of those 64k's, like on the IBM intro page linked, it's great to recall just how far we've come. Those early PC's were little more than electronic typewriters to me, a writer, while now PC's can do just about anything one cares to do.

Ain't it cool??

Re:kids in future will be spoiled.

[Skuld-Chan]

You know depending on what apple ][ you had you got a different screen when you first switched it on - like Apple //e - would look just like that or Apple //c. The first Apple ]['s actually spelled it like that when you switched it on.

Nothing l33t about it - you just had to be there.

in 5-6 years, no reboot required, says MS

[Anonymous Coward]

quote from story at zdnet:

"I think we'll get to the point in five or six years that some machines will never have to reboot. In the 10-year time frame, we want that to be the majority of machines," said Steven Guggenheim, senior director of business management at Microsoft.

Better not screw with that "freedom to innovate" :)

Re:Should we mourn for the Home Computers them?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, amen to that my friend.

This "anniversary" has little to celebrate about. The "PC" is the runt of the litter...a monstrosity designed with absolute cheapness in mind. I think the people "celebrating" this mess are conveniently forgetting almost 12 years of messing with IRQ's, memory managers and truly archaic garbage like Q-DOS (errr...MS-DOG).

I would rather drink a toast to the fallen but not forgotten home computers of yesteryear...the imagination machines, NOT the bastard "business machine" that won by default. I look forward to the day that we are free from the lineage of the IBM PC...many have tried, all have failed. :(

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Skuld-Chan]

Have you ever seen p-System run? p stands for psuedo - p-System was very very very very very slow, not to mention it ran well on ms-dos anyhow.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[trentfoley]

The existence of Microsoft as we know it is due to the accident of IBM not being able to strike a deal with Digital right off the bat, ( they DID reach a deal with Digital and by the time the PC hit the market you COULD by it off the shelf with Digital's CP/M, nobody did though).

Here I go nit-picking... "Digital" here is "Digital Research" (DR), not "Digital Equipment Corp" (DEC) as most people assume when they hear the company name "Digital".

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[kfg]

Bill Gates invented he EULA. That's about the extent of his "innovation," and we all may suffer for it for generations.

The real damage comes from those that have grown up entirely within the EULA era and think that it applies generally. I've even seen someone trying to apply software style licensing to furniture plans, they claim to license the plan and require that you buy a "license" for each iteration of the item. Buy the plans, make a chair. Make another chair and they want you to pay them again.

I'd like to see them try to support that in court, but it's just the sort of thing we're going to see people trying all over the place because they think that if it applies to software it applies to anything.

Bill is going to have lot more to answer for than his software when the roll is called.

KFG

Microsoft's New Slogan

[V50]

To Celebrate MS has changed their slogan to:
Microsoft: Inferior for twenty years and counting!

Seriously though, in Twenty Years, Microsoft STILL hasn't made an original Operating System:

MS-DOS: Bought QDOS for $50,000, which was in turn was a ripoff of CP/M
Windows 1, 2 and 3: Too crappy for comment.
Windows NT : Innovated directly from OS/2.
Windows 95 : MS innovated huge hunks of it from Apple and even bigger hunks from NeXTstep.
Windows 98: Win95 with the Finder ripoff replaced by a Web Browser innovated from Netscape.
Windows XP: Windows NT with just about everyone's (AOL, Real, etc.) product innovated into the Operating System.


What I find scary is that Windows ME still is based off of a Twenty Year old OS originaly called 'Quick and Dirty Operating System'.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to see the obligatory Anti MS post is in here - now we can all rest easy and get on with the important stuff like flaming anyone who refutes this well written (and successfull) attempt at karma whoring

Linux - a 2 bit os based on a 1 bit bad acid trip developed at berkely during the stoned 60's

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[HeUnique]

Umm, you both actually right...

Dave Cutler and other guys wrote the so called "micro-kernel" (800K micro-kernel, oy), but there are tons of other parts which have been took from OS/2 - like the file system....

Remember - Until version NT 3.51 (including) - the GUI wasn't part of the NT itself, as it was a "plugin" (although more tied then X for example), and I imagine that if Dave would have known that the stuff he's writing is going to be glued mandatory to a GUI - I don't think he would have work there (well, he does hate GUI's if I read some articles about him correctly).

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[uebernewby]

Oh everything from MS is crap - and they stole everything from apple anyhow.

Is anyone else sick and tired of this simplistic way of writing off 20 years of revolution?

C'mon - we've got to give Bill Gates/Microsoft credit for one thing: they established *standards* where there were none (or only poorly followed ones) before. And I'm not talking about standards for huge mainframes or academic numbercrunchers, but for small (remember the term "microcomputer"?) computing devices used by "ordinary men and women". Before M$ and PC's, you might have a nifty C64 and your buddy a cool Apple II, but you couldn't swap software or documents. Twenty years down the line, everyone is using the same basic set-up, a pc, Windows, Office, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and can do just that: play games together, swap documents (and viruses!), share pictures over the internet, things "ordinary men and women" like to do. From an "ordinary men and women" point of view, that is a good thing.

Let's please all remember that as we sit, smug-like, typing on our linux box (not me, thank you, the computer I'm typing this on is for doing ordinary men and women things, not for serving webpages or what have you, activities for which, I'll happily concede, linux is far more suitable), sending messages to /. about how M$ is evil.

Microsoft and Bill Gates truly believe they're doing the world a favor by (forcibly) pushing their de-facto standards and by ripping of others' good ideas and repackaging them in such a way that "ordinary men and women" can use them. This is what the "pc-revolution" is all about.

Of course, as always, absolute power corrupts etc., and, right now, M$ is far too powerful for their own good.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[FortranDragon]

> Windows NT : Innovated directly from OS/2.

Umm, do you know who Dave Cutler is? The guy who create WindowsNT for MS? One hint, go look up the terms VAX and VMS.

I will sat that complaining about MS not making an original OS is pretty dumb considering Linux and the *BSD's are all imitations of Un*x. :sigh:

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[Detritus]

No, because there are a disturbingly large number of people who really believe that Bill Gates invented the PC.

Re:Microsoft's New Slogan

[kfg]

Don't you know sarcasm when you hear it Charlie Brown?

KFG

You were using the wrong computer.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll never understand what drew people to the archaic monster called the IBM PC. It's not like we didn't have more advanced computers at the time--we did, and they weren't filled with stupidities like segmented addressing, DOS and fiddling with IRQ's. The IBM PC was an el-cheapo cobbled-together beast. IBM KNEW they were cutting corners and going with the cheapest crap they could get their hands on.

Celebrate the IBM PC? Certainly not. The "PC" has been the millstone around the neck of this industry for 20 years.

Wow, am I THAT old now?

[Arandir]

I had used friend's computers in high school to play games on, but it was the IBM PC in college that I first used as a serious computer.

Rememberances...

IBM PC: Rock solid, reliable, trustworthy.
Compaq: A rock solid, reliable and mostly trustworthy suitcase.
AT&T PC: An 8086 instead of an 8088.
Other clones: cheap knockoffs.

Macintosh: You needed a Lisa if you wanted to do any development. And what's this? You had to ask the computer for permission to eject the floppy? It was great if you just wanted to use the computer as a tool, instead of as an end-product.

Amiga: More great ideas per cubic inch than any other personal computer before or since. But it never caught the attention of the general public. Video artists and programmers still remember it fondly.

Operating systems...

The PC came with four: PC-DOS, UCSD P-System, Xenix and CP/M. I really wish CP/M would have been the standard. But with the small memory of the entry line PC, only PC-DOS could cut it. UCSD P-System wasn't really an operating system, but a glorified IDE. And Xenix tried to do too much in too small of memory (and was way overpriced).

DR-DOS: MSDOS was a joke, PCDOS was okay, but pricey. DR-DOS was affordable, reliable and did a heck of a lot of stuff that other DOS's couldn't do.

GeoWorks: An operating shell, not an OS. Just like Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 95, 98 and ME. At one time GeoWorks was preinstalled on a few computers. And it was better than Windows. But there was no SDK.

OS/2: The best user interface before or since. But it was TOO compatible with Windows, so no one bothered to write OS/2 applications.

Freenix: Walnut Creek offered up CD's on a wide variety of topics. 44BSD-Lite, 386BSD, FreeBSD and Slackware Linux. Eventually I tried Slackware 96.

The big trends...

Compatibility: Hardware compatibility aided the proliferation of clones. But it also meant that we would be stuck with an archaic architecture to this day. Ditto for software compatibility.

Code Bloat: Word processors used to fit on a 360K floppy disk. Now you can barely fit them on a 360M hard drive.

Open Source: It was always there. But it was never mainstream. The average user will gain the benefits of Open Source, but only the developer and the ideologue will really ever care that the source code is available.

Re:Wow, am I THAT old now?

[Arandir]

286? Hell, I ran it on an 8086! As near as I could figure out, the 80286 requirement was merely for extra Hz, because I never had any problems.

Without an SDK, Geoworks was destined to me nothing more than a fancy launcher with an office suite.

Re:Wow, am I THAT old now?

[triticale]

GeoWorks: An operating shell, not an OS. Just like Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 95, 98 and ME. At one time GeoWorks was preinstalled on a few computers. And it was better than Windows. But there was no SDK.

It would run on a 286; it was smaller and faster than Windows. I have long pointed out that the lack of an SDK did them in. They wound up with 100% of nothing. Same sort of a mistake was a factor in the death of Beta, the TI 99/4 and many other products.

Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers. ?

[q-soe]

I have seen this story and its never been proven but may be true - the OS undoubtedly contained bits stolen or borrowed from C/PM but then again so did every DOS on the market and most basic implementations were rip offs or copies of Bill Gates original altair one, still its a valid point and thanks for reminding me

anyone remember the Phoenix board for A1000's????

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga Apple all failed because they were CLOSED, ever try getting a 3rd party board for either back in the day? The ONLY replacement board i could find for my trusty Amiga 1000 was something called the PHOENIX board, it basically replaced the old A1000 board and added the ability to use all the new roms and EVEN have SCSI comp built right in!!!, however by the time those dudes in Adelaide South Australia got around to releasing it the new gen of amigas were out and cheaper *sigh*. I still have my 2 Amiga 1k's both working!!

IBM

[tjuricek]

Gee, I'm looking for a job right now. Maybe in their exuberance about history they'll feel forgiving....

Aaaah...

[Nevrar]

Such a lovely sight... Slashdotters take a moment out of their busy diss-the-big-corporations lives to give IBM a big group hug... :)

Re:Old ADS ( Xerox 820 and Microcornucopia )

[Locutus]

Not related to old ads but I built my first computer in the mid 1980's from spare parts after reading an article in Microcornucpia Magazine. It was the Xerox 820 which was a z80 maching running CP/M (had turbo C and learned C on it at 4Mhz along with wordstar) but the cool part was the 8086 co-processor board that alowed me to run CPM/86 at the same time as the z80 CPM was running. I could switch back and forth with the keyboard.

I wish I had pictures because this was a funny looking machine that I built. It used a tall slim shipping case that was used to ship spare parts for Scientific Atlanta's sonar systems. I stood the case on it's side so the removable top was not the back and the floppy was installed internally and exposed to the front. It looked like todays tower case. The CRT was a bare 12v green screen from a ATM that I fed the RGB signals thru seperate coax cables.

If anybody remembers the Xerox 820, it was a IMAC predicessor since it was a all-in-one design with the connectors/Mobo and monitor in one case (maybe even the keyboard). I only had the manual and parts so mine looked borg'ish.

Ah, the good old days..... I still remember my roomate saying that 4Mhz would be too slow. He had a PC from LeadingEdge that had a TURBO switch and ran at 4 or 8Mhz. I said 4Mhz was plenty fast and it was for the first couple of weeks while I learned the CPM commands, wordstar, and C. Then it got really painfully slow as I moved faster then it (10 finger typist since the 70's;).

I really miss the days of Microcornucopia and the original Byte magazine too. :(

20 years and not even the jokes have developed.

[henrikg]

Oh, and Ctrl-Alt-Delete? Bradley likes to joke that even if he invented it, it was Gates who made it famous This guy is obviously the spiritual forefather of the Slashdot crowd.

... and mine is still chugging along.

[mj01nir]

Well, how about that. My little 5150 is 20! I'll hafta go get a cake or something.

Of course it's still in the basement, ressurected a few years ago by Minix 2.0.2. Imagine, a (somewhat) complete Unixoid, open-source system crammed into 640K. It even runs httpd! I love reusing old hardware...

DreamSynthesis is a racist anti-Semite!!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

You really should read this man's posting history -- he insulted a Jewish poster for speaking out against Nazi racism and atrocity. He is
a Nazi sympathiser and has no place on Slashdot which is USUALLY a pretty Liberal site. Clean up Slashdot: ditch the racists.

We called it the ZX81

[kiwimate]

Your last line about there being maybe 24 chips in your MicroAce clone interested me. My twin brother and I had the original ZX81 (we bought it from, IIRC, the Farmer's department store in Manukau City Centre in Auckland, New Zealand back in 1981 -- we were 11). One of the most intriguing aspects was that this, the successor to the ZX80, which had over 20 chips, had been so designed as to reduce the chipset down to four -- just four!! That was seen as the true innovation that it offered over the ZX80, as it helped take the price down and thereby introduce the masses to home computing.

No, mourn for Apple's loss

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple would have most likely had the dominate platform rather than IBM if they would've simply allowed widespread cloning. The fact is, Apple's Macintosh hardware is simply too expensive compared to the alternatives. Not counting the CPU (as comparing PIII's to G3's is oranges to apples), the rest of the hardware in a Mac is totally overpriced compared to the average IBM PC compatible clone. I cannot bring myself to pay a premium for a proprietary closed architecture when there is such a vast array of choices in the PC world. I would love to try MacOS X as it looks very nice, but until the GUI is ported to the Intel compatible platform I will have no choice but to ignore it. Goodbye Apple. Apple is dying and will be out of business within 2 years.

Open architechture

[bubbaD]

This has been mentioned once before, but bears repeating, it was IBM's use of stock parts for the PC, instead of developing everything in-house (as had been the case from the beginning of IBM) If IBM's BIOS had not been backward engineered, it would've gone nowhere. After all, IBM had bigger, "better", and more profitable minicomputers, which the PC undermined. Now a reinvented IBM is celebrating Open Standards, as well it should. As for Apple, What if they had let go of proprietary hardware earlier on (and/or continued allowing "clones")? Shame on Apple for letting MS get away with selling an inferior Operating System. OSX will die without an Intel port, for the same reason.

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[Locutus]

I had MicroPort UNIX on my 286 back in the 80's and then shifted to Consensus 386. This was in the 1980's on 286 and 386 hardware and had real multitasking. The GUI really wasn't available on the PC but Windows and OS/2 were just starting, as was the XWindow System. I was amazed that WordPerfect cost me $250 for DOS but over $500 for these Unix's. I think it was the fact that these UNIX vendors didn't go for volume pricing like Microsoft did and so it remained on workstations and up instead of on the PC hardware. But why did the application vendors do the same and charged too much for UNIX versions? In 1991, NT 3.1 sucked compared to OS/2 2.0 since OS/2 would run on a 386 with 10MB of RAM and could run Windows, a Netware client, and tcp/ip networking along with a X-Server. The base system blew DOS/Windows out of the water but the extras were very expensive ( $250 for just the TCP/IP stack and another $250 for the X-Server ). Anyways, UNIX's on the 386 were 32bit and provided protected mode OS's with a flat memory model in the 1980's and OS/2(32bit) had this around 1991. Microsoft already had it's monopoly by 1990 and started making full use of it to stop OS/2 while the UNIX crowd stayed high priced and on high-end hardware. I saw a pre-release presentation of NT 3.1 by Microsoft and when I proded the presenter on the hardware requirements he said that NT was being positioned toward workstations and that Microsoft had a project called Chicago which would be their new DESKTOP OS. Remember that NT WAS advertised as the next great desktop OS until it was known to have HUGE hardware requirments. The pre-announcement of Chicago stalled the market for 5 years and the press helped that along.... It's funny that a cheap UNIX-like system is around now which goes 180 degrees from the UNIX of yesteryear and both apps and the OS are essentually free and this combination has the monster of Redmond running for its life(scrambling at least;) LoB

Re:Is this really something to 'celebrate'?

[malfunct]

Without the PC there would be no linux or OOS revolution either. You would be at the mall with your friends (if you were lucky) or at home watching paint dry doing nothing because most people would not have computers in thier home because really they only played games or did business stuff that was unecsarry.

Whether we like it or not, MS took all sorts of nifty innovations that people made and turned them into something that everyone in the world wanted. We should thank them for that much.

Re:And what a crufty piece of crap it was, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

Everyone knew that the PC (x86?) architecture would catch up -- too much money backing it up.. it was only a matter of time.

Re:first IBM pc

[daverk]

Any one out there that actualy personaly owned a DEC PDP-8 and used at home before the Altair came out? I have never met anyone that has claimed to personaly own one at that time.

As for stand alone computers I remember seeing a retired HP system which someone claimed to have used in the late 60's. It had paper tape and core memory and was mounted in a truck which would make it one of the first portable computers too.

Anyways, personal computers, as in something an individual bought with his own personal money, don't seem to exist until the time of the Altair.

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[reverius]

My first computer was an Atari ST 1040. I think it had a half a meg of RAM. Wow... and you could do so much on it! I remember thinking, as a 5 year old, this thing is cool! I can draw, then erase, then keep drawing... and it doesn't smudge like a real eraser! :P

Later I had a DOS machine, which I really started to do stuff on, like QBASIC and word processing. I had a copy of Print Shop Deluxe (remember, the old one, on 5.25" floppies?) and used it to make cards, and printed them out on my screaming (loud, not fast) printer. The kind with paper fed through it by the little holes on the side. :)

Those were the good old days.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[roguerez]

But you can see it. Here's a page with the video fragment.

For the paranoid out there, here's the plain URL:

http://video.cnet.com/cgi-bin/visearch?user=cnet_n ews&template=playhiasf.html&query=*&squery=+ClipID :0++VideoAsset:t080901_1130&inputField=&ccstart=15 015&ccend=99533&videoID=t080901_1130&value=default &which=1&old=yes&override=http://video.cnet.com:80 /cnet_news/template/override_config.js&overrideChe ck=no

This a lie PC existed since 1973

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey guys, this is a big IBM Lie
There were Altair, Apple II and the french Micral first.

IBM invented nothing. The sure did'nt belived it PC. They just belived in huge heavy computing and mad the PC out as some TOY asking partners to make it for them.

Nah IBM PS IS NOT THE FIRST PC

IBM holds up progress by a decade.

[Anonymous Coward]

When the PC came out, a bright young CS grad. from Cambridge and I looked over the design. We were not impressed. He explained to me that "IBM always holds up the progress of computing by 10 years". They do this by making a standard out of something crappy. When I recal the buzz and enthusiasm around microprocessors in the late 70s I know that this PC revolution would have happened without IBM or MS screwing it up for so long. One thing I never did understand is why Intel didn't push out their own operating system ISIS on the cheap at the time. It would have cost them nothing and circumvented the need for MS. If you wanted real time multitasking they had RMX as well.

Old ADS

[nick-less]

I have an old Byte magazine here, were the advertise a Z80 card for the IBM-PC to make it run something usefull (CP/M in this case).

Good old times, where a Z80 was all you needed to fix that damned IBM ;-)

Re:first IBM pc

[VAXman]

The first personal computer was probably DEC's PDP-8/m (started shipping in 1972) which pre-dated the Altair and Apple by several years.

That said, 'PC' as understood today means 'IBM PC compatible' (as opposed to Apples or workstations), and today's PC's are direct descendants of the original IBM PC 5150. The PC is by far the most widely used and most important architecture in use today. The 5150 was not the first personal computer, but was the first PC.

What would those be worth today?

[The Original Yama]

Would the IBM PC be seen as a valuable antique or as a worthless obsolete relic? I used to own one of these. However, my model had CGA graphics with a CGA monitor. Otherwise it was the exact same model, and it looked exactly the same. Unfortunately, all I have left is the monitor, the complete manual set and the original 5 1/4 inch discs (including MS-DOS 2.11, yay!). I haven't tried them in years, but everything should be fully operational.

Could I make anything by selling what I have?

Re:Other "advantages"

[kfg]

The device you are thinking of is this one:

http://www.digitalhistory.org/cugnot.htm

Personally I think you are right and that Cugnot is unjustly erased from the historical record, for the most part.

The story goes that when Cugnot demonstrated the device for Napoleon he accidentaly knocked down a brick garden wall which scared Napoleon so that he banned free running self propelled vehicles from all of Europe under his control.

The cure for this was to put it on rails and thus the train only came to exist out of a whim of Napoleon.

This story also serves as an example of a certain myopia tech developers can have. Once the idea that self powered land vehicles ran on rails it simply never really occured to people to remove it from the rails LONG after the reason for their being there in the first place was no longer relevant.

For a full century the development of the car simply ceased to exist, by Napoleon's fiat.

Daimler and Benz invented the car * as we know it.*

To be fair, if we're going to include the Cugnot tractor in the argument we're going to have to inculde the Babbage machine on the computer side.

Even if we start the development of the PC from ENIAC automotive development historically outstripped computer technology.

KFG

Re:$NaN is not "affordable"; doesn't work on PCI-o

[Craig Davison]

True, it says that they'll be "shipping before the end of 2000". Below that, however, there's an update that says "summer of 2001". Though I hope the VGA[1]/PCI version is available by then (soon!), I wouldn't hold my breath.

The price on the website was CDN$300 a while ago. No, I have absolutely no proof of that.

[1] MDA over PCI was not doable, so their new product will emulate VGA. As well, I believe Windows NT will not boot with anything less than MCGA.

Aww

[Bodero]

Aww, how sweet that IBM would take the time to set up a tribute page to their very own system that started a revolution.

Maybe Malda can set up a "3 years of CmdrTaco - A Tribute To Myself" page on Slashdot to honor the anniversary of Slashdot and everything great that has became of it. ;)

1980

[ColdGold]

I was a Systems Programmer working with (but not for) CDC just before IBM released the PC. We had twin Cyber 1820s, the latest and greatest in minicomputers, about the size of a modern executive's desk and less than a million dollars each. We even had a hard disk. The platters had a blue plastic hood and were about the size of an LP and you had to manually lock them into place. The magnetic field around the hard disk was so strong that your watch would stop when they started spinning (all watches were analogue then). When you turned on the computer you had to key in a bootstrap to get the computer started, ours was very short, about 30 characters as I recall. The bootstrap was just a bit of machine code in hex. We used to program in machine code (we mostly programmed in Cyber 1700 assembler or Fortran 4 which was brand new, but sometimes machine code).

It was so easy to use and we actually got to use the computer. Generally programmers were not allowed near the computer (Finance programmers had to look through the glass) and operators were sacked/transferred if it became known that they had learned how to program.

Best of all we had monitors with red text, the main monitors had green text but all the other departments had to make do with amber text.

One day one of the CDC programmers came up with some advertising for the IBM PC that was going to be released the following year. It had 64K ram and a cassette deck and cost $3000 (about 3 months wage as a programmer). We all fell about laughing and agreed that it would never be a success. I don't recall if it mentioned a floppy drive or not as I had never heard of them at that time (I was using punch cards at university and tapes at work). The thing was that there were several other personal computers as good or better on the market at that time. I think one was the Trash 80 (memory can be a lying jade though). Apple had been around for a long time then but no-one even talked about it. It wasn't a real computer in our minds (even though it had colour monitors - not that anyone I knew had ever seen a colour monitor then).

If I had known that IBM didn't own the patents then I would not have laughed so much. A few years later Apple almost became the standard but they managed to enforce their patent and so killed itself and had to be reinvented as the Lisa/Macintosh.

The world would be very different now if Apple had not been able to enforce its patents and IBM had enforced its BIOS patent.

Other "advantages"

[BLAMM!]

One computer expert illustrates the rapid advancement of personal computing by estimating that if the automobile business had developed like the computer business, a Rolls-Royce would now cost $2.75 and run three million miles on a gallon of gas.

There's a rebuttal list to this comment made by the head of some automotive company. I can't locate it right now though. Anyone else remember this? It was, of course, directed at MS with items such as: "And they (the cars) would stop running for apparently no reason, after which you would stop the engine, restart it and continue as if if nothing was unusual." and "When the roads were repaved would have to buy another car." I wish I could find the whole list.

Re:Other "advantages"

[ksheff]

With the passage of the Clean Air act, the auto makers have tried to thwart the sale of aftermarket parts and have dragged their feet on giving other people details. All the while that if they did, people could use the information to bypass or disable the emission control systems. It hasn't worked out for them, though. I'm sure they would love to have a DMCA type law to apply to cars.

Re:Other "advantages"

[ClipDude]

Can you imagine if cars were sold with the hoods welded shut and if the publication of Haynes repair guides were made a crime?

Re:Other "advantages"

[Anonymous Coward]

Mechanical Engineer, Chemical Engineer, Electronic Engineer and a Software Engineer are driving along a desert road in the middle of nowhere. It's hot - the soft-top is down and all the windows are open. Just crusin' along enjoying the drive and catching a tan. All of a sudden, the car lurches to a halt and stalls. The mechanical engineer (who's driving), tries to start the car again. The egine turns over, but just doesn't fire. He gets out and checks the throttle cable and carb, and it all looks good. The chemical engineer taps the fuel gauge, gets out, checks the fuel tank, the fuel lines and the filters. All looks A-OK. The Electronic Engineer checks the fusebox, gets out and checks the distributor and rotor, the ignition wires and the spark plugs. They're all fine. At this point, the three of them are standing around the car scratching their heads, wondering if they had missed anything and thinking how embarrassed they were going to be if they were the one whose education had gone to waste. The software engineer (who's still in the car drinking coke and eating pizza), looks up haing finally realized that the car is no longer moving. The others explain to him that the car has broken down and that they can't fix it. The software engineer thinks for a few seconds and then says, "How about we just close all the windows and start again...." Soon enough, the four friends are on their way.

Re:Other "advantages"

[ncc74656]

There's a rebuttal list to this comment made by the head of some automotive company.

It was GM. I don't think the list is on their site (but then I didn't go looking for it there), but Google came up with a few hits. This is a list of things with which to finish the phrase "If Microsoft built cars..." This is a hypothetical "GM helpdesk" taking lusers' questions as if cars were like computers (someone ought to do a BOFH version of this).

Re:Other "advantages"

[mellonhead]

http://www.cobalt-blue.com/humor/gates.htm

Re:Other "advantages"

[Anonymous Coward]

Top 20 Ways Microsoft Would Change The Auto Industry

20. The radio would be computerized, but you'd need to install 64 Meg of RAM, a new sound card, a game card, a new video driver, a CD drive, and type C:\radio\talk\rush*.* to get it to play.

19. The entire engine wouldn't be in the bay at once, and the car would have to keep stopping and starting to load in the relevant parts.

18. The speedometer would read 70 even though you are only doing 50.

17. You would have to have a full service every 500 miles.

16. Your car would refuse to start with a message "Abort, Retry, Fail?"

15. For some reason the engine controller would need a 1G hard disc and would take 5 minutes to boot up.

14. The steering wheel would be replaced with a mouse and you'd need to memorize the keyboard short-cut for "Brake".

13. A particular model year of car wouldn't be available until after that year- instead of before it.

12. They wouldn't build their own engines but form a cartel with their engine supplier. The latest engine would have 16 cylinders, multi-point fuel injection and 4 turbos, but it would be a side-valve design so you could use Model-T Ford parts on it. There would be an "Engium Pro" with bigger turbos, but it would be slower on most existing roads.

11. The air bag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.

10. New seats would require everyone to have the same butt size.

9. We would all have to switch to Microsoft Gas.

8. The U.S. government would be forced to rebuild all of the roads for Microsoft cars; they will drive on the old roads, but they run very slowly.

7. The oil, alternator, gas and engine warning lights would be replaced by a single 'General Car Fault' warning light.

6. Sun MotorSystems would make a car that was solar-powered, twice as reliable and five times as fast, but would run on only 5% of the roads.

5. You would be constantly pressured to upgrade your car.

4. You could have only one person in the car at a time, unless you bought a Car95 or CarNT -- but then you would have to buy ten more seats and a new engine.

3. Occasionally, your car would die for NO apparent reason and you would have to restart it. Strangely, you would just accept this as normal.

3a. Occaionally, executing a maneuver would cause your car to stop and fail to restart and you'd have to re-install the engine. For some strange reason, you'd just accept this, too.

2. Every time the lines of the road were repainted, you would have to buy a new car.

1. People would get excited about the new features of the latest Microsoft cars, forgetting that these same features had been available from other car makers for years.

Re:house built upon the sand

[Anonymous Coward]

Next time uncheck that +2 box. The "Attack of the Clones" bit wasn't very funny.

Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[unitron]

The PC timeline in Saturday's News and Observer may have goofed in saying that it was introduced on August 13th, or maybe they finished work on it on the 12th and intro-ed it the next day, but anyway they did have a pretty good interview with David Bradley, one of the original group of engineers who developed the 5150, and the one who chose which 3 keys would be used to reboot. The interview is online here, and includes an anecdote about the delivery of a prototype to MS.

Re:house built upon the sand

[Christian Smith]

Except that several OSes were available for the PC, including CP/M and the USCD p-System, and later Xenix.

DOS wasn't huge, and could have been reverse engineered as easily as the BIOS. It was just a functional clone of CP/M, done in about 4 man months at Seattle Computer Products from whome MS bought the rights.

I wish...

[mlafranc]

After 20 years of Microsoft bunguling, we could finally say good riddens to bad rubbish, but DOJ doen't think that that is 'necessary' oh well. I've got a PowerPC Macintosh running Debian, so revenge may yet be mine.

Happly alluminum annv. IBM!

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[kfg]

Well no, not JUST marketing. First of all there was accident. IBM adopted the open architecture of the PC because they came late to the market and then had to release product on as short a development cycle as possible. Thus off the shelf parts from outside suppliers. Had they gotten off their butts just a year or two earlier and developed from the ground up it never would have happened the way it did.

The existence of Microsoft as we know it is due to the accident of IBM not being able to strike a deal with Digital right off the bat, ( they DID reach a deal with Digital and by the time the PC hit the market you COULD by it off the shelf with Digital's CP/M, nobody did though).

The NEXT accident was IBM figuring that the open architechture was safe because the *BIOS* was propriatary. Little did they think that it would not only be reverse engineered but that the *courts* would find this legal.

The NEXT accident was the UNIX guys looking at the whole affair as "toy" computers and operating systems. Everyone at the time WANTED to run UNIX. Everyone knew it was the REAL operating system.

It cost $2500 minimum, CP/M was one tenth that and PC-DOS was one tenth THAT. Had the UNIX guys taken the PC seriously and realized the potential market and priced accordingly, about $50, we'd all be using UNIX today and not having to dual boot. *MS itself would have used UNIX had it been financially feasable.* Indeed, "Quick and Dirty OS" was a quick and dirty ripoff of UNIX needing a few years more development.

( As an aside have you noticed that depending on the circumstances MS attacks Linux either for being "Old" tech OR "Too new and undeveloped"? Cute, huh?)

And thus was the Intel/MS/IBM unholy trinity born.

Pure accident.

THEN came the marketing, and it was good. Good enough for a few years to invoke the third factor that has brought us the pile of cruft and kludge we all know and love today.

The leverage of installed base.

IBM/Intel/MS all realized the value of installed base and maintained backward compatability. All of their competitors relied on developing higher quality, more advanced systems. The consumer didn't want that. They wanted cheap, and they wanted to continue to run the programs they already had.

I was a Tandy guy. Why did I buy my first PC? Because none of my friends had TRS-80s. They all had IBM compatables.

This is the power of installed base.

What do we do about it? Damned if *I* know.

The fact of the matter is that the average high school geek could, at this point, pull an "Apple" and develop a new home computer and operating system combo that blows everything on the market right now clean away with an investment of about two years time.

But who would BUY it? THAT is the question. And the answer is clearly noone. Why not? Because we don't do it that way. The leverage of installed base again, although this time on a largely psychological factor.

Think about this. The most commonly voiced complaint about *NIX is that the CLI is too opaque. Why dosn't someone rewrite the CLI?

Well, the fact of the matter is that literally dozens HAVE. Linux allows anyone who wants to take the time to set up a directory structure, named however they wish, and a CL shell with any command structure they want. Many of those that have already written are in many ways superior to what we all use and available for download if you take a little time to search them out.

Nobody cares. Why not? We don't do it that way.

The power of installed base.

Gnome and KDE are most criticized for reproducing the Windows GUI interface. Just about everyone old enough to remember its introduction hates it. Remember seeing the "START" button for the first time and thinking "What the fsck is THAT and what goofball thought it up?"?

Other superior GUI's are available. We don't use them. Why not? Well, we just don't, that's all.

The power of installed base.

When will the PC as we know it die and finally be replaced with superior technology, most of it availble for years already? The instant no one cares about the installed base anymore.

And not one instant before.

KFG

That's funny...

[Defector!!!]

Maybe it's just me, or did CNN mention this before (read Wednesday)? Guess my submission just wasn't good enough....
Here's CNN's version (put on their site Wednesay...)
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/10/IBM.ope n. arch.idg/index.html

Re:Slow news day again?

[The Limp Devil]

Perhaps the geeks aren't the only ones interested these days, so mainstream media are trying to pay attention to "esoteric geek news"?

I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[DreamSynthesis]

I started out programming on a TRS-80, then moved to an AT&T PC 6300 (8086 w/ Wietek match coproc.), and on up the PC line from there. There's just one thing that really bothers me...

Why haven't other, arguably superior, architectures made it to prime time for home users? The PC (and by this I mean x86) has managed to blossom in homes and offices around the globe, but other architectures are still remanded to use in only "high need" or "unique" situations. Yes, I know it's redundant to use Apple as an example, but I just did. Give me a G4 running OSX any time, please. Then, of course, there's others (sun, etc) as well.

What's the deal with this? I know it can't all be due to the cost involved in manufacturing... does this really just boil down to marketing?

Of course, since my bread and butter is pretty much coding for x86 servers and desktop, I'm not complaining all that loudly, mind you. All replies welome!!!

Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[HeUnique]

I think he was talking Unix was costs $2,500 for SCO Unix..

Anyone remember the day when a TCP/IP Stack license for a SINGLE use was costing $500?

Coherenet was nice thing, but both Coherenet and SCO were crushed by *BSD and Linux (Linux have more of this "blame")

Re:show some respect

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure lot's of people could come up with better designs, but the last thing you wrote is what keeps them from it. Do you really think anyone can beat Intel?

It's like saying Be Inc. is going to be rich because they made a better OS. . . We all know how that turned out.

BTW, Omar from ATD-I own(z) you.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[MrBogus]

The Apple's Ctrl+Reset and Ctrl+Apple+Reset* keys sequences post-date the PC. The Apple //e was the first to support this and was introduced in 1982. The earlier Apple ][ and ][+ models just had a RESET key that close enough to the Return key to be occasionally painful (especially after just typing in a long listing...)

* still supported as Ctrl+Command+Power on Macs

Re:Should we mourn for the Home Computers them?

[Anonymous Coward]

PCI -- Introduced years after it started hurting.

ATA -- The only problem this solves is that Intel doesn't control any SCSI intellectual property.

Not Revolutionary

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at a Crescent City Computer Club meeting in New Orleans in 1980, and someone had a copy of the specs and marketing plan for the IBM PC months before it was announced.

I remember that the group consensus was that the only thing revolutionary about the IBM PC was that it was to be sold through Sears! Just because it was popular doesn't mean it was good, it just means that IBM had the money and the knowledge to market it.

kids in future will be spoiled.

[jacobcaz]

I remember how I had to scrap and fight to get any time on a real computer when the Apple ][ was king of the classroom and the C64 ruled the gaming world.

All my friends who have kids now have (really compared to what I grew up with) AMAZING computing power just for their kids (would you relly want a 3y/o using your computer?).

These kids will be spoiled by technology at their finger tips. They will never learn how to socially engineer their way to computer time the way I'm sure more than one of us here did.

Dang - I'm jelaous!

Re:kids in future will be spoiled.

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember how I had to scrap and fight to get any time on a real computer when the Apple ][ was king of the classroom and the C64 ruled the gaming world.

You're that old and you're still trying to appear 31337 by depicting the roman numeral "II" using inverted square brackets?

BS alert

[Anonymous Coward]

NT is actually not only "innovated from OS/2", it is completely based on the OS/2 codebase

Utterly and laughably false. Bwa ha ha ha!

It was a completely new design and code base, although it was constrained to preserve certain OS/2 and Windows interfaces via the subsystems architecture.

And besides, who do you think co-designed OS/2 (not that that's anything to brag about)?

Re:Should we mourn for the Home Computers them?

[Anonymous Coward]

firewire --how? no firewire yet? sorry

Gee, I wonder how I'm writing to my firewire harddrive as we speak? Not to mention my firewire CD-RW...
Jackass. Try actually educating yourself before you post.

Kevin

Inisghtful my arse

[Anonymous Coward]

More proof that slashdot moderators are chosen from the linux faithfull.

not only is this post a trite pile os shit designed to earn karma its also inaccurate and full of holes. Yet it scores a 4 - what a load of dogs balls.

as for the 'insight' that win 1,2,3 are to crappy to mention what GUI pray tell was the poster using when it was released then ? Mac was the ONLY alternative GUI (X windows didn't exist as a working and available product and wasnt stable until about 1997)

This proves the poster is about 15 years old and has no idea on what this industry really has been thru and why

I've been in MIS and IT for 10 years - and i started out on UNIX (AT&T actually) and worked with Win 3.1 and onward in various roles (netadmin, support engineer etc) many many features of MS software was innovative (that is NOT seen on the PC before)

May i point out that Linux is a rip off of BSD and UNIX ???

You guys as always are full of shit - innacurate and misunderstood shit - you cant even be fucked checking your facts.

Morons

Epson Equity I

[resistant]

Even though my current box is something like two hundred times faster, I somehow still miss that old Epson Equity I (an early near-clone of the IBM PC). It worked well, and was cheap compared to the "original" IBM PC. The keyboard was much better, too, even if it was "soft". Those early IBM PC keyboards did have the best "touch" per se, but the keyboards sucked otherwise. Teeny "Enter" key, teeny "backspace" key, bizarre layout ... ugh.

IBM is to be credited with spurring the computer revolution by attempting to hijack it with way proprietary boxes, though. :)

Re:they got the history of the PC all wrong

[ClipDude]

I don't know where IBM thought up all of this bullshit

I don't know, but I hear they've been duped by Linus "Pac-Man" Torvalds into spreading cancer.

And what a crufty piece of crap it was, too.

[rodgerd]

The PC only barely achieved parity with contemporary systems, and PC architecture systems lagged behind contemporaries for over a decade. It wasn't until he mid-ninties, with PCI and 32 bit processors that PC hardware caught up with where the like of the Macintosh and Amiga, never mind real workstations, had been years before.

Even these days, bad architectural decisions made back then still impede progress (look at the mess that is the PC hard drive, or the fact that you still can't run a PC off a serial port).

Slow news day again?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read about this on BBC News yesterday. Come on /. get your shit together. This site used to be the place where all the esoteric geek news was premiered weeks or months before the mainstream media picked it up. What happened?

house built upon the sand

[beanerspace]

Gad, 20 years ?! Who would have thought that a machine, built on something so lame as a 16-bit program counter, a 16-bit ALU, four 16-bit general purpose registers, along with a few 16-bit index registers, and oh yes, that all important 8-bit external bus, would have so forever changed teh face of computing ?

Personally, while the PC is significant, I believe it was the ... and please forgive the bad joke, the attack of the clones in the 80's, that finally put the brain-damaged 80n86 PCs over the top of superior personal computer architectures.

Re:first IBM pc

[3ntropy]

The Altair and the Apple I both shipped in 1976 I think. Apple had sold almost a million personal computers before the "first PC" from IBM booted. -entro

they got the history of the PC all wrong

[vectus]

Bill Gates, and his noble consortium of Microsoft visionaries contacted Mike Dell, and asked him to build a personal computer, to take advantage of Al Gores latest invention, the internet.

Well, a few days after Dell began making computers, Bill decided that the internet could be the future of the world economy, and encouraged his good friend Jeff Bezos to open an online book store.. to test the waters, and see if it was possible to create a working internet business.

Years later, thieves and pirates moved in, peddling porn, warez, and MP3s.. ruining the very social fabric of the internet. Some renegade people began to create computer virii, and send spam. Recently Bill Gates has taken the noble effort upon himself to get rid of these "open source" programmers.

I don't know where IBM thought up all of this bullshit, but I hope that no one believes a word of it.

Should we mourn for the Home Computers them?

[Pope Raymond Lama]

I don't know about you, but this plataform is just sick. Do I get mad all the times I stop to think on what the home computer industry could have brought us. Instead, from the tenths of playfull, colorfull, imaginative toys from the early 80's, what did emerge as the "winner" for the 90's, and now, beyond?

The only "Personal Computer" of the time that was, ground up, designed for "serious businness", and thus could display 80 characters of green text in a row, and wow, it could even beep. Who would want pretty toys like the Apple II's, ZX Spectruns, Atari ST's, Amigas? SO much color capacity, sound, speed...it could not be possible fopr one to want to work with stuff like this.

You may be all happy and well with this crap, being refurbished over and over. Were it not for the other only alternative in the market, I doubt if today's almighty 80x86 PC's would ever had got advanced peripheralls like USB connection, 3'1/2 floppies, firewire --how? no firewire yet? sorry - and maybe even the mouse. After all...who would ever want such a toy on a Serious Machine like those sold by International Business Machines?

Be happy and party on. I am wearing black for this "Anniversary"!

The "good" old days?

[trentfoley]

This takes me back to memories of cassette drives and, later, floppy based WordStar and masm, writing x86 text-mode programs. Remember when an "API" was loading registers and calling interrupts? As I write this on my Thinkpad A21p, I realize just how far we have come. How many people remember how cool it was to finally be able to type in upper AND lower case?

Re:is this really something ...

[skinney]

Maybe you have forgotten the Apple II, the old main frames that used to fill entire rooms, or how about FORTRAN?!
We have come a long way weather you are willing to admit it or not.

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[technos]

MCA wasn't the 'let's make things proprietary' grab everyone treats it as these days.

Let's face it, ISA was the standard, and it sucked. Here's IBM, with this comparably great, well tested, well documented bus they've been using for years, that the vendors are comfortable with, and PCI and VLB are dragging ass.. They said 'We need a better, faster bus'. So instead of fucking around, they went MCA.

Whaddya gonna do?

Ahhhh 20 years

[Judg3]

And to think for me it all started with an AMstrad PC6400. 8088cpu, dual disk drives, and the kicker 640k of ram. (There was a 5200 model, but it only had 512k of ram). The first PC i took apart was that AMstrad, to put in the coprocessor (250$~). Everything was proprietary, from the monitor cable, to the mouse, to the keyboard. Then again, almost every vendor made its own little system. Nothing fit into anything else. Im so glad its the 21st century and theres so many agreed on standards that yu can take the same video card and put it in you PC, MAC, RISC etc and run it with virtually any os (at least in VGA mode)

Re:Ahhhh 20 years

[Anonymous Coward]

Amstrad 1640 and Amstrad 1512.

I had the 1512 :-(

Transcript of 20th anniversary meeting

[webmaven]

Microsodt has published a transcript of the panel discussion commemorating the 20th anniversary.

first IBM pc

[xfs]

It's the 20th anniversary of the first -IBM- pc, not the PC. The altair was made in 1975 or so, was it not?

25th anniversary then?

Of course "Color displays are for game machines".

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think the computers back then all had green phosphor displays (excepting the wackos who went with amber. Wyse guys especially) and 5V TTL directly driving a speaker? Color? Sound? If you want that, get an Atari 2600! "Serious" computers had no need for such frivolities. IBM's nose was still flying high in the air back then. Even the Apples in school had green displays. The Atari 400/800 and Commodore computers were king of the home market.

Why do the home computing histories on CNN always neglect all of Atari, Commodore, TI, Tandy Cocos, etc.? The media still practices the early IBM snobbery.

The spooky part is that the 5V TTL driven speaker is still with us, and MIDI sound still sucks on 90% of all PC sound cards and on motherboard sound chips, which I guess is why most people are of the opinion that "all MIDI is cheap tinny sounding kid stuff".

Is this really something to 'celebrate'?

[phillymjs]

So, 20 years ago today, IBM started selling a half-assed, piece of shit machine that was slapped together in a hurry from off-the-shelf parts, just so IBM could grab a piece of the Apple II's marketshare. Whoo hoo.

Actually, what I think today should be remembered for is that it's the day IBM essentially handed Microsoft the keys to the kingdom. What do we have to show for it? Twenty years later, the world runs on unsecure, virus-friendly bloatware so complex that most of the gains in productivity we've seen along the way have been negated by all the time spent rebooting, reinstalling Windows, and sitting on hold with tech support. It amazes me what people will put up with.

I would think that most of the people who read /. would treat this as a somber occasion, the day that a possible future that held so much promise was extinguished like a match dropped in a puddle.

~Philly

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[bungo]

Punch cards?

You were lucky.

I use to dream of punch cards.

I had to do Pascal programming on a PDP-11, marking the cards using a dark black pencil. And
if you didn't mark it hard enough or you smudged the card, you'd have to throw away the card and
start again - and that's after wating in a queue of 20 people to have your cards loaded and parsed.

And you tell the young people of today that, and they don't believe you.

(This is true, btw.)

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[jx100]

Well, it is the also Printscreen key. We all know how important that is :-)