Posted by
ryuzaki0
on from the looking-back-in-the-past dept.
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."
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan
by
kfg
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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:first IBM pc
by
VAXman
·
· Score: 4, Informative
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.
Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy
by
unitron
·
· Score: 5, Informative
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.
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I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Re:Other "advantages"
by
ncc74656
·
· Score: 3, Informative
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).
Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
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?