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."
...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:How many people started with the IBM PC origina
by
brocktune
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
Re:house built upon the sand
by
kfg
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
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
Reminds me of a Dilbert...
by
myov
·
· Score: 3, Funny
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.
-- I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
Re:Reminds me of a Dilbert...
by
kfg
·
· Score: 3, Funny
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: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
The start of mediocrity in microcomputers.
by
jcr
·
· Score: 3, Flamebait
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
-- The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Microsoft's New Slogan
by
V50
·
· Score: 3, Flamebait
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'.
Wow, am I THAT old now?
by
Arandir
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
-- A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy
by
roguerez
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
--
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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
I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.
by
DreamSynthesis
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
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!!!
house built upon the sand
by
beanerspace
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
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: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).
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?
Re:Where we were. Where we will be...
by
Auckerman
·
· Score: 5, Funny
"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.
Slashdot Mirror
...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!
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.
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
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.
I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
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
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
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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'.
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.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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
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.
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
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!!!
High-quality Linux web hosting for geeks and coders.
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.
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
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?
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.
Burn Hollywood Burn