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Top 10 Personal Computers
BWJones writes "The Houston Chronicle has posted a story by Dwight Silverman on the ten most popular PC's of all time. His inclusions are for the most part accurate, but his rankings confuse me. For instance, he includes 'hobby' computers such as the Altair, but excludes the Apple I and his ranking of the Compaq portable PC at number one ahead of the Altair, Apple I and II, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Interestingly, the author also skips other significant platforms entirely, such as the Amiga and Atari computers as well as skipping over the much more significant Tandy products, the TRS-80 line of computers which like the Apple I and II had built in BASIC which helped introduce many people to programming."
My first and worst: Trash-80 Model III. 48k, 2 floppies and a built in monochrome screen.
he is a journalist, not a fact checker.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Top Ten Reasons 'Top 10 Lists' Suck
10. They usually list items that are still avertised in the meadium of the list. Top ten list of cars for example will never list the Edsel, the Durants or REOs. They will list Honda, Toyota and Fords.
9. Most lists are usually geard to non-enthusiests. They will mention items that most people know about, and won't go too far to explain new, yet important, items.
8. They are filled with lame items so that the list is ten items long.
7. They are filled with duplicates that make the same point.
6. They are filled with duplicated that appempt to make the same point.
5. Top ten lists should really start at Nine and count down to Zero. Especially if they deal with computing or mathmatics.
4. Top ten lists usually forget about the distant past - and only mention items that the reasership is familliar with. Like the list of important historical events that fails to mention items before 1950.
3. Top ten lists get tiring by the seventh item.
2. Top ten lists usually play for novelty - Like a car list wherer the 'flying car' will get mentioned, but the first diesel-engine car won't, even though in the grand scheme of things, the diesel engine is more important - it's considered boreing.
1.5 Some top ten lists will include another item, in order to appear to be cute.
1. Most top 10 lists are lame excuses to try to get attention. Like this one.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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From the article: 5. MITS ALTAIR 8800
>...but it ultimately gave birth to Microsoft, which helped make PCs available to the masses.
Ah, *that* was the missing link! Finally I am enlightened on how this all happened. My own memory of these things was far messier, until now. I'm glad that history isn't that complicated after all.
Thank you Microsoft! Thank you Mr. Silverman for enlightening me!
What no PCjr? Brilliant marketing move all around...
-Sean
You bought Rainbow on tape? OMG, I'm so jealous. I used to sit and type in all of those myself. What was worse, when the bulk of the code was in HEX. It was hours of data-entry, and you hoped you didn't put in typos (check-sums rocked!) 'Course, occasionally you needed to wait till the next month for any misprints.
When I got the CoCo 3, I only had one diskdrive, but two cartridge controllers. If you could hold the cartridge in tightly, you could pull out the ribbon and switch it to the other machine!
And it interfaced so easily little experiments using the joystick pots.
Man, I now miss that thing. And to think, my parents actually SOLD it at a yardsale a couple years ago for $10!