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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."
http://oldcomputers.net/ is one place. Like I said in another post, I'm going to write the same thing, but from a more personal angle. Also, I want to see how closely my computers have obeyed Moore's Law. Stay tuned :)
I may be misremembering, but I thought this portable came out even before the Osborne. It had a multi-line LCD display, ran off 4 "AA" batteries. They are so durable that many are still in use, and it weighed just a few pounds.
OK, so maybe the Sinclair ZX-80 and its brother the ZX-81 did not sell so well in the US, but the ZX-80 was an amazing machine at the time that was also supplied in kit form. This allowed a poor 13 year old like me to get a computer complete with BASIC for one penny less than 80 UKP which was a real breakthrough at the time.
All the time I lusted after an Apple II, but at well over 300 UKP it was impossible. When the Sinclair machine arrived, I had to wait 10 weeks before it turned up, but after an evening's soldering I had a working machine. Sinclair's lovely quote that you could "Run a nuclear power station with the ZX-80" were well far-fetched with the 1K (!) of RAM, but thanks to tokenising the basic on input, you could actually squeeze a lot more program than you could imagine into it. Oh, did I say that your video RAM was also included in that 1K?
The fact that you could not display output on your TV when the program was running, only at an input prompt or program stop was the best reason in the world to learn assembler for the Sinclair's Z80 processor and this limitation was soon removed by the large user community.
There's still some really strange/dedicated (delete as applicable) Germans running a users club at the ZX-TEAM-Homepage
It was an influential machine and got a lot of young people interested in programming. It should really be somewhere there on the list.
and of course, the Archimedes' RISC processor, the Archimedes RISC Machine, or ARM, is very much still in existence. It's one of the most widely used embedded processors.
10. Altair 8800
The first, as MS would have you think. OK, so it was the first popular, and here's where it fits in the list.
9. Quadra/Centris 610 DOS Card model
A PC AND a Mac in the same case? Sweet!
8. PowerMac 6100
RISC for the masses... what else can I say?
7. Outbound Portable
The first Mac laptop, and one of the first legal Mac clones - kinda important, wouldn't you say?
6. Laser 128 series
The first fully legal Apple II clone.
5. Compaq Portable
The first IBM PC clone, and one of the first luggable IBM PCs.
4. Macintosh
GUI for the masses.
3. Commodore 64
Cheep! Cheep! Computing for the masses, however, I didn't like the emulators, and there's a shitload of bias here, m'kay?
2. IBM PC
The... IBM... PC... umm... DUH!
1. Apple II
The first modern computer. It could boot without any addins (to BASIC, however), but it's expansion capabilities are AMAZING - after all, CF, IDE, and 10Mb/s Ethernet cards are being made for it today.
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
I'm going to play devil's advocate to the prevailing sentiment here a little bit. I'm old enough to remember well the days of the C64, Vic-20, Apple I and II and later the Amiga and Atari XL and ST line (and the straight numbered PC's before them). I remember the industry well in those days, and hell, we had two Atari 520ST's and one Atari 1040ST in my house (I also owned an Apple II and had many friends who owned C64's as well as at least one that owned an Amiga 500).
But the Atari line specifically were not particularly popular computers and they did not have a particularly profound effect on the industry as a whole. Worse, Atari's PC's dropped in popularity pretty linearly with each successive release - the Atari 400 and 800 were fairly major players at first, but as the XL/XE line and then the ST's took over, Atari's influence waned further and further. The ST's did have some nice sound hardware (and were popular with audio professionals) that may have influenced what would eventually become standard in some PC's but otherwise they were basically ignored by average consumers as well as businesses.
The Amiga was ahead of its time - and probably should be on a list like this - but again, it all depends on your criteria. Commercially, the Amiga was a collossal failure that directly contributed to the downfall of Commodore Computers. There are arguments you could make in favor of having it on a top ten list like this, but you'd have to have a pretty loose criteria to include a computer family like the Amiga on the same list as the IBM 5150 - the 5150 being the direct grandfather of about 90% of the world's PC's today, almost 25 years after it was introduced. The Amiga, while still having a cult following, is not even in the same universe in terms of influence or popularity.
As for the Apple I, I don't think even Wozniak and Jobs would really argue it belongs on this sort of list. Only several hundred were made and while it was an important PC to the Apple company just in terms of being their first released product, as a computer taken on its own merits it was not at all important. I mean it's about like arguing Orson Welles' first home movie in high school is as important as Citizen Kane - it frankly and simply is not. Same goes for the Apple Lisa (the largely experimental precursor to the Mac that shares less with the Mac platform than many people seem to believe).
So I don't know; lists like these are pretty much intended to provoke debate through their commissions and omissions (in fact, the writer even says "Of course, there will be grousing with the choices here, and certainly with the order, but that's what makes lists fun"), and there may be different PC's that should or should not be here, but I can see his reasons for not including many of the PC's listed in the article submission.
It seems to me like what this writer did was look at each loose "era" of personal computing - the hobbyist era, the "wild west" era when there were a large variety of low-cost and popular PC options, and the post-IBM PC era when most consumer PC's became largely based on the 5150 design. He then included 3 or 4 PC's from each era on his list, and these all happen to be basically the most popular or important PC's of each era (with one or two exceptions). That's really as good a criteria as any, I think.
BASIC was essentially the UI you got when you powered on the machine, though, and that's probably what the article author was talking about.
Hmm. I wrote a hell of a lot of stuff in it, for all it's being "not a programming language." One was a very full-featured (for its day) BBS for the TRS-80 model I, with a linked-list messaging filesystem including garbage collection, etc, XModem file downloading, and way more features than the leading BBS of the day, which was written for the Apple ][.
My boss when I was in high school wrote his own complete accounting suite and ran his multiple businesses off of it. But if it's not a programming language, I guess that never happened.
Yes, for example he claims that what became Microsoft Flight Simulator (that is, Bruce Artwick's program, marketed by Sublogic) started on the C64. While there was a version for the C64, it started on the Apple ][, before there even was such a thing as the C64.
By the time the Sensation! came out, customers were pretty accustomed to computers. Windows 3.1 was around, and while the $2,200 tag wasn't bad, it wasn't THAT much cheaper than the other computers. Packard Bell and Leading Edge were still around then as I recall, and those would have been cheaper (though garbage).
TRS-80, Amiga, Timex/Sinclair, TI99, Commodore Pet, GRiDPad, Coleco Adam, and many others have just as much business on that list as anything he put there.
He was probably thinking of a different chip. The Z80, in it's day, was a very good processor, and the Z8000 was just as good. Zilog just suffered from bad marketing. But they still managed to sue their way to the mid to late 90's when companies started using the Z80 again (Texas Instruments calculators and Sega Genesis, just to name two).
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Just to add my two cents: the Z80 is a really fantastic chip, very easy to get your head around and understand at the register level.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
Yep, oh the memories... 512K, dual floppy. I had no concept of a hard drive at that time. A mouse was something that scurried on four legs. I still have boxes of 5 1/4 floppy disks I'll never have need for again. Ugghhh... ohh... the memories....
bbh
Actually, RISC OS's UI is a vague rip-off of the original Windows GUI before they changed it.
I find this highly unlikely; RiscOS came out, IIRC, in 1988, predating Windows 3.0 by 2 years.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Number 2 is the Sinclair ZX-81. From a technical standpoint, it was junk. From a social standpoint, it did to the UK what the Apple II did to the US.
I have to take exception with this. Sir Clive Sinclair's biggest accomplishment in the ZX-81 was taking the number of chips down from (I think) 21 in the ZX-80 to just 4 in the ZX-81. Yes, just 4. A fully-functioning microcomputer, I/O, on-board BASIC, etc., with just 4 chips. This was what really made it so much cheaper and enabled him to get the functionality in there that sold it to the masses.