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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."
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.
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.