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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."
The Z80 chip could run rings around the Apple 6502 cpu. It's a shame Tandy didn't add basic features like high resolution color graphics and lower case letters. Despite that, the TRS-80 was a great machine and far superior to others from that era for everything except graphics.
I agree. My school has a big network of these things, and they're actually pretty fun to use. They have some really neat games also. I wouldn't mind buying a few.
hey!
I was sure to find references to my goold old Timex Sinclair 1000, or even my Adam computer, but no! I had to read about Compaq...
Not even a word on the TI 99/4A. Guess I'll have to publish my own list. Actually, I had planned a long time to do a timeline of my computers, see how it respected moore's law. Guess there's no better time then right now to get started.
With 210MB HD, 4MB RAM, and a whopping 25MHz chip. It ran DOS 6.22 and Win 3.1
It made computing a VERY VERY personal experience and taught me patience and anger-management...and the first real appropriate usage of colorful 4-letter words.
I will attest to that statement on the old Apple II machines and its BASIC interpreter, though. It did introduce me to programming. My favorite book at the time was something called "Kids and The Apple" which featured lots of BASIC code samples. If it were a list of the top 10 life-changing PCs, the old Apple II would get my vote as #1.
I have an early Compaq portable, which, as stated in the article, is more correctly described as luggable for its size. It has an orange plasma screen and still runs dos very happily whenever I decide to boot it up. I have a speech recognition card for it that actually works very well, although it can only recognize pretrained words. It may be old, but it still works great and would be good if someone wants a cheap computer to learn programming.
I was fortunate enough to have gotten a Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) as a youngin'.
It had a whopping 16k, we had it modded to 32k after a while! Eventually replaced with a CoCo 3
I learned a ton on that little monster!
TRS-80 Model I/III - these affordable computers were the first to have inexpensive networking. They had a multiplexer device avaiable (think hub) that workied through the casette port - one computer could 'save' to another 'loading' computer. Cheap, by clever, flie-level networking for the masses
C-64/TI-99/VIC-20/ATARI 400(800) - The fist mas market computers that broght comuting to people who were more interested in the applications (word-processing and gams) then the computers themselves.
TRS-80 PC-2/SHARP ??? - the first pocket computers, they had a BASIC interpreter and could do normal computing functions and yet fit in your pocket. Link here . The precursors to PDA and 'smart phones'
TRS-80 Model 100 (Kerocera ???) - the first popular laptops.
ATARI ST/AMIGA 1000 - the first true 'multimedia' computers that broght music composition via computers to the masses.
SETI&Home Project - the first virtual supercomputer.
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Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
I don't know how you rate "most popular." Since computer use has been exploding exponentially, if you do it by user head count, no computer that's more that a couple of years old would count.
So, if you rate computers by their influence or by the affection they inspired, these really ought to be on the list:
The PDP-1. I mean, the MIT hacker community used it to play video games (Spacewar! and Flight Simulator), do word processing (Expensive Typewriter, TECO, and TJ-2), play music (Pete Samson's harmony compiler), etc.
The LINC. The Computer Museum designated this as "the first personal computer." It was a tabletop unit, not floorstanding, and pioneered the first diskette-like storage (the LINCtape stored about 700 half-kilobyte blocks with random access and rewrite-in-place; effectively, a linear diskette with fractional-minute seek time). It was a 12-bit computer, probably the shortest word length ever used before microprocessors.
The Xerox Alto. First WYSIWYG word processor. First compound-document (mixed words and graphics word processor). First "object-oriented" drawing program. First bitmap-editing painting program. Ethernet and local area networking. One user, one computer. I mean, every significant concept in modern-day personal computing was there.
The Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system. If we ARE talking user head counts--adjusted for exponential growth--the Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system has to be way up there. How many people used it? How many peole first got the idea that computers should be a working tool for ordinary people by using it? Where did people get the idea that they wanted their own computer, and why they wanted it--so that they could run their own BASIC programs. Hey, how would Bill Gates have known what to write in 1974 if Dartmouth BASIC hadn't been there first?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I loved this one as I made many of the cards for it... cards which would do really weird things like interface to gas turbines, as I had some projects back then which involved large heavy machinery, and it occured to me that I could program one of these machines to act like a gas turbine, and allow me to check out all the logic of a Gas Turbine Controller without having to power up an actual gas turbine, that is I could read the fuel injector signals, generate a corresponding RPM signal, mimic fuel failure signals, vibration signals, etc. I remember how weird it seemed sitting in the control room of the turbine control room, with the entire room aglow with all sorts of displays indicating the turbine running full power, yet the turbine just down the hall was dead quiet as it was undergoing replacement of its blades.
It was my first taste of having my own programmable device that I understood intimately... and I still have it, albeit I have not used it in years... as I use several old ISA PC's to do this now... ( I like my old Borland 3 C++ compiler for DOS way too much.. it does exactly what I want it to do, and is much quicker for me to get something done than coding in 8080 assembler. And hell, I don't want GUI or its assorted bloatware just to do quickie process simulations. )
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
The Z80 chip could run rings around the Apple 6502 cpu
Erm, it was the other way round.
A 6502 at 1 Mhz could at least control a floppydrive.
When they tried the same trick with a Z80 they needed a 8 Mhz version.
The reason is very simple.
Look at the instructionset.
The shortest instruction on the 6502 was 1 clockpulse,
On the Z80 it was 4 clockpulses.
The longest instruction of the 6502 was 6 clockpulses.
The longest instruction of the Z80 was 24 clockpulses.
Just because it was your worst PC doesn't mean it was one of the worst machines. When it was made 48k was pretty good (16k used to be enough), monochrome and floppies was pretty much the standard issue for a buisness computer. There really weren't a lot of higher end options without taking a HUGE jump in price, and that mostly bought you speed, certainly not color and multimedia. Heck, the TRS-80 was one of "the" standard machines
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
And this was the feature that made it possible for the Apple II to have a low-cost floppy drive. Steve Wozniak designed a "dumb" floppy controller, using only a handful of chips, that worked by using the Apple II's cpu as the controller. The fact that the cpu directly read individual bits off the floppy and controlled the floppy hardware at a low level made possible some truly baroque copy-protection schemes.
The Apple II was also the only PC of its time to offer a true bit mapped "color" display--another of Wozniak's innovations. Every other PC of the time had only character-mapped graphics. This feature made the Apple the game machine of its era, although as with the floppy drive, everything from sprite movement to the individual cycles of the speaker had to be controlled directly by the cpu.
The article does not indicate the guy really was involved in the early days of computing - it seems he filled in the blanks based on research more than being out there in the field.
I'm not sure what he means by "most important" - that's the caveat. "Most important" based on him browsing through advertisements in old issues of Byte magazine probably.
Clearly, the TRS-80 should be among the list. It was the first successfully-marketed and mass-produced PC.
The Kaypro should also be listed - it was more "important" than the Compaq portable. Though I still have a Compaq portable III with the gas plasma display in a closet somewhere - that was an innovative computer for the time, but it was following in the footsteps of the Kaypro and earlier portables. NEC, from my memory came out with the first mass-produced computer that would be considered a "laptop" - I had one of those as well. I forget the name - but it's worthy of the list.
The Compaq worthy of mention in the list would be the Compaq 386 - the first at the time to take advantage of the faster processor - ahead of IBM.
I would also note that the TRS80 Model II was the first mass-produced PC that was geared for hard core business use, even though it didn't do well (and there were others like Cromemco that were popular - not sure if those were legiti microcomputers or minis - my memory isn't what is used to be).
Other notable mentions: Timex/Sinclair - the first ultra-cheap, bare bones PC; the Texas Instruments TI99/4a, the Commodore Pet, Tandy Color Computer, and probably many more I'm forgetting.
Strangely, although RISC OS limped on to this millennium [along with a much-changed AmigaOS], home PC OS'es have commoditised down to Windows vs. UNIX (Linux/*BSD/Mac OS X) with no other OS'es even getting a look in. Ditto with the hardware, which is basically Intel/AMD vs. Power PC.
I was running a TI-99a in 1981 - and I consider it a more common machine than the Osborne (which I never saw or heard about until the 1990s).
Where is the Atari? The Atari 800XL was an awsome machine - on par with the Commodore 64. After learning basic on the TI-99, I later used the Atari to learn machine level programming, poking and peeking (or was it push and pop?)my way into the guts of the beast.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The Acorn ruled supreme, at least for a short while in the late 1980's/early 1990's. Jealous PC owners where stuck with a DOS box or, worse, Windows 3.1 and slow 286's and 386's.
Such a shame Acorn couldn't market themselves out of a paper bag. The computer world would be a lot different (and a lot better) right now if they had only taken the time to market their products better.