Slashdot Mirror
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.
Does anyone know of any other such lists? I would be interested in seeing them. (fp?)
Definitely missing the Amiga on that list. Chuck the "APPLE NEWTON MESSAGE PAD".
IMHO
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
he is a journalist, not a fact checker.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
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.
and the Xbox, PS2, and Sega Dreamcast running Linux?
The only thing was that it was a hand-me down and I got it in 1991 when most people were using Amigas or 386s and 486s. Today my watch probably has more memory than that thing had (I bought a cheap pocket organizer in the mid 1990s that did). You could hook it up to a tape recorder to playback programs. The word processor took about 20 minutes to load and didn't even have word wrap! You had to hit the enter key at the end of every line. And of course typing essays while staring at an old color tv was rather hard on the eyes. By that time Basic was a little retro but it was still interesting from the point of view of someone who had never done any programming before. Of course it also played a mean game of pong as it had a cartridge system for games. :-)
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.
Yes the Amiga should be on that list, the others, I don't really agree with.
But you might be forgetting is this is someones list. It isn't the end all and be all of lists, go ahead make your own, write an article about it.
I find it funny that so many people will get all riled up over what a single person wrote.
I still have ye'ole coco I, II, and III (all thoroughly modified of course) squirreled away along with the cassette tape "drive", etc.
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.
while the compaq was pretty big, im sure the main reason he listed as numero uno is because compaq was based in houston. about ten miles from my house actually. my pick would have been the macintosh, because thats the first computer my dad bought.
lose != loose
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Certainly the Amiga and the Atari ST. First 32-bit computers generally available to the masses.
But how on earth can you not include the Sinclair spectrum (1982)... Or in fact the ZX80/81. Obviously not an author from the UK....
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
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.
Back in the 80s there was a huge difference in price between clones and any recognized brand name. Most of the people I knew then bought one of these as their first machine. 8086, 768K RAM, 10 MB hard disk, two 5 1/4" floppies and a green monitor. Seemed like heaven at the time.
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.
How can Slashdot be regarded as a reputable news source when they post some guy's biased top 10 list when stories about an entire record label putting their content up for download, or cases of Internet fraud, etc. are refused?
Certainly the Amiga and the Atari ST. First 32-bit computers generally available to the masses.
Uhm. The Amiga A1200, A4000, A4000T and CD32 were 32 bit. The other Amigas and the Atari ST were 16 bit computers. Right?
Disclaimer: Some of the "box" Amigas (2000, 2500, 3000) could take 24 bit graphics cards, but they were still 16 bit internally
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Cool, I actually have one of these, up on a shelf on display. It still works, running DOS 5 with it's single 5.25" floppy. In all reality, though I never had or desired one, where is the original iMac on that list? It did save Apples ass and has got to be up there pretty high on the all-time best selling lists.
Implicit Evaluation with PHP
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.
.
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!
the original 128k Macintosh is not listed as #1. Don't get me wrong, it's high on the list, which is good. But this list is sort of like having a Top Ten Rock & Roll Bands List, with the Beatles beaten out by Bruce Springsteen . The original Mac was the 800lb Gorilla, who's presence is still felt today (at least in terms of every computer use by the masses). Love it or hate it, it basically defined the User Experience still in use today.
And dammit, where is my TRS-80?
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!
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]
In the UK, you'd have to at least consider the inclusion of the Sinclair ZX80/81 and the BBC computer from the early 80s. Both were affordable, came with BASIC built in and introduced people to the idea of having a computer in their homes - I was particularly fond of BBC basic which, like many others of my generation, gave me my first programming experience.
What no PCjr? Brilliant marketing move all around...
-Sean
This one really is an old chestnut.
Short answer: "It depends on your view". They all used the 68k series chips. Every member of that chip family was internally a 32-bit processor, doing 32-bit arithmetic in a single operation. Some chips had external databusses with only 16 (or in some cases 8) bits. The "ST" stood for "Sixteen Thirtytwo", showing it's 16-bit bus and 32-bit architecture.
As far as I'm concerned, if you can hold a 32-bit memory pointer in a single register, manipulate it, and use it as an indirection pointer, it's a 32-bit machine. Others' views differ...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
First cheap IBM PC clone should get a look-in, surely?
About 5 years ago the Junior High School I attended sold off a full lab of IIGS's. I think the asking price was $20-$50, or something to that effect. Wait around - if your school has a network of them, they're likely to sell them off eventually. Those machines continue to run relatively well far longer than their useful lifespan (they lack modern word processing software, world wide web capabilities, etc).
GL
I don't think they mean the Newton Message Pad as such, but more PDA's in general. I think computers will get smaller and smaller in the future and perhaps some day we don't need a "personal computer" in the old sense. Just a little portable device that we can connect to a monitor, hook up external gear like keyboard and mouse (or whatever input devices that'll be used in the future). So the Newton Message Pad might be the most importand PC of all time in the future.
I voted for Macintosh though.
Ciryon
My first personel computer was a C64. It had a 5.25" disk drive. All of my friends with C64 were dealing with cassette head adjustment. It was cool to have a disk drive.
:)
But; now they all have a life and I'm just posting to Slashdot. I wish I had to deal with cassette head adjustment and found out there were better things to do outside.
Thanks dad, for the disk drive thing.
less is more
It should really be renamed the "the top 10 personal computers of all time in the US".
I emailed someone last night who had brought up some of the history of Apple Computer. They made the statement that the Apple //e lasted in Apple's catalog well into the late 80's.
//e (this would be early 90's).
//e was originally released in January 1983 and was finally discontinued in March of 1995!
I had to correct him - I remembered seeing seeing an Apple catalog listing both the original Powerbook Duo 210 and the Apple
As it turns out, the Apple
The computer, with only a few minor revisions, was sold for over twelve years.
In addition, I was sorry to see that the original iMac did not make the list.
- (c) 2018 Hank Zimmerman
"Pathetic" is a bit over the top. Each of those machines exerted some major influence and made a mark on the industry.
The TI 99/4 was definitely saddled with a weird "expansion box" which was essentially an empty PC case designed to hold expansion cards (memory, floppy drive, etc.). However, the 99/4 became the darling of early education since it ran LOGO, a programming language that was taught to kindergarten and elementary school children. There's a generation whose first classroom PC was a TI 99/4 running LOGO. TI also spent a lot of money advertising the 99/4 (Bill Cosby was the spokesman) which raised consumer awareness of the existence of PC's for the home.
The Timex/Sinclair was a novelty but also showed the possibilies for cheap and small PC's that could be used by hobbyists on a budget. There are a lot of programmers that cut their teeth on BASIC on the Sinclair
The Adam from Coleco was nearly "pathetic" as far as a PC, but it was a pretty cool gaming console and it had great packaging. It was compatable with nothing, but Coleco bundled it with a lot of stuff. However, if I recall correctly it was a major disaster in terms of sales and took Coleco down with it.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
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.
Slashdot can be regarded as a reputable news source? Since when? Slashdot does not write news or any other content. They just post links to other suposedly reputable news sources. One cannot expect Slashdot to research all of the detials printed in every story before they post it. That is obsurd.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
You old people and your computers! Am I going to be telling my kids how we used to have those old GigaHertz machines that we used to have to use a keyboard to get information from out heads into the computer?
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
Try Ebay. There's one without a monitor for $10.49 and a complete one for $11
My first x-86 computer was a PB, and believe me nobody that ever owned one would mention something so terrible, you insensitive clod!
Learn something new.
I got one the same way, it was probly a common occurrence, but could you have gone to Roosevelt?
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
Well, the difference between the 6502 and the Z80 is that the 6502 is a very efficient design, that already uses a bit of pipelining. The Z80 is based on a very conservate and simple state machine and takes roughly 4 cycles to do what the 6502 does in ones.
I loved my Atari 1040ST. Motoralla 68k chip, color GUI, well before the Mac went color. It had builtin MIDI ports, which was the kickstart to the creation of breakthrough software for the production of music (software sequencers). Some of today's biggest names in the computer based musical studio software, including Steinberg (now owned by Pinnacle) and Emagic (now owned by Apple) got their start on the Atari ST with programs (to this day) called Cubase and Logic.
...
I still have it, although it's sitting idle in a display case in my basement. Too many fond memories to let it go
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.
It was a common occurence.
GL
Umm, there's a TCP/IP stack and a 10Mbps ethernet card (granted, Marinetti doesn't play nice with the ethernet card, but it WILL play nice with a modem). It's got Internet capabilities. WP software? That's why there's OSS - keeps platforms from dying completely off.
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.
And Osborne-I a personal computer? What a joke. That machine was only used my professionals.
I think we've establish that a top 10 list for computers won't satisfy anyone. I'd say its not because the list is wrong, merely because there are so many important steps in the developement of the computer. I think a more relevant way of ranking importance would be a top ten list with honorable mentions at each step. This way, other significant advances can be recognized.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
If you answered Atari and Amiga, you're wrong! They were never popular.
Except if you're from Europe.
Atari and Amiga was a big hit over here.
Even the ZX spectrum sold very well.
Probably my 5th computer but the most usefull: it worked 8 (eight) hours on one battery charge. I used it at university for taking notes. I had computers with more impressive specs (amiga 1000, Sinclair QL, ...) but with this laptop (which still works) I learned that PC's dont have to have incredible specs for being usefull. I just bought a Palm Vx. Probably for the same reason: unlimited battery life, light and very dependable.
Jeeze, how could he forget NeXT? Display PS so what you had on the screen was what really printed out, an application development environment that is still one of the best +10 years later, excellent speed thanks to the DSP chip and an user interface to die for. I think they were also the first to ship with ethernet as standard equipment. Yes, no FD, the optical HD and price were a problem but still IMO it belong's in the top five.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
His inclusions are for the most part accurate, but his rankings confuse me.
/. readers would want to read it?
And then, BWJones goes on the rip the article apart.
If it's so bad, why did you think
The most important computer to me was the Adage Ambilog 200. First machine I ever saw that digitized sound and could control the video with a joy stick in 1964. The Apple II was just a knock-off. :-)
It was my dad's company's design and primary product. Later he couldn't understand why anyone would want anything better than a Commodore 64.
My vote for most important personal computer would be an IBM 1130. No one would have wanted personal computers unless smaller machines like the 1130 were available to take over during the dead of night for essentially unlimited computing time. That was addictive stuff.
1 - I said modern word processing software (MS Word, WordPerfect, etc)
2 - Note that I specifically said "world wide web" and not "internet." I'm aware it's got limited internet capabilities, but you're not going to be browsing the web on it.
GL
1. And that's why I said OSS. Someone could backport OOo to ProDOS 16 on 65C816... *ducks*
2. Telnet to a shell account (better than dialing directly in only in that you can get the dial-up), and you'll be browsing the web. Port Links to it, and you'll be browsing the web.
I think you're using the term 'browsing the web' a bit loosely. If I recall correctly, those monitors can't even display at a high enough resolution to be of much use today, even if attatched to a brand new machine. My point was that students can't search Google for a picture/video of a frog for their biology class.
GL
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.
They're tuner-less, RCA-input-only TV sets, unless they're RGB models, in which case they're better, but less compatible. They're still great for playing games on if you can find one with an RCA sound input.
BTW, Links 2.x IS graphical, through X or FB... No tabs, but Hacked Links offers that.
My first computer I had access to was the Tandy Model II and a III at my High school.
Wrote my first computer games in basic on it, 32K of memory and the Z-80 processor. Built my first little microcomputer project based on the Z-80 cpu.
Then got my first computer a Tandy Color Computer II, 16K of memory. Upgraded the machine myself to 32K, then later to 64K.
At first did not have a storage device and would type in sample programs and keep the computer on until I got tired of the program.
First storage device was a tape player, then moved up to a floppy disk drive 320K storage!
Then my first Hard drive was a 10 Meg Western digital drive, in access the hard drive I ran a OS call OS-9 from Microware. It was a UNIX based multitasking OS, learn to program with C on a style UNIX system.
Also started do custom hardware building for my computer, built a Laser light show system, Real time video digitizer.
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
...and serving as the butt of jokes for its lame handwriting recognition
Uhh....come again?
I cried when that machine died. But my mourning period was short - as my parents (thankfully) replaced that 400 with an 800XL, and I finally got to use a decent keyboard (the 400 had a craptacular chiclet keyboard).
I can't help but wonder what my life would've been like had my parents NOT got me that 400 for Christmas, so many years ago. I know they scrimped and saved for it, and I'm thankful for that and all the other great things they've done for me. I hope I can live up to their example and do the same for my two kids.
Sniff. Can you feel the love in here? Sniff.
He never says anything like that in the article. It's his "Top Ten Most Important" computers. Way different than most popular. I was going to guess the original iMac based on the article header, but it was completely misleading. Bah.
Nerd Rock In Progress
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.
Sinclair ZX Spectrum (the machine that the UK games industry was founded on)
Apple Mac+ (when the Mac actually became *useable*)
Commodore 64
IBM PC
Apple ][
Atari ST (if you were musically inclined in the '80s and '90s)
Psion Series 3 (the first palmtop that you could actually do anything useful with)
Altair
Apple iMac DV (computer as form *and* function, not just grey box)
Commodore Amiga
You must think in Russian.
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.
You never forget your first--this post's for you, D.
Dismissed as a toy by "serious" computer users at its 1984 launch, it inspired Gates and Microsoft to move away from the text-based MS-DOS and push the copycat Windows found on the vast majority of PCs in use today.
Apple Rules...
The package said "Windows XP or better. Pentium Class Processor or better"... So I got a Mac with OS X
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.
He's also wrong in claiming they were the first 32 bit systems available. I hate articles like this because nobody ever mentions any computers from outside of the United States.
;)
The Amiga 1200 was launched in December 1992 but before that a British company called Acorn Computers released the Archimedes range of computers, the next generation after their 8 bit systems (Atom, BBC A/B/B+, Master, Master Compact). Starting with the A305, A310, A410 & A440 in mid 1989 these machines had 32bit ARM2 processors (from which the Intel XScale/StrongARM chips out now originated), the Arthur (later RISCOS (Screenshot) operating system in ROM (instant bootup!), wonderful GUI, built in BBC Basic and easy ARM assembler access, 8 channel stereo sound, etc.
My first computer was a BBC B in 1982 (which should have been mentioned for it's incredible robustness and shedload of I/O ports.. you could link it to anything, oh and for being the machine the original version of Elite was written for) to an Acorn A3000 in 1990, before going PC 94'ish. Shortly after Linux appeared so all was ok again
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The Amiga was a fanstastic machine, way ahead of it's time.
However, the world ignored the Amiga. It's influence on today's machine is negligable.
Amiga style light weight multitasking never caught on. Machines just became fast enough to not need it. No machines today that support multiple resolutions simultaneously. Native NTSC timing died with the Amiga as well.
Yes, I remember laboriously loading Flight Simulator into my Apple II+ from cassette. It ran in wire-frame graphics at maybe 10 fps or so, but was an amazing achievement for its time and hardware.
>Sorry, but I fail to see how anyone could rate
>either the Apple I or the Apple Lisa as one of
>the "most popular" PCs of all time.
Did you read the (fine) article? Obviously not. The author wasn't ranking the "most popular" PC's of all time, he was ranking the "most important" (although he never really gave any criteria for what determined "importance"). If he were ranking based on popularity (by which I'm assuming you mean sales), I'm guessing not a single one of those models on his list could have made the cut (apart from possibly the Commodore 64) as most of them predated the '90s, when the personal computer market was much, much smaller than it is today. Dell probably ships more of some Latitude laptop models in a single year than Apple shipped original Macs during that model's production run.
The article lists the personal computers the writer believes are the most "important". I.e., it's his opinion.
/. has sworn off using editors, but at least the staff might try using their brains.
Our hapless submitter changed that to most "popular", which is an entirely different thing, of course. And, easily determined by looking at sales records.
I know
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
As a Houstonian, I've made the mistake of reading Dwight Silverman's column on many occations. Rarely does he offer any insight... or know what he's talking about for that matter.
They were around, but never as influential as the Apple II or the TRS-80. The PET was attractively priced, but was hurt by its calculator style "chiclet" keys. When I was trying to decide on my first PC, the contenders in my price range (excluding some impressive but expensive hobbyist systems) were the Apple II+, the PET, the TRS-80, and the Exidy Sorcerer (I think the Sinclair was also available, although I did not seriously consider it). I ended up with the Apple because I wanted to write a scientific graphic program, and only the Apple offered true bit mapped graphics.
Compaq are very important in computing history, since they were the company to clone the PC BIOS and start off the whole PC compatible movement. Had they failed or been legally kicked off the job, the computing landscape would look very different today. Better or worse is hard to say, but certainly different.
Cheers,
Ian
The BBC and Sinclair computers were very popular in Australia too, with many schools purchasing the BBCs in particular. I had a BBC B as my first computer. It was a wonderful way to learn about computers - an excellent semi-procedural basic (GOSUB was new back then), a 6502 assembler built into the basic interpreter, a decent sound chip and OKish graphics.
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.
I actually thought it was a very well done list, but the "Tandy Sensation"?? I vaguely recall the initial hype when that model came out - and ultimately, nobody considered it a really "sensational" turning-point in home computing. If you're going to list the most significant Radio Shack/Tandy computer product, I think you'd be much smarter to list the Model 3 or Model 4. Those were among the first personal computers to offer networking, with a designated "server" system (and everything interconnected via serial cables). This made them very popular in school computer labs, where lots of middle schoolers and high-schoolers got their first real opportunity to use a computer. A huge (5 megabyte!) external hard drive could be attached to them, as well as external 300 baud modems, daisy wheel or dot matrix printers, and many other accessories. (For a while, they even offered a punch-card reader add-on for the Model 3.)
... but as the author said, making a cut-off point of "top 10" always forces you to leave out some good stuff. The Timex/Sinclair, great as it was, didn't really seem like it helped hook "the masses" on computing. It started out being sold in kit form as the ZX-81, and that model only appealed to hard-core electronics enthusiasts. Even when the TS1000 was selling in K-Mart for $99.95, the tiny, flat membrane keyboard kept lots of people away from it.
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair 1000, so I would have loved to see it make the list too
Anonymous Coward sez: "Still the best. Use it up to this day."
Same here. 4 MB RAM, 7.5 MHz, 100 MB internal drive, 30 MB of which is dedicated to the '286 clone transputer running MS-DOS 3.3
Hasn't crashed since 1990. The internal calendar goes to 2040, and I believe it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Hey! I still have my boxed copy of Flisght Simulator II for my C=64!
On the other hand, you are right, the Z80 had a 4 cycly minimum instruction length, with each memory ddess adding 3 cycles, but the Z80 usually run close to 4 MHz (e.g. 3.5 MHz on the ZX Spectrum). It had 5 pairs of GPRs, plust a shet of shadow GPRs, and it supported 16-bit reigster addressing and arithmetic. So in general, a 3.5 MHz Z80 was far superior to the 1MHz 6502. The current x86 instruction set is the derivative of the i8080 instruction set, which is a subset of the Z80 instruction set.
Huh? The Genesis/Megadrive used a Motorola 68k as it's primary CPU.
The Amiga's way of working was similar; if you were taking over the machine at the lowest level (which, being a games programmer, I did), you actually had to implement the MFM encoding of the bitstream sent to or read from the disc. (Yet another use for the blitter.)
On a game I did for a major French publisher (this was in the late '80s) I created a disk format so arcane that the disc duplicating company couldn't duplicate them until I explained how to reprogram their duplicators :-)
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
Also- the SimCity that was available for the C64 was incredibly crippled compared to its Amiga and IBM PC counterparts. It had horrible graphics (a square with a letter in it to indicate zone, rather than graphics of buildings), and was missing major gameplay elements.
Somehow, I still spent a million hours playing it.
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.
And a Z80 for its sound CPU. I think it used two actually.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Let's not forget the DOZENS of arcade games that used, and STILL USE Z80 processors. IIRC, the Gameboy is based on Z80's as well.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
They were all 486sx's when 486dx's were taking over. Not a multimedia dreamhouse. Especially if you wanted to play doom or run FreeBSD. ( Didn't hear of linux until a few years later oddly enogh)
http://saveie6.com/
Thank god someone finally mentioned Acorns!
I remember many hours of geeky schoolyard fights between a group of us.. One person had a Mac, one had an Amiga, one had a PC (yeah, i know, but that's what everyone knows a windows box as)
I had a trusty Acorn A4000... The arguments were never settled:
Amiga lad was, well, and Amiga owner.. i can still spot them today..
The Mac had blatently ripped off the Acorn desktop, and the hours of grief he got for having only one mouse button was amazing...
The PC was crappily slow compared to the raw power of my 12Mhz RISC monster (he had a 486SX25)
The Acorn ruled supreme for a short while, then the PC finally overtook in my eyes, Acorn gave a small fight with the Risc-Pc, but it was too late...
Still nice to hear them appreciated on Slashdot though, they were damn good little machines, and I still venture into the loft and see if mine is still running..
I might be wrong on this, but wasn't SimCity originally a Mac game? It certainly wasn't a C-64 original. So did this guy just find advertisements for 10 old computers and decide to write an article about them?
Oh, come on! The ENIAC was a beaut! All you would need to house it would be an extra garage...
I used to be a full-blown /\miga Fanatic... I was eventually forced to switch to a PeeCee after C= died and it wqaqs obvious that there would not be another Amiga (still have my Amiga 2000).
But imagine my frustration when I switched from a 14MHz Amiga to a Pentium 166 MMX (best at the time)...
Switching from a Realtime OS with a *NIX style CLI to a POS (M$ Win*) was a major problem for me. I had become used to the system responding at my command (something I enjoyed after having to deal with my first computer...a C= 64) and using the many advantages of the *NIX command line...
Of course, Linux now has the new preempt patch in the 2.6 kernel which makes me extremely happy...
When I was in 8th grade I got my first exposure to computers with the PET (I won't say what year, but to give you a hint, the game Hunt the Wumpus was popular at the time).
Our teacher started us out with flowcharting, and then gave us the book on BASIC. He was cool enough to let us use the PETs in the 'computer lab' ( a tiny room with 4 computers in it ) instead of going to class, for which I will always be thankful. How many hours did I spend there...? All my lunches, free periods, staying after school...
I was able to write a game which was a race through a randomly generated maze, where you had to answer math problems in order to move. The faster you answered (correctly), the more spaces you could move.
I also did a little graphic demo of a rocket launching and doing an orbit around the earth. All those PEEK and POKE statements...yikes!
Later, in freshman year of college I finally bought my first computer, a VIC-20 with a 300 baud modem, which was fine for connecting to the UNIVAC from my dorm room. It used the same(?) BASIC as the PET, and I even wrote my own version of Pacman on it.
I went on to have a torrid affair with the Atari ST, then moved on to Wintel, and now I'm livin la vida Linux. But the PET will always be my first... sigh.
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
Ummm....the TRS-80 laptop that I have in my possesion is based on the Intel 8085 chip................. That is not the same as a Z80 by any stretch of the imagination.......
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.
As much as I am an Apple fan (I have no less than six Apple IIs in my basement at the moment), the Apple II's graphics paled in comparison to the C64's. Bitmapping is great, but it didn't allow fast graphics w/o top level programming, and with no sprites (shape tables don't count!), by the mid to late 1980s, the Apple II just couldn't keep up with the C64.
That all said, the Apple II's graphics (which use two-part sub pixel rendering to create colors) are a LANDMARK of efficiency and elegance of design (or a really awesome hack, depending on your point of view). Although the screen's resolution is 280 x 192, when using color graphics, it was effectively 140 x 192.They also look great in monochrome, and stunning ugly in color. But they kick the sh*t out of any other PC from 1977 (see also: TRS-80 Model 1)!
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
The Z80 and 6502 were roughly equivalent in processing power. In any given year, the Z80's clock speed was twice that of the 6502's and took about twice as many clocks to get a given job done. The 6502's instruction set was a bit more cleverly efficient; the Z80 had more registers and some powerful instructions.
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The Model 3 and 4 were weaklings compared to the Model 16, a 68000-based behemoth that ran Microsoft XENIX. A Unix workstation on your desktop that you could buy from Radio Shack! Of course, it cost almost as much as a car, but still...
The Model 16 had a hybrid 68000/Z80 based architecture. You could boot your old Model II TRSDOS disks with it, but the real fun lay in XENIX. Unless you wanted to do graphics. The extra memory XENIX demanded (I think you could go up to half a meg) meant no room for the graphics video card.
The Model 16 was great nonetheless. I learned to program ASM in TRSDOS and C in XENIX on one of those things.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Breakfast served all day!
What is sad is that I actually still have one of those Compaq 'luggable' PC at my parents house. And with the boot floppy it still boots!
A computer in every closet
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)
Nice use of the word K-Rad. That sort of lost popularity as the Internet got more popular. Thanks for reminding me of it.
Let's not forget that the C64s graphics paled in comparison to the Atari 400/800
Ligaguinggligagiggagoogoogwillgo
1 - I said modern word processing software (MS Word, WordPerfect, etc)
I know for a fact that my ][gs had Wordperfect on it... and it was WYSIWYG long before Word and Wordperfect for DOS were.
Nintendo paid the company who paid royalties to Zilog. That's the only way Zilog lasted until now, was in court.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
Why such fuss about a journo having it off with himself! The most skippable of articles surely must be journalist's opinions, "investigations" or (dare they call it) "research". The press and web is full of these convulsions of the lowest of the low. These creatures are on par with salivating real estate agents and noise-spewing car salesmen. Utterly irrelevant!
"Sprite engines" for the Apple II were implemented entirely in software. Because there was no way to rapidly write an arbitrary sprite to the screen at an arbitrary bit position independent of byte boundaries (not to mention the Apple II's awkward pixel position dependent color scheme) sprites had to be stored as tables of pre-shifted bitmaps (these are the "shape tables" you mention) for every possible position within a byte. Fortunately, another one of the strengths of the 6502 was very fast table lookup. Early games used an XOR scheme, which allowed the background to be restored by rewriting the same sprite, but produced ugly artifacts where colors overlapped. Later games used buffers to restore the background. Add-on hardware sprite boards never penetrated significantly into the market, and were not widely used by games.
As much as I am an Apple fan (I have no less than six Apple IIs in my basement at the moment), the Apple II's graphics paled in comparison to the C64's.
Yes, later home computers like the Commodore 64 and Amiga and the Atari 800 made game programming much easier, as they provided hardware sprites, background scrolling, and simple sound synthesizers, all of which had to be implemented in software on the Apple II. For an Apple II game to be monitoring an analog joystick, playing a recognizable tune, and moving multiple "sprites" around on the screen was a real tour de force of assembly language programming.
1. IBM PC.
Most PCs are an evolution of this machine. It was an open architecture, very flexible, and built like a truck.
2. Apple Macintosh
Most of what you see in modern PCs were first made available in this machine and it's successors.
3. Apple II
This made personal computers popular, leading to the IBM PC. A complete open architecture, it was the favorite among a new breed of hackers.
4. Osborne I. The first luggable, leading to the laptop marketplace of today.
5. Tandy TRS-80 Models I & III.
This was the first inexpensive, mass marketed PC. Many small businesses loved the Model III, despite it's flaws.
6. C64
This was the most popular mass marketed PC. Simple yet technically better than the Apple II. But a more closed platform means that the hackers never looked at in in the same light as the Apple II.
--- There is a lot of love for the following machines, but they didn't change the world as much as the computers above the line. ---
7. Sinclair ZX-80. This was an inexpensive, mass marketed PC, extremely popular in Europe.
8. Atari ST series. Very popular, especially in Europe, but it was the last of the breed. It could have been a mac killer if it was more refined and not associated via a game company.
9. Amiga series. Very popular with hackers, but it just couldn't get into the mainstream. It wasn't as popular as the Atari ST series, but technically it was a "better Macintosh". But Apple could afford a long-term development strategy that Commodore could not.
10. TI-99/4A. Very popular and inexpensive. But since it was a very closed platform, it never had the chance to grow significantly beyond the grip of TI.
---
Of course, all these machines had important precursors... those earlier machines, including the Altair and (later) the Apple I and countless others led to the industry we have today. They were the seeds to get things started.
What, me worry?
I'm afraid not. Shape tables were an entirely different type drawing, that resembled vector graphics. Though the shape itself could only be defined with 90 degree angles, IIRC, it could, once defined be resized and rotated freely (IIRC the rotation unit wasn't degrees [360/circle], but 256/circle) It's been a while, but I believe the relavant Applesoft commands were DRAW, SIZE, ROT
They were completely different from the preshifted bitmaps you describe, which were neither resizable not rotatable. A shape's lines remained the same thickness not matter what size it was drawn in.
Oh, you are talking about the Applesoft shape tables. Those were basically useless for animated games, because Applesoft was just too slow. Hardly any games used Applesoft, except for some early turn-based adventure-type and strategy games (I think one of the first games in the Ultima series used Applesoft).
I find it interesting that their number one choice is the COMPAQ PORTABLE PC, a computer that was designed and built in houston. I guess the Houston Chronical is proud of Houston's contribution to the PC revolution.
But the 6502 only had 3 8-bit registers! It did not have any registers that could fully hold an address
True but it had special address modes which allowed it to access locations in the zeroth page using an eight bit address which saved a clock cycle when loading the data from the address. Also, there were address modes to allow you to do indirect addressing off pairs of zero page locations. This gave the programmer 128 address registers (albeit slow ones) to play with.
Yes the Z80 had 16 bit arithmetic, but IIRC the internal data paths were 8 bit (like the 6502) so there wasn't much speed advantage. And the registers were not general purpose. Each register/register pair behaved slightly differently in some way.
Oh and the 1MHz 6502 was contemporary with the 2 MHz Z80. There was a 2MHz 6502 which was more or less contemporary with the 4MHz Z80.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
The Sega Game Gear also used a Z80. Yeah, I still have mine, but it eats batteries for breakfast ;-)
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Show me where they are claiming to be a "reputable news source"?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
It wasn't the chip that determined the best computer, it was software for the platform --
like which one had the most games of professional wrestling.
Hey what about the kaypro. i still have one in my garage. and i broke my apple II playing karatica. nut i eventually ended up working on a zeuse. cpm bassed system using the z80 proccesor. how about those.
Hangon, I make a perfectly accurate statement, get modded down as a troll, you spuw out some random garbage and get modded up? you got to be fucking kidding me!
moo
...in (almost) every school in the UK. Pretty much each and every British geek of my generation (i.e. born in the early '70's) cut their computing teeth on first the 6502 BBC Micro, then the Acorn Archimedes.
Things really turned around with the 68K and PPC; They have a ton of registers and pipelines.
The 68K had a generalized set of eight data and eight address registers (one of which was the program counter), as well as two stack pointers. It also had a 3-stage fetch, decode, execute pipeline. This CPU was a dream to write assembly for.
The registers and arithmetic were 32bit, but the address bus and ALU were 16bit. 16bit instruction words did make code more compact and faster, though.
The PPC, I haven't written asm for so I'm not entirely sure about it beyond the fact that it has an enormous register set that completely dwarfs Intel's.