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.
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?
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 :)
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 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.
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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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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 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"
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 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...
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
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
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.