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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."
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.