Top 10 Personal Computers, Revised

rebelcool writes "Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle has revised his Top 10 PCs of all time, mainly as a result of this Slashdot story. He addresses many of the replies written to him wondering why X system wasn't on the list in Y position, but also chose to replace the Apple Newton with the Amiga A1000."

Comments

Re:Apple newton

[Clever Pun]

I used to have my Dad's old Newton (I've since passed it down to my younger brother), and I have to say I agree. It's got sound output, incredible handwriting recognition software (NOT Graffiti, either), an infrared transender, and a lot of other nifty features that it took the rest of the computing world how many more years? to come out with. Bravo.

Re:Apple newton

[LordKazan]

You know what's funny about the Apple Newton, the guy that was one of the leading software developers for it (Steve Strong) went back to teaching computer science and math in high school after they eliminated the project and downsized.

I was truely blessed to have him as a professor. I generally dislike mac (now only because it's properitary hardware, OS/X is a very nice operating system). The newton didn't fail because of lack of ingeniuity, or bad coding. It was groundbreaking, and had insanely good programmers.

It was a device before it's time.
If you were to make a list of devices influential to hand-held computing the newton would be undeniably #1

Re:What about ...

[Zak3056]

The Amstrad 1512?

In the UK anyway, it was one of the big milestones in computing.

I hate to say "RTFA," but you should RTFA!

The author specifically mentions this point, that he writes for a local paper and not some international news source, and thus, OF COURSE his list is North American-centric.

Re:It's the Hardware, not the OS

[hamtux6]

IIRC, the Compaq Portable PC was the first fully legal, BIOS-compatable PC clone.

If that's not influential, what is? God knows most machines out there today are x86, and aren't IBM-made.

Early Amigaian

[POds]

To my knowledge, the A1000 was created by Jay Minor, who i believe has "passed on" now. For give me if im wrong :). He worked at Atari and possibly lead the development of several of their chipsets. Jay wanted to create something astonishing, something to blow the computer world away. For some reason or another, Atari didnt want to. So Jay quite and moved to his back shed where he worked on the Amiga. You can still find pictures where each chip was built out of several bread boards... Interesting stuff!

Anyway, eventualy commador bought the Amiga design and hired Jay, Made everyone involved famous and rich and then killed them Amiga less than 10 years later :)

Heres a nice, show report? and some technical details about the first Amiga or as it was code named, "lorraine".

http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v10n4/150_A miga_Lorraine_finally_.php