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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."
The Commodore 64 was fantastic when I first ran across it. It was the first computer that I recall any of my friends having. Unfortunately, my parents wouldn't think of buying a computer at the time (and I couldn't afford one being somewhere about 10 and all). I often would go to a friend's house and play on his family's computer and play games like Zork.
Unfortunately, it never went much further than that. However, the inclusion of the Apple Macintosh in our school computer labs was a huge influence as that is when I first recall seeing a GUI like that.
For those reasons, those computers will always remain classics for me and are definitely part of my top ten.
*
troll blacklist. Please mo
The cycle continues.
He will just get more emails now from the same people wondering why he didn't put machine x in frount of computer y.
It is impossible to make a top 10 list that will make everyone happy, but it is cool that he took other peoples ideas to value and re-did this list to accomidate information that he learned in the process
Is it the hardware or the OS... or both?
Those that suggest you "dance like no one is watching" really want to see you make a complete fool of yourself.
I don't like apple in general.
I find their computers annoying, and hard to use, mostly unfamiliarity, and that the UI isn't very intuitive to me.
But I really disagree with removing the Newton, that was an amazing piece of hardware, the first time I saw it, I was blown away, and it was already a few years old by then.
I saw it, played with it, and thought "this is where computers are going for the public".
I really think it was a landmark in computer history, it was just too recent for people to note the effect.
Probably because internet polls, generally, are only slightly more accurate than using the (RAND) function. If he ignored the option, that suggests he had reason to believe the poll was spoofed in some way. And for that matter, so do I. 10% I'd believe. 20% would be stretching things, but I'd accept it. But over 1/3 of respondants, when Apple only has something like 5% of the overall market? Something was going on.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I have two nominees:
1) Leading Edge Model D This PC was the first important "low cost" PC that was nearly 100% IBM compatible. I remember it having quite a following and marketshare back in the day.
2) Wells American A*Star This AT class machine came with a full set of schematics for the motherboard. I remember reading Peter Norton's guides about the interaction of the various chips, then following the traces in the schematics. There is no better way to learn "internals" than that.
The Amstrad 1512?
In the UK anyway, it was one of the big milestones in computing.
It was the first affordable x86 machine, running MS DOS and GEM and capable of running Lotus 123 and MS Flight Simulator - the two killer apps of the time.
The fact that it was available in Dixons meant that the typical non techie person got to see it.
It was a lot cheaper, and better specced than the typical IBM machine.
From 1991-1996 to be exact and it was actually a pass me down from my father who upgraded to the Amiga 1000
If your father "upgraded" from an A500 to an A1000, you should shoot him for being an idiot. :)
The A1000 was the first amiga built, sorta. First, there was the "Amiga" which had a few stupid problems that fell through Commodore's notoriously great quality control. So they fixed those problems and re-released it, and it was called the Amiga 1000. They also added RAM, so it had a whopping 256K, but it only had the Agnus in it.
THEN Commodore's notoriously stupendous marketing department decided that people LOVED the C-64 and the C-128 SOMUCH, that the Amiga needed to be put in a case with the keyboard, a more "compact" model. At the same time, they put a standard 512K of RAM and the Fat Agnus, and upgraded some of the minor chips as well, iirc. They packaged it TWICE, once to appeal to the original A1000 owners, and once because their marketing department were a bunch of fascists. The fascist version was called the A500, and the loose, modular, and mostly upgradeable version, the A2000.
THEN, giving in once again to market pressures (for the last time, I might add) they released the A3000T, which was just an A2000 with all the standard expansions (1MB RAM, a couple of minor things) in a tower case.
Then, they did a bunch of stupid things that nobody understood, which resulted in a NEW line of amigas (the infamous AGA line).
Finally, the President and the accountant took off with a bunch of cash, and left commodore bankrupt, and we finally understood all the stupid things they had done.
(If you detect any bitterness over the whole deal, you don't need to recalibrate your bitterness-detector)
Like what I said? You might like my music
I can't believe there's no Sinclair Spectrum in there. I think it's pretty much responsible for the current UK IT industry. Most developers that I know around my age (mid 30's) in the UK learned to program on it.
I still can't figure out how peoplepc gives you a nice Gateway computer for the price of your dial up connection. Could this be, if price is an object, the best computer of all time? Look, I pay my ISP $19.95 per month, and people pc has a computer plus dial up for that. Could we say that as long as I intend to go online, I pay $19.95 per month (and that money goes out the door never to return) for as long as I am able to get online.
With people pc, you have a "membership", and for the term, 48 month, you have the computer, then at the end of the term, you renew, and don't they then send you a new computer (then current technology) and you return the now 4 year old machine? Just this week, in reporting on the AOL 299 machine, Wall Street Journal reported that in the last quarter alone, people pc added 90K accounts! What then, is the catch, besides the finance charges, not getting to keep the machine?
Especially when viewed from the angle of paying your ISP from now on...
...asking "Have you ever heard of the Tandy Sensation?" Goodness knows I never had, until I saw this fellow's first article, and as a CoCo user, I was fairly attentive to what Radio Shack sold up until early 1991 when they finally stopped selling the CoCo3 and went totally over to the Dark Side. Sounds like it was just another (insert favorite expletive) PClone.
The A3000 (desktop, which came before or at the same time as the T model... didn't it?) wasn't just an "A2000 with all the standard expansions."
I seem to remember the 3000T coming out WAAAAAY before the 3000 desktop, but I could be wrong about that. Yes, yes, all the stuff you said falls under what I called "some other minor stuff". :)
Also, why would the AGA line be "infamous?"
Perhaps you recall waiting all those years for those things to be released while, unknowing we were the company was sucked dry by a couple of scoundrels. It came out later that the rumors were correct and Commodore SAT on teh AGA line for 2+ years without doing any more research and development. They lost their competitive edge, meanwhile trying to turn the Amiga into a gaming console (THAT never took off).
*sigh* It was a great machine that got crushed by a couple of very evil people. We're talking guys that make Bill Gates look like mutherfuckin' Santa Claus, dude. They weren't even interested in taking over the world. They didn't give a shit about the millions of people that PAID THEIR SALARY. They only cared about how much they could steal from the company, delaying R&D, product releases, and so forth, just so they would have more "working capital" to take when the left the country. They let marketing run the company, which is exactly why we got slammed with a stupid gaming console when what we *really* wanted was teh AGA line!
The AGA line was only grudgingly released because the shareholders demanded it. Something about "You say you have been spending all this money on R&D, why don't you have a product? Why are you losing your competitive edge?" and a threatened lawsuit, and WHAM! we get teh AGA line.
So yeah, the AGA line was quite notorious. For the record. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
I posted about his original list here on /. when it was first mentioned here. By tacking on the Amiga he really hasn't fixed a thing, and he hasn't adequately addressed any of the substantial complaints made the first time around.
For starters, the Tandy Sensation doesn't belong on *anybody's* list. CD-ROM drives and "multimedia" abilities were already commonplace on the Macs by the time Tandy slapped together their Sensation. Being the first major manufacturer to do in the clone market what Apple had already been doing for quite awhile really doesn't count for much - it was obvious that's where the market was heading at the time. It's not like the Sensation was a sales . . . er, um . . . sensation that inspired other clone makers to follow in its footsteps. They all continued to do what they'd been doing for some time,and would continue to do straight through the '90s - chase the Mac. And I guarantee you could have purchased a similarly equipped PC straight out of the pages of ComputerShopper back in the day. The Trash-80 is arguably the only important machine Tandy ever released, given the sheer number of programmers and students who cut their teeth on that system, although the CoCo had its devotees too I suppose.
If he wanted to cite a revolutionary multimedia clone, he should have put the Mindset PC in his list instead. That system was well over 5 years ahead of its time when it was released in 1984.
And I don't think the Amiga belongs on his list, either. He claimed to be listing "important" PC's in "home computing", and the Amiga certainly wasn't any more important than the Atari ST, the Sinclair QL, the Acorn Archimedes or any of the other Macalike systems that came out in the mid-'80s. None of them established themselves as a standard the way the Macs and PC's did, and while much ado has been made concerning the Amiga's multimedia abilities, little of note happened to the home computing market because of them. The Amiga's video editing abilities were certainly neat, but like the Atari ST's MIDI interface, there wasn't much use for those abilities in the home. How many home PC users had a video editing setup or a bunch of MIDI keyboards?
The PC's and Macs were both able to successfully exceed the Amiga's graphics and sound abilities within just a couple of years, mostly because both the PC and Mac leveraged their formidable economies of scale to rapidly adopt more powerful 32-bit processors and more capable expansion interfaces. Custom chipsets are nice, but they're no match for the rapid adoption of faster, better CPU technology. And all of those Macalikes quickly fell behind the PCs and Macs when it came to offering faster chips and higher-resolution displays.
If you want to list an "important" home computer with multimedia capabilities, swap out the Amiga with the Atari 800. When it was released in 1979 it was far ahead of its time, and it maintained that lead really until the Macintosh came out in 1984. The C64 came close to equaling it, but no 8-bit system ever truly bested it, and in many respects as a home computer it was superior to the IBM PCs (it was certainly easier to configure and use, and sported the best game titles of the era).
And I see Compaq's stupid clone is still tops on his list. What a joke that is. Sure Compaq was the first to successfully reverse-engineer the PC, but they hardly would have been the last. Japan, Inc. would certainly have gotten around to it eventually even if nobody in America had bothered. As I said about the first article, the hardware doesn't matter all that much, anyway. It's the interface and the abilities that count. If you want to look back in history to choose an important home computer, I should think you'd want to look for the first successful machines to implement the interface and abilities commonly used today. Since we continue to utilize the same interface introduced to the home computing market by
I remember playing "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiago?" on my friends' Apple II at the tender age of 10, we had a blast and learned (gasp) something at the same time.
;)
Not to be topped by the first time I played Doom, however...
Hehe, I have some of the original Amiga ROM kernel reference manuals.
To this day I maintain those are some of the cleanist and modern API's ever developed. I've not seen anything of the same scale that is designed so well (*).
* - I've worked for both Microsoft and Apple and there is no frick'in way any of their stuff is as good (the Amiga inspired some of the API's for NeXT - now OS X).
If you get the chance, check out Dave Haynie's "Deathbed Vigil" tape. As you probably know, Dave was one of the key architects of the Amiga hardware platform and designed many of the systems that we still know and love.
The "Deathbed Vigil" tape is a video that he made inside Commodore on one of the last days before the collapse. It's pretty depressing though - massive assembly and warehouse areas all totally cleaned out and shut down. It does run into a lot of well-known names inside the Commodore R&D offices and such, as well as at the final staff party and such.
And there's the famous (and well-deserved) burning in effigy of the CEO and accomplices...
As I said, it's worth a look, but it's kind of depressing. They had a lot of very talented people in hardware and software and a few suits who wanted to line their own pockets screwed it all away...
Hey, at least I got Dave's business card with the videotape, and I still have an A1200 in my bedroom (although it hasn't been fired up for quite a while).
N.
"Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence." - Charles de Gaulle
Yes, I RTFA just fine thanks. That still doesn't meet my criteria - it's not near specific enough.
Did 300 baud modems connected to Compuserve in 1983 make a VAST difference in the household use of computers? Undoubtedly. Is it fair to compare it to the dot-com boom years of the Internet's privatization - no way!
Did the Amiga change the way a lot of people thought about multimedia? Well, yes, for those who saw it at the time. Many who did nonetheless compared it to a game machine - but who would even THINK about buying a 'business pc' for the home without the ability to play a great game or listen to music nowadays?
Was the Amiga's contribution to multimedia any lesser, or just a case of bad timing? A list like this is just too general to address technology that made a difference at the wrong time.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Compaq was founded and is headquarted in Houston. Coincidence or Conspiracy? http://h18020.www1.hp.com/corporate/history.html
That's correct. The SE/30's ROMs were 24-bit color-capable, driving native QuickDraw routines.
I loved the original Mac design, and the first computer I ever bought (since starting with acoutsic-coupler greenbar terminals in 1979) was a Mac Plus in 1986. I eventually modded it with a quiet fan (the original PS lives to this day) and 4MB of RAM, maxxing it out.
One of the coolest systems I saw, and one which I wish existed today, was a NEXTSWorld Expo 1994. A company had made a Mac Plus/SE clone in black ABS. They had a 10" Sony color Trinitron, CD-ROM, and 486/66 in there. It ran NEXTSTEP, and was gorgeous. For a sysadmin, the portability, onboard Ethernet, and native NEXTSTEP 3.3 was a dream combo. I wish I would have bought one.
I've been playing with best-of-breed workstations and servers (anyone remember Auspex?) since 1990, and the only two computers I ever bought with my own cash (assembled, not build-your-own) were my 1986 Mac Plus and my 2001 TiBook 550. They were both totally worth two grand in their times, and each changed my life.
I know people using 5 year old PCs too, many of those people use their computers solely for web browsing, writing emails and word processing. In which case a 450 or so MHz machine running Windows 98 performs just fine. Which is about the exact same thing that the folks using a 5 year old Mac are doing too.
Now if you want to do any gaming... wait you can't do that on a Mac... how about video editing... well that will work about just as well on a 5 year old PC as a 5 year old Mac, that's saying painful by current standards, but not impossible.
The trick is that because PCs cost less then Macs, and you don't have to jump through hoops to build your own. In a 5 year time span I've built 3 PCs that altogether would cost about the same amount as if I had bought a Mac 5 years ago, and I would be stuck with that same old Mac all this time.
Personally I think the biggest reason why the Macintosh does not deserve to be at the top of the list is because they hands down lost. Apple wanted to be a Microsoft and control all of the hardware too. Not to mention that many of the "innovations" came out of Xerox Parc, not Apple.
Indeed... why else would just about EVERY computer would not have come with BASIC either in the console ROM or on a bootable floppy? Why else would COMPUTE! magazine have been so successful?
The TI-99/4A had to be one of the greatest flops of the era, aside from the PCjr.
TI tried to compete in a market where they didn't belong. The 99/4 and 4A used a 16-bit processor, unlike its intended competition (VIC-20, C64, et al) which only had an 8-bit 6502 or compatible. The system was deliberately crippled to keep price points down, such as using an 8-bit data bus instead of 16-bit (although a 16-bit is available externally,) using a BASIC interpreter written on top of another interpreted language, all stored in video memory (adding more latency.) TI BASIC is HORRIBLY slow and almost unusable when compared to the likes of AppleSoft BASIC or Commodore BASIC 2, 3, or 7.
Near the end of TI's Home Computer invasion, the 99/4A was sold at incredibly stupid prices with incredibly stupid rebates. This is why my parents bought the computer. I played with the C64 and the 99/4A at K-Mart's displays, but the 99/4A ranked best in pricing for that Christmas, and thus ended up under our tree.
I'm not so certain this computer should have made the list, but it certainly helped detail how NOT to compete in the computer arena, and ranked TI up very high in inept management decisions. I'd say very close to the level on ineptitude which helped drive Commodore into the ground.
I don't recall seeing one, but I think a great article would be the most spectacular failures of the computer industry. Atari's closed licensing, Commodore's crappy support and shyt management style, TI's horrible home computer management. I'm sure there's plenty more!