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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.
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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.
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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)
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...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. ;)
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