Slashdot Mirror
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."
AOL's $299 PC?
The bigot!
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
Goes to show that united geeks carry weight.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
that slashdot readers are a "linux advocacy" community?????
...trying to pigeonhole only a 'top 10'. Top 10 WHAT? It would be easy to ignore the contributions of 8-bit computers nowadays, but at one time there weren't many other options and each type had a specific advantage.
Hint to the writer: If you're going to do a list like this, try and be more specific.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Mr. Silverman seems very obliging, revising his original list to conform to certain external demands. The one question I have is why he didn't acknowledge his own poll (the one on the original top 10 page)? The largest number (34%) cleary chose the Apple Macintosh over every other computer, with a couple recieve close to no votes at all (0-1%)! I don't use a Macintosh, but if so many people feel that way, shouldn't Mr. Silverman think about it?
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
...just to make sure he never makes the same mistake again, that'll teach him!
Jonathanjk.com
I'm not sure on what basis top 10 were chosen but I feel the iMac should be a definate candidate. Not only did it revitalize a company struggling at the time (Apple) but it's the first computer I can think of that was considered by the general public to be cool looking and since the iMac showed it could be done computers have really become alot more stylish in appearance (whether for good or evil). I feel that for its popularity and effect on the modern computer industry the iMac deserves a spot.
I stole this Sig
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.
For my 2 bit computer to make the list...
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
Woohooo! :-)
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.
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.
List looks pretty accurate to me now. I'm not an Amiga fan, but it was definitely a huge machine. If he wanted the Newton in, he should have chucked the Tandy Sensation, whatever the heck that was. I know every other machine, but not that one.
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.
The "PCs Limited Turbo"? Yeah, that was another DOS machine, and helped revolutionize the turn toward mail-order PCs. Again, that wasn't about the OS.
So those people who complained that the Mac should be number 1 because its OS influenced Windows are missing the point. That doesn't seem to have been the focus of this columnist's article. Now if you want to have another article talking about the most influential OSes, well that's entirely different, and I doubt you'd find the "Tandy Sensation" on that list.
Still, I guess I will make my nits too. If you are going by ubiquity and influence in the marketplace, would you really put the Compaq Portable PC #1? Yeah, it revolutionized portability back when everybody and their uncle's dog were making nothing but desktop PCs. But I would think either the Apple II or the IBM PC would be the truly revolutionary boxes. Those were the boxes that told the world that you could have a computer of your very own, both at home and on your desk at work. That was a true paradigm shift that none of the others matched, IMO.
Some of these den't even belong on this list. I don't think adding a little more memory, hard disk, cdrom or sound card makes it on this list.
10. Osborne I;
This was the first luggable, dump compaq portable.
9. PCs Limited Turbo;
Who is PC limited, just another clone company, sure maybe its Dell, but Compaq and Gateway were there first.
8. Tandy Sensation;
Most everyone heard of the TRS-80, but Sensation? All Tandy did was add a CDROM and a sound card. SVGA was already common.
7. Commodore Amiga A1000;
Great Addition, the more/less utility to view files looked like a movie title production. And Aming had multitasking too.
6. Commodore 64;
5. MITS Altair 8800;
4. Apple II;
This should be first, this was the first mass market computer with expandable slots, floppy drive.
3. Apple Macintosh;
2. IBM PC 5150;
1. Compaq Portable PC.
Where is the first real portable with a LCD? It was the portability but the first clone. But this shouldn't have been so high, if there was Apple, then IBM, there wouldn't be anything to clone. Copycats shouldn't rate so high.
My list
1. Apple ][
2. IBM PC 5150
3. Compaq PC, this was the first clone which begat th entire clone industry
4. Apple Macintosh
5. Apple Newton
1st handheld
6. PC Laptop with LCD, very portable!!
Actually the Apple ][ c had a laptop profile but no LCD screen.
7. Commodore 64;
8. Commodore Amiga A1000;
9. Osborne I;
10. Tandy TRS-80
this was used alot in the 80s
WhatMeWorry
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
Mr. Silverman is really mischaracertizing his whole article, and statements such as above explemplify the distance between his knowledge and experience and the reality of the early computer industry.
In the early days, people purchased computers to "program" them. Part of the fun was taking a machine and teaching it to do new things. He should more-aptly rename his list to the, "Top 10 computer-controlled consumer devices of all time" because there is a difference.
Again, not listing the TRS-80 on the list is gross negligence. The TRS-80 was the most popular computer in the world for many more years than most of the other computer models were even around. Even if one panders to Mr. Silverman's goofball rationale of ignoring computers seemingly built for "nerds", more people used TRS-80s for business applications than Apple in most of the early years.
And what the hell is the MITS Altair doing on the list then? Make up your mind. Either you're going to give props to the computers that were most influential, or the ones who ran the most ads in Byte magazine that 7 people in Virginia actually purchased (namely the Tandy Sensation - a computer I still haven't ever seen even though I owned every other computer on his list, as well as dozens of others). But make up your mind. Your list isn't either.
It's amazing. I didn't think he could take his suck-ass list and make it even worse, but he did. If anything, this proves that dorks like this are yanking the chain of the tech community and laughing as they bask in their 15 minutes of attention.
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.
...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.
Because, if you read the article (yeah, I know, this is Slashdot, what am I thinking?), it's because the Altair was the machine that Allen and Gates used to write their version of BASIC, and hence was the start of Microsoft. Which is certainly a pretty significant turn of events in home computing.
no iBook!? how can this be?? Steve said it was insanely great!! he wouldn't lie!, would he?
Uh, you're on crack. Slightly. 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." For one, it had the 68030 CPU with MMU and the 68882 FPU as standard. It had Zorro II and ISA slots. It had on-board SCSI. It had Kickstart & AmigaOS 2.x. Basically, it was much more of an upgrade than A1000 -> A2000.
Also, why would the AGA line be "infamous?" The 1200, 4000 and 4000T are clearly some of the finest Amigas, with a lot of great features and graphics which were still way ahead of the IBM machines. The A4000 was a large success, especially as a Video Toaster system.
Although everyone can't ever be 100% satisfied with their own list - much less someone else's, it's good to see the Amiga got its appropriate level of respect.
Much more than Mac zealots, Amiga users have continued to utilize their 10-15 year old Amigas for things that matter in our modern world.
Sure, you can play text based games, use ssh/telnet, and "word process" on nearly any PC in existance, but old Amigas can (and still are) utilized for video work.
While I think the Newton deserved a spot in the historical review, the Amiga is truly - like the Mac - one of the forebearers of our modern Gnome, KDE, Mac OS X, and WinXP computing environments:
The Amiga was the more deserving of the two.
I think that's a very "fair and balanced" list (I'd take off the Tandy and replace it with the Newton or the original Graffiti Palm). The reason Amiga zealots persist is only due to it not receiving its historical recognition. This article will go along way to making them feel validated. I feel that Mac OS X shares much in spirit with the original Amiga, and I have long since switched to the new keeper of the flame - on the desktop. Linux and FreeBSD will (forever?) remain the server favorites.
Spiritual Leader of Green Bay Net
I believe the MiniTel was setup in the late 70s, which of course IS long before Microsoft invented the internet with the introduction of Windows 95....
First they burn books, then they burn people.
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 know the whole article is a troll, but I can't resist commenting anyway:
10. Osborne I
No big deal. Not worthy of the list. It was neither the first portable (which was the IBM 5100) nor the best-selling. It has the distinction of being the goofiest portable with the most ridiculously-small display ever. The Kaypro II was more of a milestone, more useable and more practical and more widely available.
9. PCs Limited Turbo
If we're going to call attention to clone manufacturers, then Compaq should be here. And Compaq's 386 was the first 80386-based PC on the market. PC's limited was just one of the many clone manufacturers who's main distinction was that they didn't end up going out of business early on.
8. Tandy Sensation
It seems me and almost everyone else on the planet don't know what this computer is doing here. I have to assume Mr. Silverman has a warehouse full of these doorstops he's trying to inflate the value of.
7. Commodore Amiga A1000
Worthy of being on the list, mainly because, like many Apple models, what it lacked in large-scale consumer acceptance, it made up for in loyalty and user satisfaction. Computers like the Amiga (Apple Lisa, NeXT, Tandy 1000, etc.), if more widely accepted, might have set the industry in a different direction.
6. Commodore 64
Worthy of the list as well. This PC was many peoples' first introduction to the PC world.
5. MITS Altair 8800
No list would be complete without this computer, but the company with which it's included is inconsistent with whatever point Mr. Silverman is
trying to make (beyond getting attention by inciting the tech community with his ignorance).
4. Apple II; 3. Apple Macintosh; 2. IBM PC 5150;
All worthy.
1. Compaq Portable PC.
This might be a worthy addition to the list, but not as the top spot and not at the expense of listing many more important computers, specifically the TRS-80 (Models I and III), or many of Tandy's innovations in this field including the Pocket Computer, PC100 (Kyocera), and Color Computer. Many people have listed a lot of early clones, such as the Leading Edge. And IBM's XT was also a pioneer in taking computing to the next level with its 10MB hard drive. As for portables, the Compaq Portable III was more "important" and truly more portable than the monster that was the Model I.
I'm likely to talk about the Amiga in a bitter fashion, since I'm very bitter about Commodore, and a few other unrelated things going on in my life at the time. I actually swore off computers for 7 years and went and got a life. So I look back at my Amiga days and can't help but think "I wasted my time with that company?". First time a company wasted my time that it really mattered, and the only time I paid THEM for it.
I still love the Amigas as a line of computers, and they really were cutting edge (nevermind that Atari was able to do some of the things they did because of a lawsuit involving the Amiga technology :) ), and it really did take 10+ years for the rest of the computing industry to catch up. ANd if it weren't for the stupid patents and the fact that commodore went under the way they did, it would NOT have taken 10+ years for the rest of the industry to catch up. Moreover, the rest of the industry would be a LOT FARTHER ALONG than it is *now*, because Commodore was a big player in the desktop market before they fell apart (they were crushing APple left and right, and with Atari dropping out of business Commodore was poised to defeat Microsoft before the monopoly was even built).
I'd like to see what the world would be like today if Commodore had truly supported the Amiga and kept up R&D on it and remained competitive. I really and truly think the world would be better as a whole, and computing specifically would be tons better.
Like what I said? You might like my music
Dwight Silverman is right! The A1000 rulez! It is the oldest of my machines still running.
;) I used to send stuff to and use stuff fro FredFish before I even heard of GPL and FSF.
Marble Madness still gets some play time!
Thanks for remembeing this great machine...
~8^]
That's a very unlikely update - 500 pretty much replaced the 1000... He probably went to a 2000.
The 1000 is likely to have been picked simply because it was the first Amiga. It was the one that made jaws drop with what could be done in a home computer and started it all off. The 500 was just a cheaper, smaller 1000 with a ROM bootloader and different expansion slots.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
What? How could he forget AOL's $299 PC?
That is a prison term, not a computer.
No, this is AOL's PC.
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
I bet the dewey beats truman guy wished he could go back and change the news like this!
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...
Those new-fangled 32-bit address spaces with virtual mappings in the System/390 are a kids toy.
Real men use the System/360
Jason
ProfQuotes
So he writes an article ... gets a bunch of pseudo-hate-mail from people that disagree, then goes back and "fixes" his list?
... would I haved bothered emailing him to say "jolly good job chap ... you've selected my favorite CPU". Nope. Not that I'd write him and complain if my machine of choice hadn't made the list either, but apparently some people did.
... especially as the end of the year, and bonus time, approaches? But if he's going to bend to the wishes of some nerds with an email account, maybe he should've taken the time to do a more thorough research job in the first place instead of congratulating himself for bringing more traffic to the site. All of that original traffic was coming to read a list that I guess was wrong. Way to go Dwight!
If my "system of choice" had made the original list
My point is that simply changing a list because he wants to address the concerns of those that had a reason to voice their disagreement doesn't seem like the right way to go about it. Sure, he'll bring more traffic to the site and to his column in particular. Who wouldn't want to single-handedly be responsible for that not once, but twice
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
Compaq was founded and is headquarted in Houston. Coincidence or Conspiracy? http://h18020.www1.hp.com/corporate/history.html
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!
:)
A miga_Lorraine_finally_.php
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_
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
The Newton was a short-lived market failure.
The marketplace didn't kill the Newton, Steve Jobs did. Apple spun off the Newton into its own profitable company, but when Jobs came back he gave it the axe.
People who think the Palm was a Newton copy are nuts.
Copied, no, but many of the laid off Newton engineers went to work at Palm.
The real problem with the list was that the Newton was on it
Bzzt! The only problem with the Newtons is that there wasn't a low cost, compact consumer model. They didn't have time to try to make one. But a used Newton is still one of the most powerful PDA's you can have.