Slashdot Mirror
30 Years of Personal Computer Market Share
chiagoo writes "Ars Technica has a fantastic article that looks back at the most popular personal computers from the last 30 years. It covers everything from the Altair to the 8- and 16-bit eras to where we are today. A bit of a downer that they barely mentioned Linux and gave no mention to other significant OSes such as OpenBSD, but still a great read nonetheless."
I can remember when you could measure a platform's popularity by the thickness of Computer Shopper.
Back in the early 80's it was with Apple ][ clones -- Peaches, Oranges and various other fruit. Slowed a bit when Apple bit back on the people copying their ROMs so the cloners simply bought a bunch of ROMs and kept going
In the late 80's and early 90's it was all PC's -- Once Columbia PC beat the blue giant of IBM it was open season and they approached 2 inches in thickness.
Now it's all but gone, or may be as I haven't seen one in a while. The web pretty much killed these publications, like Micro Times, a bay area staple for geeks until it vanished.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
That this was more about hardware than software so I wouldn't expect to see a lot of mention of Linux. After all, most of us are running Linux on a platform they talk a lot about - the PC!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
It says "market share", not "free for all".
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
What a poorly-written article. It's like they just cruised through Wikipedia and copy-and-pasted a bunch of stuff.
Ars Technica used to be good, but now that they're making almost a half-mil a year with their subscriptions and product sales, the article quality has gone waaaay downhill. Nothing like a few bucks and minor notoriety to make a blogger fat and lazy.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I'm kinda shocked that the PET outsold the TRS 80 by 1980. I never saw a PET before today, and I grew up with TRS-80s of all sorts, Model II, III, 4, Data Terminal [that was never hooked up even], Color Computer II, and Model 1000 laptop. The laptop is particularly popluar today, since it runs on AA batteries, and edits plain text which is still fine for web programmers with a Serial port.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
IIRC, the turbo button actually slowed things down - games and other applications ran as fast as possible, so when running an old DOS game for example, the turbo button would bring the game down to playable speeds.
http://www.TheGamerNation.com/Forums
.. if only some of the big unix vendors back then had thought: Gee, lets push our operating system as a general purpose desktop system. Instead, we had a whole range of proprietary unixes that ran on their own proprietary platforms.
Dvorak on Doomtech
When you're talking about market share then Linux is unfortunately just a blip and BSD even smaller, particulary if market share is being measured in terms of revenue. When it comes to personal computers (!= servers and embedded systems), then many/most Linux PCs probably got sold as Windows units anyway.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
where you could type your games... later it came with the Automatic Proofreader(TM), where you could verify each line's checksum, and it beeped with an error if the line you entered was wrong.
:)
My dad had a huge collection of these magazines. But what interested me (at 6yo) was the ads, because they mostly were videogame ads, full of colors, etc.
Remember Summer Games? Summer Games II, Winter games? Pitfall II? H.E.R.O?
Ah... i feel so nostalgic about it
No mention of, a) 8-bit era, BBC Micro. OK, probably a UK-only phenomenon, but one of the best 8-bit machines of its day, with a big following. b) slightly later, and the successor to the BBC, the Acorn Archimedes. I know at least 1 person who had one, so its market share can't have been zero!
The dominance of IBM PC's over the past few years is much greater than any dominance of Microsoft in the software market, yet the haters of this technology are few and far between (mostly Mac fanbois). I guess with multiple vendors making products for the platform, open-source junkies are satisfied that one company isn't making all the profits whilst the majority who follow the lead are happy that new innovations are constantly being made and they have the backing of an established, relatively stable platform. Is the success of the IBM platform an argument for open-source software? Obviously IBM doesn't make a heap of cash from every PC product sold, so there's not a great long-term monetary argument for a company developing an open-source standard per se, or is there?
When many people here started using computers, Spyware & Malware were much of a concern. Pre mass internet proliferation, Microsoft products were the forefront of easy to use technology at a reasonable price. Mac was probably the only major alternative.
Get what I'm saying. MS might be big, bad, and bloated now, but they had a very important role to play in the development of computers. Think of it like "It's a Wonderful Life." Sure, it seems to not be that important, but when you get rid of it, bad things happen.
Besides that, all I can say of Microsoft is that at least they let you choose what hardware to run it on.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
That was to help recoup the $2500 cost of the 4.77Mhz (yes, kids, not Ghz) dual floppy (no HDD) computer.
It was really cool - it was an "all-in-one" Televideo, with 4-shades of green, emulating CGA!
w00t!
w00t, in this context, means "we owned q'bert"!
I only regret not retrieving the system from my sister-in-law, who had it in her attic as recently as 2 years ago. Lost forever now...
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
In a sense, yes. Actually, when the turbo button was disabled ("off"), it would cause the CPU to execute a bunch of no-ops, effectively making the CPU as slow as older models to allow games, etc., to be useable. The frequency at which the CPU ran never changed.
Be relentless!
Seriously though, I remember my first PC was a Packard Bell 486 running Windows 3.11
Ah, those were the days... when playing an mp3 at full quality was a system intensive task... when a 2gig hard drive was A LOT of space... when a 56k connection was FAST... when owning TWO computers was a big deal... when L.O.R.D was the king of BBS games...
*sigh* Those were the days.
Anyone interested in this stuff should pop over to Germany and visit the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum (http://www.hnf.de/index_en.html)in Paderborn. There's even a liquid-cooled Cray. How great is that?
This article sucks.
Even on the first page, they act like all these companies were run by idiots, ignoring the possibility of a PC that was supposedly right under their noses.
It wasn't that the technology wasn't ready. Intel, at the time primarily a manufacturer of memory chips, had invented the first microprocessor (the 4-bit 4004) in 1971. This was followed up with the 8-bit 8008 in 1972 and the more-capable 8080 chip in 1974. However, Intel didn't see the potential of its own product, considering it to be useful mainly for calculators, traffic lights, and other embedded applications
That's because that's all it was good for. SMPS technology was in its infancy. Storage technology involved huge platters or huge tapes. RAM was damn expensive.
So what did they think Intel should have done? Released a "PC" in 1971 that weighed 200 pounds with a linear power supply, came with a mini-fridge sized persistant storage unit that held 100k, had 4k RAM and cost $20,000?
The technology indeed wasn't ready. The PC came when it did because technology allowed it to come, not because of lack of vision.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I got into computers because of BASIC.
Quoth TFA:
"The idea of a personal computer, something small and light enough for someone to pick up and carry around, wasn't even on the radar." (referring to the mid- to early-eighties).
Not so -- Arthur C. Clarke, in his mid-Seventies novel "Imperial Earth" described a device called the "Minisec", which sonds a lot like a modern PDA -- it could even "synch" to a larger console computer via infrared.
Oh puhleease!
Remember Byte magazine?
A perfectly representative example of the steaming turd pile that was and still is the American 'tech' press?
It was utterly indecipherable gibberish excreted by tossers trying to sound knowledgable.
At least English magazines covered things the average computer enthusiast was interested in, yes, including games.
As usual the choice was pretentious American drivel or quality info from the rest of us.
Note: no one is fooled, we know you're probably just some Yank fucktard sitting in an American polytech dormitory.
.. if only some of the big unix vendors back then had thought: Gee, lets push our operating system as a general purpose desktop system. Instead, we had a whole range of proprietary unixes that ran on their own proprietary platforms.
It was tried. Microsoft sold Xenix, no one cared, MS then gave up and sold it to SCO I think. MS' second attempt to get people to move to a "proper" operating system was OS/2 1.x, that failed too. You just couldn't get people to give up on DOS. You literally have to "give away" alternatives, either practical give aways as in Windows bundled with PCs or literal give aways as with Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
Also the big Unix vendors were really hardware vendors. It's like Apple today, it would be suicide to let their OS run on generic PC hardware. You are effectively arguing that all these companies should have abandoned their core business and volumteered to become a small fraction of their former selves. Linux is not something that helps Unix vendors, it kills them. Linux is not much of a threat to MS as many around here assume. Linux's real competition is Sun and other traditional vendors. It is a disruptive technology that destroyed a market segment. The traditional Unix vendors never had a chance.
I'm not arguing that the world is better or worse off. I'm merely arguing that your proposal would not have helped the vendors.
But I can't count the number of times I've cursed that goddamned bomb symbol popping up on the Mac OS.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Not exactly, the turbo button either directly changed the frequency of the cpu or it turned off the caches that the cpu required to run effectively, they never, afaik, 'inserted no-ops instructions' as you suggest, however by turning off the cache and forcing the cpu to read from slower memory, there were undoubtably cpu cycles wasted (no-op style), but this wasn't directly due to the turbo button. The frequency at which the CPU ran DID change on some implementations.
The year 2010, when a server is finally built that can withstand the full force exerted by "The Slashdot Effect".
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
Nice article. I read the entire thing. Good information. Not sure it's worthy of a slashdot post though.
--
United Bimmer - BMW Enthusiast Community
Somebody's forgotten about (or more likely too young to know about) Dungeon Master which debuted on the Atari ST in 1988 - I remember an Amiga owning friend of mine coming over to play my copy. He later ended up writing a Sci-Fi clone of it called BSS Jane Seymour IIRC for the Amiga.
Those were the days...
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
"If only 20 of those 30 years didn't have to include Microsoft, computers would be pretty good today."
After reading the article, it's not all that clear that Apple would have the PC's penetration today. Apple's marketshare didn't go above 14%, even before Windows 95 came along. Like or hate Microsoft, Billyboy was right about the market power of clones.
"Derp de derp."
Dammit Slashdot! If you would just drop the capital S, you could be making billions of dollars too!
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
What this article is totally lacking is a breakdown between the HOME and business computer markets.
There is a much more interesting story waiting to be told I think when you look at the eveolution of the home market. Things were very different than the simple story that these graphs tell.
The only REAL COMPETITION story is in the home computer market. That is where we had C=, Apple, Tandy, TI, Atari etc actually innovating and competing. The business market never even gave a single platform a chance other than IBM PC's, so I feel by including the business stuff in the story your just introducing a HUGE amount of BORING to the story.
Screw the business pc market, tell the story about the more dynamic home computer market where PC's didn't even start to make much of a splash until just before Windows311/Windows 95 came out.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Welcome to "Web 2.0" - now with the performance of 38K dialup.
The PET never had more marketshare than the TRS-80, in fact it had at most about a quarter of the of the TRS-80's marketshare. You're misreading those (crappy) graphs. The TRS-80 was the best selling computer in 1980.
That last graph says it all: the PC dominance is tapering off. It's running out of steam and on the verge of collapse!
>After reading the article, it's not all that clear that Apple would have the PC's penetration today.
Thats because this article sucks. It totally ignores the fact that the HOME PC market was TOTALLY DIFFERENT back then from the business market.
Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
The home market was dominated by Commodore, Apple, Atari, Tandy, TI, etc.
The problem with this article is the graphs lump the business market, which ONLY BOUGHT IBM PC's, and mixes it all in with the market data for the home pcs.
I still believe that this is a huge mistake and doing analysis of the home market would be much more interesting.
There is not much to learn about the business PC market. They bought IBM PC's, and they bought them in huge numbers and thats pretty much it. Nothing else there to tell.
It clouds the interesting historical part of the story greatly.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
Are you kidding me? Are you saying that Gates and Allen are lost warlock masters of Computer Science and programming languages.
You make it seem like Allen and Gates are Einstein and Newton, the ONLY people capable of writing a compiler/interpreter. PLEASE. As if they designed BASIC? Which is why it was on Apple ][s. This is not proof of "great men" theory of history. They just happened to be willing to write BASIC for it.
I mean, if MS hadn't been such bastards, we would have had a far better DOS from IBM or DR-DOS, and would have transitioned to OS/2 with true preemptive multitasking. Or we would have had NeXTs on the desktops, or a better clone of MacOS.
Back to the land of disingenous specious baseless arguments. No more of that here. What am I kidding? This is slashdot.
Hey, I'm just your average shit and piss factory.
I was recently introduced to RISC OS on a Castle Iyonix. Pretty neat for a new machine running an OS with some history. There's also something geeky-cool about running an ARM / Xscale CPU on the desktop.
It depeonds on what sector of the business market you're talking about. People with heavier CPU usage had a variety of UNIX workstation to choose from (Sun, Apollo, AT&T, SGI) as well as the DEC MicroVAX workstation for VMS. Apple tried their hand at a business PC with the Apple /// (man what a sad story of design-by-management). There were also several cheap machines that ran CP/M. But for the most part the business world was dominated by Big Iron driving terminals. IBM AS/400, IBM S/360 and S/390, Data General Nova/Eclipse, DEC VAX, and many others. There's a reason why we have termainl standards such as VT100, tn3270, and tn5250!
I thought Apple had something of a resurgence in the last couple years, but I don't see much indication of that.
they are called arsetechnica. i dont expect them to bother looking at computing at any modern time period.
Honestly. This isn't meant to be a flame, but when you think about all the advances in personal computing, why would software that requires the operating knowledge of a machine released 2 decades previously be of any mention in groundbreaking in the area of personal computers? Don't get me wrong, I'm running GNU/Linux right now as my only operating system, but you're only fooling yourselves if you think the rest of the non-computer inclined world cares. Curreny advancements have made things like Linux unnecessaryily complicated, relatively speaking, for the average personal computer user of this generation. Sure, we've made inroads into the desktop computer market, the personal computer market, but we have a loooong way to go.
That is precisely why it would not belong in this article for anything more than a minor footnote.
There is a huge difference.
When IBM lost the clone battles Phoenix & everyone else were free to offer reverse-engineered work-alike PCs. Not just "mostly alike", just alike. Buy the same MS or whomever OS, install the same Lotus 123 or whathaveyou, it's all a commodity.
IBM later tried to recapture the market by redefining it with MicroChannel, their proprietary & well defended next-gen bus architecture. But the ISA market was too big and had enough momentum that IBM's efforts were doomed and look, 25 years later they're out of the PC market they helped create not having made a profit at it in years.
On the other hand Apple, after a few early skirmishes, never lost control of their products. Their architecture didn't lend itself to easy reengineering and there was rarely an eager alternative OS vender around to make non-MacOS boxes viable. Be, Yellow Dog, etc. never were more then novelties.
What Apple did do was, under contracted terms, sell their proprietary system ROMs & MacOS 7 to third parties for a licensing fee and per-unit compensation. The idea was that these nimbler & more aggressive partners would expand the Mac into markets Apple wasn't interested in or where it was unable to compete effectively (usually cost or distribution-wise).
However instead companies like Power Computing turned around and cannibalized Apple's domestic bread-&-butter Mac market by offering similar systems at price points slightly below Apples.
A few did expand the Mac into new markets - high-end multi-processor, etc. but by-and-large it was a financial disaster for Apple. They were already suffering from extremely poor supply chain management, a shrinking market, and high R&D costs; to then start supplying direct competitors with products that undercut their own was disastrous.
So when the opportunity arose with a new MacOS to change terms Apple did - they bought back their licenses and shut down the program. Most folks agree if they hadn't the company wouldn't have lasted another year.
*Yes, there were a few obscure attempts but it never amounted to a few hundred clone units total.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
That article is poorly researched. No mention of hugely influential (and successful) machines such as the Sinclair ZX-81 or Spectrum? No TI 99/4A description? And if the article is about "market share", why the history of the MITS and Altair without mentioning other alternative such as Heathkits and the comparison in sales?
A classic example of an unfocused, poorly researched article.
Back then I made it a mission to play every CRPG that was released on the Amiga, and I did so up to and including Eye of the Beholder. Then suddenly became totally bored with the genre, though I was funny to see PC owners getting excited over these "new" 3D RPGs in the 90s.
Probably the most fun I had playing a CPRG was when I played BloodWytch (Amiga) with a friend. In this game, two people could play two separate parties simultaneously. Ganging up against or ambushing monsters was great fun, and we might just have had some of the earliest loot arguments known to rpg gaming.
It will never happen, but... imagine if Microsoft released a version of the current Windows that ran on Mac hardware.
>Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
If you mean "no-one" in the "no-one except for a not terribly significant amount of people" sense, you're possibly correct. If you mean "no-one" in the "absolutely no-one" sense, you're absolutely incorrect. In my household, we had a PC. Back in the DOS days. I'll grant you not many people had PCs in their homes at this point in history, but they did.
Is it just me, or does that article remind you of that horrible flop of a documentary "Triumph of the Nerds"? Even the obvious negligence of the history of UNIX and other POSIX systems. Did the writer steal the outline of this movie and put it into a pretty website format?
The article is about reality, not SF. Asimov described powerful pocket computers in his Foundation series, ca. 1940. He probably wasn't the first.
You are a wanker.
There were attempts to run more primitive Unix-like systems on PCs from the first 8088-based IBM boxes. Not notably successful. The best known is Xenix, which I have heard a lot of nasty things about.
Open source software, great as it is, played no significant role, pro or con, in the rise of the PC to dominance.
IBM doesn't make any cash at all from every PC product sold, because they gave up the software end, figuring the real money was in hardware (oops). Then Compaq reverse engineered their bios chips and broke their lock on the hardware. IBM doesn't even make PCs anymore. The PC rose to dominance essentially because IBM blew it repeatedly, and lost control of the platform they created.
I don't understand, the conclusion graph seems to suggest that mac marketshare surged in 1991 to 1993, whereas the text in the mac section says it surged with the release of the imac. http://media.arstechnica.com/articles/culture/tota l-share.media/marketshare.jpg
In 1983 I was working for a company that had a modest success with 8088 and 8086 systems running their proprietary OS. They licensed a lot of standard software from Microsoft, including GW-BASIC, to bundle with the product. They had decided to make the move into 68010-based Unix boxes, and asked Microsoft to quote a price to port GW-BASIC to the new platform. The quote was totally ridiculous, so they hired a single engineer to write a clone. I think it took him a couple of months.
Oh come-ON now! That submission itself should have been rated "0, Flamebait".
Horns are really just a broken halo.
I'm missing the good old Indy etc. Not really a consumer computer, but neither was NeXT. No Sinclair either snif.
The 8086 and 8088 both used 20 bit addressing, 2^20 = 1,048,576, it's simple math!!!
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I thought Apple had something of a resurgence in the last couple years, but I don't see much indication of that.
Apple's profits are at record highs and their sales are way up. Apple is growing and expanding. **BUT** the rest of the computer industry is growing faster. As a result, Apple's marketshare continues to drop.
I had a lot of fun programming this thing in machine code, writing the codes in pencil & paper before hex-keying them in. Wrote several actually useful programs. One was a Morse code sender and receiver for amateur radio. Another analyzed signals I had coming from a $5 ADC chip I got at the local store. This is straight machine code, not assembly.
I really liked playing with this chip, and it started an interest in hardware and down-to-the-metal coding that I still enjoy sometimes.
The 1802 chip was never big in the home computing world, but was very successful in embedded designs. Space hardware used them often. Whenever I see something in the news about computer makers worrying about ever-increasing power consumption, I suspect that maybe we have forgotton something that was known long ago with the old power-stingy CMOS designs.
I found a pic of it on the web here.
... all the ones I had.
When Wayne Greene announced that he was going to start a computer magazine, I jumped right in. The first few issues of Byte were nothing like the later years... I dropped my sub after it became all about IBM compatibles. The first issues of Byte were from another world than we know today.
After saving up my money, I bought a Southwest Technical Products 6800 system. I had 3 memory boards, for a total of 12K bytes of ram. That's a lot of 1K x 1 ram chips to solder. SWT also did a "tv typewriter" kit that gave you a 40 column by 24 line terminal. Wheee! In those days, I lusted after an Teletype Corp. ASR 33 so that I would have a mass storage device... paper tape. *sigh* I think I still have the power and reset switch, and the transformer somewhere in my parts pile, salvaged when I scrapped the computer.
As an undergrad, I got to play with the early PET computers. The chicklet keyboards would make you nuts! I eventually bought an Apple II, (not IIe, not II+, an Apple II with integer basic on the mobo). Eventually, I upgraded that system to the full 48K bytes of ram. Floating point basic was a nifty addition. And I was one of the first to go out and snag a floppy. Hurray!!! No more casette tape mass storage. Got pretty good at 6502 assembler. Apple's high-end 6502 assembler could generate an external symbol dictionary, but they never made a linker. So I wrote one. It was about 4k lines of assembly code, IIRC. One of my most vivid memories of those days is the first time I saw VisiCalc. Blew me away. I said right there that program was going to sell a lot of Apples. Nobody had ever seen a spreadsheet before VisiCalc.
Remember TRS-80's but they never impressed me much.
Had the original Mac. 128K bytes of ram and a floppy -- who needs anything else? Ha. Ended up with a couple more macs as time went on. Apple lost their way shortly after that.
Got a PC compatible just about the first release of NT, a 486 system of some flavor. It, too, rusts in piece. I have 2 Pentium systems that still boot, a couple of Pentium II systems, the family file server is a P4 Celery running Linux (Slackware, I'm old school). Oh, and my daughter has a P4 Celery also. And there seems to be a Toshiba laptop graveyard out in the garage.
And I'm typing this on my wife's new Mac mini. I think Apple has found their way out of the woods, finally. If they can fix cron in the next update to Tiger, I'll be very happy.
OK, enough of this pointless navel staring. Gramps is signing off now... it's time for my medication.
charged more for the roms and OS? Or did they have long range contracts or something silly like that?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
A BBC B and a Master. Plus the Electrostatic-Death-Generator (otherwise known as the Monitor) and a few games (Arcadians, anyone?) to go with it.
Heres a tech question.
One of the BBCs is set to load from a network and wont load from the disk drive. I know there are a few commands you have to type to get it to switch to the disk. Does anyone know what they are?
Who the heck puts ENIAC in an article about personal computers? I mean I got get in this thing and die out of starvation before I manage to find my way out.
Also, while everybody where dying to make the perfect e-office out of their computer, Atari came and took 'em by surprise with their Unique Killer Feature. The feature? PONG.
They're working on it - look up "Trusted Computing" sometime
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
I'm pretty sure that in terms of market share in the UK, the ZX-81 whomped all competition (TRS-80, Atom, VIC-20) in the early 1980s, and the ZX Spectrum outsold the C64 and the BBC Micro by quite a margin for the first few years of its life simply because it was so much cheaper than either. Macs and PCs barely made a dent even in the business market until the late 1980s simply because they were so damn expensive!
You must think in Russian.
I have read the first foundation book twice. In one version, the main character owned a rule calculator (the mechanical thing) which was so advanced it could do differential equations. In the second version, it was replaced by something which resembles the present day PDA.
For an excellent (and certainly more through) account of the advent of the personal computer you should check out Fire in the Valley by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine. It's one of those rare non-fiction works that truly engages you in the story. It even includes a copy of the letter Bill Gates wrote about software piracy (c. 1976).
Required reading for internet skeptics
Only very recently has Apple's "resurgence" manifested itself in higher-than-market sales growth. The Ars article apparently doesn't include that data.
Apple desktop market share on the rise; will the Mac mini, iPod help?
The US free market: two halves of a government-granted duopoly are free to set the market price.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrums were at the same time (1982) as the BBC and kicked off the idea of a computer in the UK home to me. If my experiences are reflective of the wider picture, The BBC Micros were more about school use - but at home a Speccy was the thing to have - mainly as it was cheaper and seemed to have better games.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Off on a tangent... 30 years since I read those. Anyway, it was either Hari Seldon himself, or maybe the Second Foundation members who had those. The latter also had wall-screen displays to run the psycho-history equations. I haven't read any of the sequels he and others wrote long after when he tried to integrate this with his positronic robot stories, originally a quite different future history. They probably retconned the technology.
It's interesting to read Golden Age SF, when they look out the spaceship portal with a telescope to locate other ships, and you wonder why they don't use radar till you realise it hadn't been invented when it was written; or Heinlein's astrogators who use memorised tables and slide rules to pilot starships through hyperspace (Starman Jones).
Asimov wrote a book about how to use slide rules; I read it at high school, when LED calculators were an expensive novelty.
Just wait 'till mext month.
We apologize for the inconvenience.
"When IBM lost the clone battles..."
Hmmz... I thought episode II was named "The clone wars" not battles..
and what part did IBM take in it again?
Very puzzled i am, indeed...
>Besides that, all I can say of Microsoft is that at least they let you choose what hardware to run it on.
Ah. It must be a nearby mico black hole that prevents me from running Win2K natively on an Inspiron 8600. Perhaps the sam black hole prevents Fedora FC3 from writing to the disk of a Dell C610 that also won't run WinXp.
Damn those singularities.
The Archimedes was a great machine. Lightning fast and could run Impression, a full desktop publishing application off of floppy discs - there was no hard drive on the model we had at home. There were also some great games on it including a fantastic version of Elite and an arcade conversion called SWIV.
I don't think it ever broke out of the educational niche market though, which is a shame.
The first RPN pocket calculator, introduced in January 1972, complete with trig and log functions. It rocked the scientific community, and you were a Big Man on Campus if you had one hanging off your belt instead of a Pickett slide rule. Even the sound of opening the soft leather case with its Velcro closure strip was sooo geek chic. Now, if only chicks had dug it...
No mention of Digital Equipment Corporation's Rainbow PC, or the Alpha CPU? ...and I thought the whole Wang computer fiasco would have had some mention.
The SX Spectrum Sinclair isn't mentioned at all. Released in 1982 it quickly gained worldwide popularity, and is till this day considered Britains most famous computer. It had a strong (but presumably unintended) appeal to latex fetishists, provided by a slippery rubber button keyboard. The software was loaded from compact audio cassettes in an external casette player. One would listen in awe to the music of every byte, as they left the storage device and reassembled to create the wonderful gaming scene of the 48K memory, 16 color technical wonder. Didn't load? Hit rewind, adjust volume and try again.
Jupiter Ace - ran Forth instead of BASIC
Oric 1 and Oric Atmos
Dragon 32 and 64
Sinclair ZX-80, ZX-81, Spectrum, QL
In general though that's been the trend for home computers.
Earlier on, the competing standards were all about different hardware architectures.
But now, the shift in competition for home computers has moved from hardware to software. Right now most people use Windows, Linux, a BSD, or Mac OS X. And guess what? They ALL now run on x86 hardware.
The companies don't compete based on hardware anymore... now they compete for software.
Its really interesting reading these articles where they mention Commodore 64s and IBM PC Clones in the same breath. I was 'growing up' during that period and hadn't adopted the shroud of geekdom, but I was still pretty tech savvi. I went through a BBC Micro, Spectrum 48k, and a lot of my friends bought Amiga 500s (luck SOBs) and the school had a few Macs, but when it came to doing work we used IBM clones, because they were 'real' computers.
Even before the world standardized on Microsoft Office, and people were using Word Perfect and Lotus Office, saying that an Amiga 500 was a proper computer was the equivalent of saying that an XBox 360 is a 'real' computer now.
Thats the tragedy of the 90s, these great systems are gone, not because they weren't any good, but because people didn't know how to use them, and nothing has changed now. I shocked a developer that I work with yesterday by saying that you could run a lot of DirectX games on Linux. Everytime I pull my PowerBook out in a meeting with new clients they are shocked that a geek would use a Mac instead of a 'real' computer. But if anything its more ridiculous:
SCSI/Firewire/USB/SATA/PCI/Ethernet/TCP/IP
We have standardized on so much that even our games consoles are almost indistinguisable from an IBM clone, and yet if you walk into an computer shop you have at most two options: PC / Mac, and in a couple of months both of those systems will be identical in all but OS.
So as a world, why are we so obessed with the Wintel platform?
Its can't be performance. Ever since the PIII, the two biggest barriers to real office performance have been RAM and HDD speed, and with 256MB RAM costing £20 and fast enough HDDs for £40 that really isn't a barrier.
It can't be price. Apple, with their extrodinary mark-ups are capable of producing the Mac Mini for £350. Where are the other PPC / ARM / SPARC / POWER contenders?
It can't even be software. Linux, in particular Ubuntu, have matured to such an extent that for 'real' computer task it exceeds Windows in usability and functionality. I could sit my dad in front of Open Office, on an Ubuntu box and he'd be just as functional within hours.
I think its DRM.
The XBox 360 has a 20GB harddrive, 512MB RAM a full networking stack and an API sophisticated enough that it is possible to create applications with graphics comparable to Jurasic Park, in real time. It has the ability to connect to my iPod, my camera, a keyboard and mouse, and it even has an external SATA connection (albeit proprietary) for future expansion of the harddrive. At £270 its a good price, for a system that would be fascinating to play with because of its 6 hardware threads. And yet its competitor is the unreleased PS3, not the mac mini.
Millions of these units will be sold and will achieve a market penetration that Steve Jobs would kill for, many of them to lower income families (who value entertainment and keeping up with the Jones' over education) and yet, because of DRM, the number of children that will do their homework on one, or use it as a 'real' computer will be counted on one hand, and even fewer will ever use it to develop software for the console itself (unlike the Commodore 64).
Beacause of DRM, turning these systems into a home computer isn't as simple as inserting a Live DVD and attaching a £10 keyboard and mouse set. Because of DRM, an exciting and innovative hardware platform will never be anything more than a toy. Because of DRM, in 30 years time, the Ars Technica article won't even mention the PS3 or the XBox when they're talking about the development of the home computer. So much for protecting innovators and artists.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
... for *DRIVE. Because *DISC (I think the spelling *DISK was also grudgingly accepted) merely selects the DFS as the current filing system (as opposed to, say, *ADFS or *TAPE.)
First Personal Computer
But if you mean a modern PC (personal microcomputer not sold in kit), it was french and named MICRAL. Ref.
Million Dollar Screenshot
Means no history of personal computing. The ZX Spectrum sold a million units in Britain alone and (until the IBM PC) had more knock offs and clones, thanks to Communist Block countries) than any other machine.
PS for ultimate irony the security image says spectrum!
Sir Clive Sinclair should have been mentioned in this article. A large number of Europeans have been introduced to computers with the Spectrum ZX and the Amstrad CPC series.
"yet the haters of this technology are few and far between (mostly Mac fanbois)."
Well for Mac weenies, vendor lock-in on the software is just not enough. They need the warm comforting feeling of vendor lock-in monopoly hardware too.
I think you use the phrase 'open source' here a lot more than you mean to, so I'll adjust the argument appropriately
"I guess with multiple vendors making products for the platform, open-source junkies are satisfied that one company isn't making all the profits"
For "open source junkies" you really mean anyone who objects to Microsoft-style monopoly business practices. Including the open source community, free marketeers, competitors to the monopolists in question, and consumers generally.
"Is the success of the IBM platform an argument for open-source software?"
The IBM platform was a computer architecture that was opened up and became a de facto standard. "open source software" has little or nothing to do with it. Perhaps what you mean is that the lesson of the IBM PC could have some analagous lesson regarding the openness of software standards.
"Obviously IBM doesn't make a heap of cash from every PC product sold, so there's not a great long-term monetary argument for a company developing an open-source standard per se, or is there?"
s/open-source standard/open standard/j I assume
What you're trying to say is that developing an open standard is silly if a company wants to become a monopolist. Probably true.
But there's plenty of money to be made from the computer industry without necessarily becoming a monopolist (for example, IBM made heaps of cash from selling PCs, and then selling it's PC business, even if it couldn't charge rent on all the PC clones out there).
The only argument in favour of letting a company monopolise or close a standard is if the software that uses it wouldn't otherwise get made, not whether or not makes $100 million or $10 billion. With t'internet and it's terabytes of free or open source software swimming around, not to mention plenty of the proprietary stuff if that's your thing, that software does have a way of getting itself made these days, so I really don't see that as a viable argument.
No, it changed (halved) the clock speed on the bus. Sort of like overclocking in reverse, realtime. I remember on my 12Mhz machine, it only got down to 6Mhz, which was too fast for some games but fine for others.
>Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
>The home market was dominated by Commodore, Apple, Atari, Tandy, TI, etc.
By that standard... NO HAS APPLE'S AT HOME NOW... after all the home market is dominated by PC clones so we can pretent that nothing else exists... right?
The article missed a few important home micros of the 80s: the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the BCC, the Acorn Archimedes, the QL. Of course some of these machines were hugely popular outside of the US.
What is noteworthy is that the most successful computers were not the most technologically advanced. For example, at the time I was playing "Shadow of The Beast" on my Amiga with 18 levels of parallax scrolling and hundreds of colors at 50 FPS, the PC could do 16 colors at low resolution without parallax scrolling and barely reaching 15 FPS. The difference in visual quality was so great, that it made me believe that custom chips (what is now known as 'video accelerators') would be the first thing any IBM-compatible PC would have right away. But I was so wrong: It took 10 years for the first video accelerator for the PC to arrive.
Personally I think the Amiga was the most important home PC ever. It showed how a home computer should be like: easy to access, loads almost instantly, plays on TV and on computer monitor, with a wealthy of tools for the programmer and amateur electronics designer, and totally open in specs. In fact, the Amiga was so versatile as to (for example): a) display 16M colors where only 256 colors were actually allowed (on Amiga 1200), b) have CPU 68000, 68030 and PowerPC running at the same time, using the same memory.
What went wrong for Commodore? The Amiga had great prospect, but what killed it was the disability of Commodore to see the importance of 3D graphics. Back at 1991, Commodore had a great custom chip that could do 1 million textured polygons at 50 frames per second with hardware transformation, but they instead went on to produce CD32. The decision was a result of internal politics...then Doom appeared on the PC, making it the premier gaming choice, and the rest is history.
The history of Amiga reminds me of SEGA: SEGA were the masters of 3D graphics at the arcades, but they miserably failed to produce any decent 3D machine until the Dreamcast. SEGA underestimated the importance of 3D graphics for the home, and they were forced out of the console business. If we had arcade-quality Outrun, Space Harrier, Afterburner and Powerdrift at home during the Genesis/Megadrive era, and then Virtua Fighter / Virtua Striker, things would be different today for SEGA, just as it would be for Commodore if the Amiga had custom chips for 3D graphics 10 years before the PC.
Speak for yourself, we had a PC to replace the old BBC Micro before 3.1 and Windows 95 and so did a lot of other people I knew. I haven't a clue what I used to do with it mind you.
Nonsense. Kids (I was then at the time) mostly used Commodores and Atari's because PCs were expensive and games sucked on CGA and EGA and the PC beeper. But several of my friends parents had PCs at home to run pirated copies of Wordperfect 5.1, Lotus 1-2-3. And the kids played DOS games on them. I waded through many Sierra *Quests in glorious 4 color CGA. Not to mention that stuff like Wing Commander, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Civilization all confortable predated Win95.
Are you actually advocating Mac, which is historically more encumbered both in hardware and software?
Or XBox, which is even more limited, because it is sold as a game-system, and not a computing platform? It's not even an alternative to Wintel, it's still wintel except for a few hacks on the board.
DRM is not even implemented to any big extent in any of these systems.. DRM is in HDTV and such beasts, but is hardly implemented in all its gory ugliness yet.
I just don't understand your post.. If Xbox competed in the same market as computers, the two product offers would get the same price tags. You can't have it both!
I will say it is customers who are too picky about learning something new. If it's not Windows / x86, people just run away screaming.
In the beginning of 2001 - A Space Odyssey, the main character reads the news and personal messages from a small, flat handheld device, by pointing at icons on the screen. The movie is from 1968.
100% incorrect. Please mod parent down.
http://www.glasswings.com/
I've had a theory for some time that it's the apple that Alan Turing poisoned and used to kill himself with. So the bite-mark is from Turing's suicide. Pretty grotesque, but I don't know of any other famous apples in computing history.
Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
That is not true. The home market for PCs started when Amstrad introduced their range of low-cost PCs, and these shipped with MSDOS and Windows 2.x (the 'top-of-the-range Amstrad 386 which I once owned came with Windows-386)
Yeah, that's it.
Be relentless!
The article states that Atari never released any products other than an ST which shipped with a memory upgrade.
That's not true at all.
I recall several different versions of the Atari ST:
ST
STM
STFM
STE
The Atari ST model E had enhanced sound and graphics capability, in order to display 4,096 colours and also provided new sound capabilities, plus a more up-to-date version of TOS.
Also, Atari released the Mega ST (in a PC style case), the awesome Atari Falcon and Atari TT.
The ST was popular for music applications (notably Cubase) and DTP applications due to the Atari High Resolution (Mono) monitor!
The Atari ST could read and write low density (and high density, with an upgrade) PC formatted disks for information interchange with the PC. The Amiga could not, because it had a higher capacity (880K rather than 720K).
I loved my Atari ST - I learned to program on it, but I also desperately wanted a PC which I couldn't afford!
Microsoft Basic is not even a particularly good BASIC. My first introduction to BASIC was in the mid 1970s on an HP2000 system at college. This was vastly superior to the MS BASIC. Even the Locomotive BASIC on the Amstrad CPC home computers (Z80) was superior to the (later) PC and GW-BASIC on PCs.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/b
"Apple has also recently made market share inroads in the United States, according to IDC. After years of hovering between a 2.5
and 3.7 percent share of the U.S. PC market, the company finally cracked 4 percent in the first half of 2005, Daoud said.
Apple's market share of PC shipments was 4.4 percent in the third quarter, an increase of 43 percent from the year ago period,
while the overall PC market expanded by only 2 percent, he said."
The Atari 400/800 did not come with blitters. That was the Amiga. As for being a "closed" system, I still have the Atari Hardware Reference Manual that I bought along with my 800. Has full schematics and the source code to the OS ROM.
GW-Basic came with DOS 3.x. That's when MS finally abandonded Bill's feeble attempt at writing any software and bought the rights to GW-Basic. But yes, I do remember those days, and the third disk that came with my whopping 1MB RAM system, OnTrack's Disk Management and Driver, so that I could access the extra 8MB of storage on my 40MB HD.
Now if you really want to go back, go back to the Atari 800 w/ cassette drive, for which you had to read a 40 page instruction book on how connect and initiate programs from a tape. Or the TRS-80 w/ 1 floppy drive. Start up the system, yank the disk, put in program disk, run the command for that paticular program, yank the disk, replace system disk, run edit program, yank system disk, replace with disk holding file to edit.... BTW, Apple had a similar system out at the time of the TRS-80. The pre-PC days. What a time....
These were truly pain in the ass systems. When dual floppy systems came out, there was much rejoicing.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Less powerful than a modern pocket calculator, the first real job for these massive machines was to speed up the calculation of artillery firing tables.
So Colossus being used to break the Axis' "Fish" cipher system not "real" enough then ?
Odd that this should fail to be mentioned, despite the author correctly identifying Eniac as the second electronic digital computer.
Bloody yanks
Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
Note true at all. There was a big home market for PC clones in the late 1980s. People wanted them to run word processors, mostly. Remember Word Perfect? WordStar? Q&A Write? And you could buy a lot of Atari, Apple, and C64 games that were ported over to the PC, though usually with horrific graphics.
We brought our first PC clone home in 1986. I used it for around 5 years before retiring it.
IIRC, it came with AT&T DOS 3.0 (although I remember 3.1 and 3.3 also being around at the time).
When I got to college in 1987-1988, only 3 out of a dozen rooms on the floor had a computer in their room. Two of us had IBM compatibles, one person had a C64. Another fellow, one floor up, had a Mac Classic.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
That's when I started making my first information systems. Of course, before long I was writing programs that were too large for the 16K chip to store so I had to cool it unit I got the 32K chip! What a glorious day. Then I learned how to peek and poke the ROM and read information coming in the joystick ports which then opened up the great security system I created with some wires, resistors, and a cannibalized joystick controller.
Yup, now those were the good ol' days...
Pick up a copy of Digital Retro, The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer by Gordon Laing. It's by Sybex ISBN: 0-7821-4330-X.
It's a fantasic book and it will bring back many good memories of that first computer. It covers about 44 computers/game consoles with colour photos, technical specs, company history and interesting trivia.
Includes lesser known (in my opinion) systems like the Tatung Einstein TC-01, Oric-1, Jupiter Ace and the Grundy NewBrain.
The article wasn't too bad until the 2nd-to-last page, where they start out by saying WinXP was a combination of Windows 95's face and NT's stability. They seem to completely forget about Windows 2000, which is when that happened -- not to mention that XP's "face" looks very little like 95/98 (cosmetically), yet exactly like 2000.
Then claiming the Mac & PC were on equal technical footing? Just because they have a few similar software abilities? Hell no, the PCs of the time had FAR more upgradeability, whereas the Mac was pretty tightly closed still. While it has to do with Apple business choices, it's still a technical inequality.
Instead of waxing nostalgic about product introductions, when is the last time you saw something and:
1) Told bosses that getting one of these would open great, new horizons?
2) Pleaded with teachers and administrators to make a historical decision?
3) Begged parents because something was revolutionary and not evolutionary?
4) Saw the future as wide-open because of a fantastic new tool for inventors?
The SX Spectrum Sinclair isn't mentioned at all. Released in 1982 it quickly gained worldwide popularity
Worldwide, or Europewide? Was it ever made compatible with the 60 Hz monitors that were popular at the time in, say, North America and Japan?
Ah, the computer wars of the mid-80's.
:)
At INFO magazine, we were right in the middle, bashing IBM and Atari, giving grudging admiration to the Mac, and singing the praises of the Commodore 64 and Amiga.
Those were the days.
Anyone still interested in such things might be interested in visiting my INFO nostalgia page at: http://airship.home.mchsi.com/infomag.htm
- Mark R. Brown, former Managing Editor, INFO Magazine
PS Very nice article at Ars, by the way. Great research. Those numbers are almost impossible to find, and I think they did a great job. Love the graphs.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
I always thought that the "GW" in "GW-Basic" came from "Gates William", so I always assumed it was a genuine Microsoft product. When did they buy it and from whom?
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The first 3D RPG I heard of was 1984's Alternate Reality: The City for Atari 8-bits. (The sequel, AR: The Dungeon, had better graphics.) AR: City screenshot here.
"Designer Jay Miner had fitted these machines with impressive technology, including a custom blitter chip that could blast large sections of graphics on the screen without involving the CPU."
This is incorrect - that was the Amiga. The Atari's custom graphics chips were the Antic, which could arbitrarily mix graphics modes on the screen and produce interrupts in-between designated scanlines, and the CTIA / GTIA, which could overlay sprites (player / missiles in Atari parlance) as well as doing general color processing.
Terrible.
I went from a c64 which was getting dated to a 386 running Dos 5.0. I "added" on Win 3.0 when it came out and then 3.11. I had several friends with similar setups, way before 95 came out. Wing Commander was the first good game I bought for it and most games wouldn't run in windows mode.
MPEGs at 11.
Seriously, if I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say this for the last 15 years, I wouldn't be posting to slashdot because I'd be too busy living my international jet-set lifestyle...
And rolling nickels to take them to the bank all the damn time.
I thought Apple had something of a resurgence in the last couple years, but I don't see much indication of that.
Yes, but that was due to the iPod not the Mac. They are offering the most capable Macs ever, a industrial strength Unix with an actual credible consumer oriented UI on top of it, and with the Mini an attractive price. Yet they are merely maintaining or moderately expanding their market position. They may be on an upward trajectory but nothing dramatic is evident on the Mac side yet. Apple's current buzz and stock price is all about the iPod.
"Apple really topped out in the early 1990's, and has been on a long, (admittedly slow) downhill slide since then. They've managed to produce a couple of temporary upward bumps since then, but never anything very significant. Ultimately, it's just a bit of noise in a long, slow slide into oblivion. Recently, Apple's doing a bit better financially, but that's due to sales of iPods (and associated music, accessories, etc.) not Macs."
. 013.jpg
In 2001 Apple sold about 3 million Macs which generated about 4.5 billion in revenue.
In 2005 Apple sold over 5 million Macs which generated over 6 billion in revenue.
http://homepage.mac.com/jomy/.Pictures/APPL/Q4-05
It takes absolutely no merit to "standardize". It just takes a majority.
In Europe in general, Sinclair computers (ZX-81, Spectrum, Spectrum +N, even the QL) were a lot more common than Commodore's. The original Spectrum, in particular, probably had more market share than all the competition put together.
;-)
I still have a couple of Spectrums (complete with those hideous MicroDrives that failed so much they ended up being slower than tapes).
And I have a memory expansion "brick" that pushed the ZX-81's RAM all the way to 16k. How often do people add 15x more RAM, these days?
Actually, it's a reference to the apple that Adam bit, that was supposed to give mankind the knowledge and power of a god. Hence the bite. The Newton played on the name "Apple", but it wouldn't make any sense for it to be bitten. And who would want to buy a poisonous computer? It's "the apple from the tree of knowledge".
RMN
~~~
I found this article overly-digested (i.e. overly simple). For instance, they imply that Commodore developed the Amiga, when in fact Commodore bought the company, refined the product, and then released it.
I still have my Commodore SX-64 (luggable X-64 with a built in 5" monitor and floppy drive), several Apple ][+s and ][Es, an Amiga 1000 and 2000. I gave away my TRS-80 model III though (with its 8" drives), because it took up so much room.
I must say, of all of these, that my favorite is the Apple ][+. It was the first computer that I had in my house. But I feel somewhat saddened when I look at that logo, and see what a Marketing Machine Apple has become.
My very first computer was a Sinclair ZX-80 connected to an old black and white TV. 1k of memory and a membrane keyboard. I didn't even have a cassette drive for the thing. If I wanted to run a program I had to type it in by hand, and as soon as I cut the power it would be gone again. Still, it's what I learned BASIC on. I still have it somewhere, and with a bit of soldering I imagine I could get it back up and running again. Hmmmm... sounds like a weekend project.
/., my first "real" computer was a C-64. It was a *huge* part of my childhood. (300 baud, baby!) It was still my primary computer well into my college days. I remember typing papers in SpeedScript, and printing them out on an Okidata tractor feed printer. Those were the days! I still have my 64 too, as well as a big box
:-)
Like many on
Next came my Amiga 1200 upgrade, which was like a whole new world. 3.5" floppies, 20 MB hard drive, fully multitasking, and a 2400 baud modem. Still have that, too!
Like you, my introduction to PCs was with Packard Bell. I splurged and got one of the blazing-fast new Pentium processors (60 MHz). I supplemented the original 420 MB drive with an additional 540 MB drive and had no idea what I'd ever do with all of that room. I mean, it was almost a Gig!
Nowadays I can emulate all of them on my PowerBook.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
W00t!!!! If it hadn't been for the Vic20 that my dad bought me when I was 8, I wouldn't be here today. I *really* wouldn't be here. I got that, and my life changed forever.
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
The chief enabling technologies (as you hinted) for the PC was low cost RAM, low cost mass storage and low cost display.
Possibly true for the US. Not so elsewhere. In the UK and Australia though, Amstrad's PC clones were at the AUD $1000 price point in 1988 (mine was the PPC512S "luggable" with one of the first "CGA emulating" LCD screens) but there were also similar desktop models around. I used to do my highschool and uni assignments on that with Wordstar and did a bit of programming with Borland Turbo-Pascal 3 (which was released for both DOS and CP/M) ;-).
If we're excluding IBM PC clones, some home micros were quite affordable in the early days. AUD $100 bought me my very first computer: a DSE VZ-200 (aka Laser 200 in Germany, Texet TX8000 in the UK) in 1983, while schools in Australia were generally stocked with Microbees.
Depending on what you mean by 'broken', cron may not be fixed for the next version of Tiger. Apple is wanting folks to move towards using launchd for everything. This includes cron, at, xinetd, inetd and rc. You can add your own scheduled items to launchd. See: man launchd and man launchctl
Dungeons of Daggorath (cartridge) on a TRS-80 Color Computer - in 1983. Arguably one of the very first (but not *the first*) 3D "hack-n-slash" dungeon games on a computer...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
TFA's definition of personal computer ("something small and light enough for someone to pick up and carry around") isn't really the commonly accepted one, either. "Personal" usually means "one computer for one user (at a time)." I'm not really sure what they're thinking of. If they mean schleppable, my C=64 could be easilly carried around. And any TV could be its monitor. If they mean pocket-sized, TI and HP both had programmable calculators in that era. My BASIC programmable TI-66 fit in a coat pocket. I programmed a little gas milage program into it that I used in my car. 15 years later, my PDA finally acquired that functionality.
I am not a crackpot.
Franklin Computer Corporation produced several different models of Apple II clones throughout the '80s - even after being sued by Apple. The Franklin Ace computers were fairly popular and I new a number of people who owned them.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
"A bit of a downer that they barely mentioned Linux and gave no mention to other significant OSes such as OpenBSD, but still a great read nonetheless."
They don't mention the above OSes because they're talking about personal computers, not servers. There has never been a sizeable portion of the computer-using population that has ever used those OSes on their personal machines. Let "personal machine" be defined as a digital computer costing approximately $5,000 or less at the time it was released for public purchase by individuals and being designed for use by a single person either at their desk or in their lap. An IBM 650 mainframe that you own personally is thus not a "personal computer".
These OSes more than likely also will never be in such a list because they don't have the massive resources to make them into something useful for ordinary people, like the Mac OS or (some people think) MS Windows. One shouldn't be required to reverse-engineer drivers and write a shell script just download pictures from one's camera to the personal computer. The kind of people who run stuff like Linux and OpenBSD at home are the kind of people who do things just because they can and without any regard to whether it's actually a good idea or not. It's a deficient sort of thinking.
The article was entirely oriented to sales in the USA. The Commodore 64 dominated the 8 bit era. The Sinclair made no impact in the US.
I agree it doesn't tell the whole story and misses a lot of important computer systems from other countries (MSX anyone?).
Sometimes my arms bend back.
If anyone wants to read about the battle between Commodore and the other companies, there's a new book called "On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore"
http://www.commodorebook.com/
If anyone wants to read about the battle between Commodore and the other companies, there's a new book called "On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore"
http://www.commodorebook.com/
Most prominently that idiot who bought Commodore and tried to turn the Amiga into a game console during the "everybody make a console" early '90s. Watching the Amiga "Deathbed vigil" video is one of the most depressing experiences for an old Amiga fan.
Aside from bad business decisions the one thing that really killed the Amiga was the same component that made it so greats: the custom chipset. The Amiga was so tied to it's hardware that it couldn't upgrade easily. Software was hard coded directly to the custom chipsets and even the one released upgrade (AGA) managed to break a number of game programs. And because the custom chips were directly tied to the motherboard, you couldn't upgrade an older Amiga to get AGA graphics. I myself had so much invested in my Amiga 2000 (big hard drive, '030 processor, deinterlacer, expanded memory), there was no way I was going to throw it all out for an inferior (CPU wise) 1200 and no way I could afford a 4000.
Meanwhile on the PC side, VGA came out and rapidly became extremely cheap. The prices on PC hardware dropped dramatically. I was reluctant to leave the Amiga world - but the choice was between spending money I didn't have on a dying platform, or using a PC that a friend gave me for free after they upgraded.
I truly miss the Amiga. It was a computer that was so far ahead of it's time that it took a decade for other computers to catch up and ultimately surpass its capabilities.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
I was in middle school when PC can into existance. My mom would bring home computers for me to "play" with over the summer: apple ][, C64s, atari 400/800, TIs, etc...
I would dig through books at stores and libraries, and managazines trying to port various basic programs to whatever "platform" I had available to me at the time. Once I wrote a "helicopter" game using basic. The "graphics" were the result of various poke statements to get funny chars to print on screen. I found a top down view of a boxing game written in basic, for a different basic and PC. I spent countless hours trying to translate that to the basic that ran on my TRS80. The TRS was the first computer my parents bought for me.
The first computer I bought with my own $ was the RadioShack MC-10. A little thing with push button keys for the keyboard. I think it had 8K RAM. I bought it a pawn shop outside of FT Bragg, for about $40, while my parents were on base visiting. That look on their face, when the came back to the hotel, and I had this hooked up to the hotel TV. lol.
I think the MC10 was my favorite, because I could take it with me on trips, plug it into the TV at the motel and entertain myself. I even got a cassette tape backup. I wish I could find a MC10 just for the memories....
There was a period when CP/M was the way to go. First general operating system so you didn't have to run everything in BASIC or write a different version of your software for every machine, ect. (Not to mention that DOS was for all practical purposes a 16-bit mimic of CP/M.) But I didn't find any mention of it at all in the article.
My first machines were Morrows, and although 40,000 machines is nothing now, it was a good quantity back then. And it was certainly more functional than the first Mac.
Elite was a fairly popular game at first but Wing Commander was the start of a new way of thinging for gamers. Througout the 80s, the goal of programmers was to reach as many possible configuarions as you possibly can. Amiga games were coded to run aon a 512k amiga 500, no memory expansion, no HDs. PC games were EGA or CGA and supported a gazillion, older sound cards. Suggesting that a programmer write a game only for VGA video cards would close you off to well over half the PC market, and programmers were afraid of doing this sort of thing... "backwards compatibility" and all that.
WC changed this; instead of pandering to older standards to get more widespread support, they produced a game that required better hardware. They went from "anyone can run me, though it will suck on a monochrome monitor" to "You need a new video card, a 386 or better, or more ram" or all of the above. This was huge, and WC helped drive new hardware sales for gamers. Other gaming houses saw WC's success and realized they didn't have to just code for an EGA equipped XT box; they could code for 386 games and people would buy them, and even upgrade their hardware if need be.
As far as the WC game itself, it bore no resemblance to Elite other than being a "space based game" until Privateer came out several years later. Even "Frontier" (aka Elite II sometimes)
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I knew tons of people with DOS PCs at home. And they aren't all slashdotters today. Most of them were owned by families that had teens at home that used them for games, word processing and BBSes.
Who still has working models of any of the computers mentioned?
I have two Commodore 64's hidden away in my parent's attic. I've read that they were designed to have a service life of roughly 20 years, because no one envisioned them becoming obsolete so fast. Last time I tried one of them, probably 2-3 years ago, it worked fine and I had bit of fun playing Pitstop and Omega Race with an old Atari joystick. I actually have floppy disks for Wing Commander, Sim City, and Bard's Tale (Wizardry clone), but they seem to be corrupt. I was only able to do the training mission in Wing Commander and couldn't load Sim City or Bard's Tale at all. I also used to have a bunch of random programs on casette tapes, but I think they all got thrown out. One of the C=64's is in the original box, with a Costco price tag from 1984 for $200 or so. I've never looked into what I might be able to accomplish with my 300 baud modem and the Compuserve trial disk I have.
If you are talking cross-platform, you could learn the Qt or GTK APIs and muck around with getting Qt or GTK installed on Windows for your 98% of the world according to TFA Windows users. Or you could do it in Java. It would pretty much Just Work on Windows, Solaris, Linux, and OS X. Yes you have to get Java installed under Windows, but in most academic computing facilities, sysadmins putting Java on Windows machines is pretty much a given these days. You ask for Python and wxWidgets and you get a sullen stare -- as to Qt or GTK on Windows, fugetaboutit.
Java has this BufferedImage thing that pretty much lets you twiddle the bits of an RGB image to make any kind of graphical display you want under all of the mentioned OS's.
You may be programming to the Windows API, I may be programming to the Windows API, but talk to your friend, your sister-in-law, and the guy down the street developing a Windows app, and they are all doing Visual Basic. You may be proficient in Qt, I may be trying to learn Qt, but talk to the people doing graphical Linux apps in Comp Sci departments, and they will all tell you Java.
Java has a layout manager you say, true, and if you pick up NetBeans expecting it to be VB and you plunk a JButton down in the middle of a JFrame and find you can develop a nice app where a single button takes up the entire main window, well welcome to the club. Once you get over the layout manager learning curve, you will be using it like an old pro, and besides, things like wxPython are layout-manager oriented, now aren't they?
I can see myself switching my development of scientific visualization apps from Delphi to Java, and when I have enough of my stuff running in Java I could say to myself, "Hey, I could just as well be running Linux as I am running Windows -- if I get the hang of OpenOffice or AbiWord, maybe I don't even need Windows." I don't see myself investing in the learning curve to develop for Qt or GTK, especially since I am not prepared to ditch my Windows machine and figure out how to get Qt or GTK up on Windows.
Where are the Linux desktop apps? In a 98% Windows world it will come from people doing Windows with a cross-platform layer -- it could be Java, it could be RealBasic, it could be Python -- I really doubt it will be Qt or GTK. It may also get a boost from Longhorn/Vista and whatever new thing Microsoft is pushing and people deciding to stay with Windows but to go with one of these cross platform things rather than the Microsoft API du jour. When people have enough of these apps, people will say "Hey wait a minute, I could just as well be running Linux."
Weird article. It seems to have been written by an academic who just knows the facts from reading textbooks and has tried to liven them up. He doesn't mention several machines such as the TRS-100 a pocket computer with 4k of memory nor does he seem to recognize other kit computers that were available before the altair...
And his opinions on why companies did things at the time is sorely lacking... My memory is a bit hazy but a lot of the things he says are close, but not actually correct. Heck, I remember programming on TRS Model I, II, and III's and they aren't even mentioned from what I saw of the article... So he history of the 60's 70's and 80's isn't all that good... I got bored with it and stopped reading...
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Doom came out before windows 95 and we all remember or at least know how poorly that game did....
Seriously though, the home PC market for PC's was very large in 86 and 87 when I was working at VF associates in Maryland. We sold hundreds of systems each week, and it really started to get hectic with the 30 mB rll harddrives. The 286 was cool and we heard that there was something called the 386 we would be getting our hands on soon.... Don't make the mistake of thinking the PC market wasn't going hard... I remember a time when you put in the disk and booted the computer and games used ems?dos to run their own operating systems... Of course I had played with apples and Commodores were great, but the pc though ugly and difficult to use was used in business so we bought them for our homes. If you wanted a great system, you went with an amiga, but for the working class we bought PC's.
/* TODO: Spawn child process, interest child in technology, have child write a new sig */
Since the classic OS had cooperative multitasking, any app crash brought down the system.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10