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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."
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.
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.
Kids these days... *sigh**mutter*
You know, there were Apples before the Mac, especially the famous Apple IIs (as the GP clearly stated). They indeed created a blooming market for third party add-ons and clones of mostly dubious legality, much facilitated by the fact that all Apple IIs (at least the big ones, don't know about the IIc, some kind of laptop-precursor) came with full schematics. The Mac was a rather late entry in the whole PC game, Apple was well known for more than half a decade before that. Likely that the bad experiences with Apple II-cloners led Apple to the very closed and proprietary course they took with the Mac (completely opposed as to Apple operated before).
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!
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."