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30 Years of Personal Computer Market Share

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the counting-down-the-hits dept.

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."

5 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Seems to me... by Chordonblue · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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..."
  2. Re:Nothing like the old days.... by quokkapox · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    Sounds vaguely familiar.

    GOodbye, fair karma.

    --
    it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
  3. Need more study of HOME vs BUSINESS by furry_wookie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  4. Linux is too advanced for this story by fm6 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Linux is a semi-modern OS, and has hardware requirements that reflect the fact. To run Linux, you need memory management. In the PC world, that means a 386 or better. By the time the 386 came along, the story TFA is telling was essentially over.

    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.

  5. Home micros, custom chips and the Amiga by master_p · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.