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."

Comments

Remember when?

[ackthpt]

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.

Re:Fast... like turbo button!

[Ruff_ilb]

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.

Anyone remember the RUN magazine (C=64) ?

[Spy der Mann]

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 :)

Re:Think how different it might have been today..

[SimonInOz]

Actually I always felt DEC made a catastophic error. At the time PCs were just appearing they had a tough, industry tested 16 bit multi user, multi processing operating system - RSX/11M. It ran on a microprocessor (and bigger machines in a different form, notably on the VAX) and was really pretty good.

I don't think they could bring themselves to sell it at a low price - they charged maybe USD 1000 for it.

And now they are dead. So sad. They made good kit.

Re:Fast... like turbo button!

[MarkRose]

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.

Not So! Clarke was there first!

[Stan Chesnutt]

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.

Re:Also no mention of BBC Micro, etc.

[BJH]

Yes. The BBC Micro was never really marketed in the US, and the Sinclair 8-bit computers were sold under the Timex-Sinclair label, but failed miserably in the market (unlike the UK where they were seen as the "working man's computer" because they were so cheap, in the States I think they were seen more as useless toys - unlike the more useful computers that were coming out at the time, in particluar the Trash-80).

Re:gah

[evilviper]

SMPS technology was in its infancy.

So? There's no reason PCs couldn't have operated with linear power supplies. They are even cheaper than SMPS. Effeciency and size wasn't much of an issue at the time.

Storage technology involved huge platters or huge tapes.

Although slow, cassette tapes were a real option back then. Large floppy disks from IBM were also starting to appear at the time, although expensive.

RAM was damn expensive.

Everything was expensive. That doesn't mean there wasn't a market for low-spec'd, expensive machines (still far smaller and far less expensive than minicomputers).

So what did they think Intel should have done? Released a "PC" in 1971 that [...] had 4k RAM

Sure, why not? Even with 4K of RAM, people would definately have found uses for them.

The technology indeed wasn't ready. The PC came when it did because technology allowed it to come, not because of lack of vision.

Only if you redefine "PC" in some very specific way. Practical PCs could have come about years before they did.

C64, Amiga, and INFO Magazine

[airship]

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. :)