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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."

4 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Remember when? by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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
  2. Anyone remember the RUN magazine (C=64) ? by Spy+der+Mann · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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 :)

  3. Not So! Clarke was there first! by Stan+Chesnutt · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. C64, Amiga, and INFO Magazine by airship · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.