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
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.
Sounds vaguely familiar.
GOodbye, fair karma.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
>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 thought Apple had something of a resurgence in the last couple years, but I don't see much indication of that.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, though I'm a Mac guy myself and just don't use Windows, it amazes me looking back that Apple had such faith in their OS and more importantly in developers' abilities to write solid code that they had next to nothing protecting anything in the system. They even placed things in memory in such a way that crashes were likely to be even more catastrophic - like placing key system variables in very low memory, not far off location 0 - and we all know what writing to NULL does, don't we?
The system bomb only appeared if you were lucky - in fact most crashes hosed the machine so badly that even that couldn't be displayed (and in spite of appearances, the system bomb isn't drawn in a real window, or uses any of the high-level code - it's just faked out to look that way, drawn by some very low level code in ROM that in theory should always be runnable... though to be honest the BSOD is probably preferable, since the bomb always made YOU feel like an idiot...)
What is remarkable looking back is not that the original Mac OS was crude compared to what we expect today, but that it actually worked at all. Things have changed massively on OS X - not only is there no system bomb, but very littl elikelihood of needing one. Yes, crashes do happen - I've had perhaps 2 kernel panics in the last year - but they are so rare as to be easily ignored. If Apple had somehow put in some of the memory protection that we take for granted now into the original Mac - I know, I know, technology wasn't available, blah blah - then the history of computing might have turned out differently. But then you could say that about a lot of things.
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
"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...
microsoft created OS/2 v1 for IBM when the big blue released the first PC-AT based around intel's 80286 (they still had the 80 prefix at that time). the objective was to take advantage of 286's protected mode, which allowed the OS to use a flat 16 MB memory space and multitasking capabilities.
it was a fiasco for several reasons. one of them was the 286 could switch from "real mode" (in this mode it was little more than a glorified 8086) to "protected mode" (with all the new features), but there was no way to switch back to real mode. the result was that to run MS-DOS (which required "real mode") they needed some ugly hacks, and the compatibility was far from perfect, specially for things like lotus 1-2-3.
when they added a GUI, things became even worse. if you tried to run a real-mode DOS app in full (text) screen, it was almost impossible to switch back and forth between graphical an text mode. the reason was the EGA graphics cards. those older cards (CGA, Hercules, EGA, etc.) had write-only registers. this meant that the OS had to keep a table in main memory with a copy of the registers, otherwise it was impossible to know the state of the graphics card. since DOS apps had direct access to card's registers, it was impossible for OS/2 to know in wich state DOS programs left the graphics card, making switching modes impossible.
the GUI was called "desktop manager" and looks pretty much like windows 3.0's. here's some screenshots
What ? Me, worry ?
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!
"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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
Lousy article, 2/10 if I'm generous.
/Elite/, the classic BBC game (and Spectrum and C64) on steroids.
They've missed several very important PCs - ones from the equally keen, equally inventive, but smaller, UK market.
Where are Clive Sinclair's ZX80 (1st PC < #100), ZX81, ZX Spectrum, and QL (cheapest of the 4 68k machines)? TI rebranded some of those in the US, I know.
Where was the BBC Electron, Model A, and Model B. And the Acorn Archimedes with the ARM processor. A processor so well designed that pretty much every single other micorprocessor manufacturer has licensed its design (TI, Intel, Motorola, etc., etc.). I know the Beeb reached the US as my g/f had one when she was growing up.
It mentions Wing Commander, but has conveniently forgotten that WC was just
And why is the era of the 20 address bit PC, and the 32-bit register 24-bit address space ST/Amiga/Mac/QL called the "16 bit era"? The 6502 and Z80 machines were the heyday of the 16-bit era. The fact that shitty PCs had a shitty OS was the "oh my god, 16-bit legacy refuses to die" era.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
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.
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?
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.
My second point was that if it wasn't DRM encumbered, and was allowed to run a full OS, its share in the home market would probably make up a significant percentage, just like the commodore amiga did back in the 90s.
My final point, although it was probably the weakest, is that it doesn't matter what you are selling, if its not Intel/Windows its not a 'real' computer in the eyes of the public. It doesn't matter how fast, how well it works, or how much better it is than Wintel, people will always assume its a toy unless it got the wintel seal of approval.
For example devices you can send email from:
What do people buy when they want to send email regularly? A wintel box. Why? Because its a real computer, and everything else is just playing at email... at least thats the perception.
Its not really the publics fault. We might be used to the IT horizon changing every couple of months, but other social groups just arn't used the that rapid sense of change. It might be 5 years since you couldn't transfer a Mac floppy/usb stick to a PC, but its only now that this fundamental change is starting to sync with the public psyche.
Linux has gotten an even bigger mountain to climb. It may be getting some free advertising in the national press, but if you ran a vox pop on Linux asking "What do you know about Linux?" I'd bet you get more half truths, fud and outdated misconceptions than in a Microsoft marketing thinktank, and if you can find anyone who's even heard of *BSD out side of the IT industry I'd be very suprised.
As for your point about price tags. I understand that the machines are subsidised, and that they recoupe that cost through development licenses and game sales, I just don't remember asking for it. Nintendo sold their games on cartriges because it made the games load faster. I can respect that, especially as the console before that was a spectrum 48k. I can also see that from a business point fo view it entitled them to charge for game licences and development kits... cartridge fabricators arn't exactly standard on new PCs.
What annoyed the hell out of me was when Sony and Microsoft waded in with commodity hardware and decided to cripple the real functionality and decide that what the community wanted was cheaper, but restricted hardware, and then getting all pissy when people didn't want to play just the offical games. If you stick USB ports, firewire, CD/DVD drives on a box with a general purpose CPU in it, its going to be cracked. Release the development kit, and let nature create the greatest games on the planet.
I don't have a problem with copyright holders coming down hard on piracy rackets who are profiting at the expense of their expertise and genius. I don't have a problem with console builders suing the hell out of software companies that sell games without paying a licence. I do have a problem with publishing houses and hardware vendors who penalise people for wanting to get the most of hardware that they own, using free software. If you buy lost leader ink-jet paper from Costco are you restricted from using it in a printer your bought from Best Buy? Of course not.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
I think he's saying "Why can't you get OpenOffice (equiv) for XBOX?" Which is a good question. Why don't all computers come with a BASIC interpretor anymore?
I looked at this issue on a thread a long time ago, and I'll restate it here - people don't care about computers anymore. I don't know why. My kids have access to gaming and coding technology I would have killed for, and they don't even care. They don't even play computer games much anymore - they're simply not interested. What the heck happened?
Game Informer this month released the 'statistic' that 78% of teenagers were becoming "less interested" in gaming. Anyone know if this is an actual trend? I thought gaming was on the rise. Computer Science certainly doesn't seem to be.
-WS
An operating system should be like a light switch... simple, effective, easy to use, and designed for everyone.
"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."
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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
There were several floppy-based disk operating systems for the Altair and 8080 clones. In 1976 Digital Microsystems brought out a floppy disk subsystem bundled with CP/M, and that machine was capable of doing real work. Digital Microsystems folded, but CP/M went on to dominate the world of serious applications up till the IBM PC came out.
CP/M started life as a software product (you wrote your own keyboard and display drivers in assmbly language), but took off when Digital Microsystems, Compal, and many others began bundling it with their systems. It dominated "serious" computing until the IBM PC came out. IBM bundled DOS with the machine and charged $75 extra for CP/M. CP/M continued technical excellence -- multitasking and a LAN version followed -- but DOS swamped it in the marketplace.