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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."
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
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
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!
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.
"Cats like plain crisps"
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!
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...
Think how different it might have been today... if only some of the big unix vendors back then had thought: Gee, lets push our operating system as a general purpose desktop system.
Like, Microsoft Xenix?
Or, the AT&T Unix PC?
Or, AUX on a 680x0 Macintosh?
Or, NeXTStep?
Or, Sun Workstations?
Yeah... it would have been real different if any of the above had existed twenty years ago. But, I guess we can only imagine...
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.
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.
It sounds like you pay a bit more attention to advertising than you really should. The reason you don't see it is that (despite Apple's ads) it's not real. Rather the contrary: the last time a Mac actually gained noticeable market share was the original iMac. 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.
This "change of venue" helps them considerably. On the computer front, they have a major problem: almost any change large enough to stand any chance of gaining significant market share would also very likely alienate a large portion of their existing user base. The iPod gives Apple a way out: instead of taking huge gambles in the OS, they just quietly de-emphasize the Mac, and put their real effort into iPods (which are more profitable anyway).
In fact, I'd personally guess that Apple's switch to Intel processors is driven far more by the iPod's success than by technical details like CPU clock speed or power consumption. The improvement in Macs will be an almost accidental side-effect. The fact that it lets them concentrate on iPods instead of things like bridge chips and motherboards for PowerPCs means far more. Of course, they do still make quite a bit of money on Macs, so they have to de-emphasize them slowly, carefully, and in a way that doesn't alienate their user base (after all, that's why they can't make significant improvements in the Mac either). Over time, however, the Mac will become much more like a generic PC clone, with just enough unique to Apple to prevent running OS/X on anything Apple didn't sell. Eventually, even those trivial differences may be eliminated in favor of using a "Trusted Computing Platform" to "manage your rights", so they can charge a 20% premium for what will otherwise be an utterly generic PC.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
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.
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!
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.
DUH! How about the one that hit Newton on the head? In fact, that
is EXACTLY what was on the original Apple computer logo, a drawing of Isacc Newton and the apple.
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."
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.