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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..."
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.