The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time

theodp writes "As the IBM PC turns 25, the editors of PC World present their list of The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time (IBM & others) and the rationale behind their picks. What, no IMSAI 8080?" And my favorite compaq luggable is missing too. Clearly this subjective and arbitrary list is subjective and arbitrary!

Comments

Re:Case mods wouldn't count, so...

[cyclone96]

Indeed, the Thinkpad is so dependable it's been the only laptop used by NASA in space for over a decade, as described here. In all fairness, some of that can also be attributed to the long relationship between NASA and IBM. IBM wrote the flight software for the Space Shuttle, among other things, and in general does an outstanding job on government contracts.

The crew of the Space Station has around a dozen A31Ps that are used for both non critical office type tasks (those run XP) and critical command and control functions (those thankfully DO NOT run XP, they run RedHat). There's a few elderly 760XDs and 760EDs onboard that are used for some specialized functions that aren't worth certifying on faster machines as well.

The Russian Segment also has a suite of Thinkpads (which, given the practical nature of Russian engineering to use what "just works" - is probably the biggest compliment).

A Very American List

[uohcicds]

This list is indeed very US-centric. And OK, there's nothing inherently wrong with that, being as it's a US site and everything, but there is something missing from this list.

In the UK in the late 70's and early 80's a very different computing buzz was going on, so I'd like to mention the claims of two other machines: the BBC Micro and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

The Spectrum was the machine (even more than the ZX80 and 81 before it) that switched lots of kids of my generation onto computing. And it's why, to this day, we have some of the best programmers, developers (and games people) in the world. It may not have had the graphics and audio power of the C64, but it took ingenuity to squeeze perfomance out of Uncle Clive's little rubber keyed wonder. A huge kitechen sink games market grew up around the Spectrum and many of us learned to program on it.

The BBC Micro was damn near ubiquitous in British schoools in the 1980's and is probably the one thing about Margaret Thatcher's time in office that she called absolutely correctly: the need to get computers into schools. Sincalir came very close to winning the contract to supply BBC-badged computers to put into our schools (as apart of an initiative to introduce home computing to the masses), but in the end Acorn (later to become ARM) got the nod. For the time, the Beeb was a pretty powerful and expandable machine, with probably the best version of BASIC on the market.

Both of these machines helped to kick start computing in the UK, but never really made it across the pond (though the Speccy was badged as a Timex sinclair and sold in the states). A whole generation of kids used the Beeb at school and came home ot a spectrum (the best seller here). Before the IBM ear, these were the machines that defined home comuting in the UK.