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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!
Self built beige boxes must be the greatest PC's of all time because I've not owned anything else in over a decade.
A PC is by definition a Personal Computer.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Useless list.
I know everybody is going to complain that their personal favorite is missing, but I can't believe that NeXT isn't on the list. I think it was one of the most influential systems of the last twenty years. In addition to all the innovations with graphics, removable storage, onboard DSP, drag and drop e-mail attachments, object-oriented framework, etc., the first web browser was developed on a NeXT.
I remember playing Bruce Lee and a ton of pirated games my parents bought for $1 a disk(all they were really worth).
It took us a while to find out: LOAD"*",8,1 or sometimes only LOAD"*",8
But once we unlocked all those games, it was a party time that finally broke the era of boring Atari 2600 games. Commodore rocked so hard. Then came Nintendo 8 bit which didn't entirely blow C64 out of the water, but was the 2nd biggest step in gaming, the first being Atari2600 or Colleco(from your vantage point) to C64.
I loved my c64 and would have kept it if someone didn't offer me $300 for it in 1993 when internet PCs were just starting to make it for the public.
God spoke to me.
OK. Sp Apple's emate is on this list, which is very cool. The emate is essentially an MP2100 Newton screen, in a clamshell with a built-in keyboard. The processor is a little different between the 2100 and the emate, but they're both arch compatible. Anyway, what matters is not the chip, but the user and programming environment. Due to the recent /. discussion on the Q1 vs. MP 2100 article, I ebayed myself a newton out of curiosity. It *IS* pretty amazing. And *awfully* slow. I mean horribly slow. Newt's Cape (web browser) can take over ten minutes rendering cnn.com in *plain text*! In comparison, my trusty old 386sx/16 from 1990 used to browse the net with lynx no trouble. Real fast.
This is not to insult the Newton dev team. The Newton was never intended to browse the net anyway, and never had any internal acceleration for text manipulation and rendering. And the environment - whoa. It's the prettiest thing since LMI and Symbolics. NewtonScript is an ease to hack. If you care you can code up c++ snippets and call them from within Newtonscript. So, you can write fast stuff - but you're still limited to NewtonScript to interact with the OS for drawing and datebase access (no filesystem, a relational db for data storage instead). Actually, I bet the relational db is part of why the Newton is so slow too.
The Newton has a lot to teach for UI consistency and streamlined design. It really was a beautiful product. I look at Squeak and think: THAT should be the next Newton. Not Gnome, KDE, or Windows XP Tablet edition (Never mind CE). *sigh*
Want to have fun? Check out Einstein, a Newton emulator for MacOS X and Linux/ARM: You'll have to use your nefarious hax0r sk11z too find a Newton ROM and then you too can learn 'bout the Newton (and emate) without having to ebay one.
The IBM-PC and PC/XT just weren't designed to be home machines. In the US, Commodore, Atari and Apple computers were all more affordable than the PC. IBMs were equipped more for business use. Monochrome graphics were standard on the IBMs, and they often had HDDs in the 10-30 MB range, not really needed in home apps then. You could get CGA color for IBMs, but it really wasn't worth it -- the home computer world is more than green, puple, black and white. 16 color C=64s and Ataris were far better for home applications where more colors was more important than higher resolution.
Even an XT clone like a "Leading Edge" was very pricey at $2000 or so in the middle of the decade. A Commodore 64 around the same time could be had for $300, another $300 or so for the floppy. A TV would do for a color monitor if you didn't want to spend another $200 for a dedicated S-Video monitor. If you bought a C=64 or an Atari for home use instead of an IBM PC, you'd have money left over to get a printer and modem and a subscription to compuserve or Q-Link. And your non-IBM comptuers had sound!
IBM tried to crack the home market with the PCJr in the 2nd half of the decade, but this annoyed and insulted home users more than anything. The keyboard, in particular, was a huge failure with the wireless interface and chicklet keys.
I'm not knocking IBM PCs. They were great business (personal) computers, and the clones made possible by the "openness" of the bus design did greatly influence home computing later. They just weren't a good choice for most homes (in the 1980s) where computers might be used to play games, run education software, some word-processing and maybe a little finance, in that order -- sort of upside-down version of what the IBMs were good for.
I am not a crackpot.