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

'Personal computers', but not 'PCs'

[payndz]

If the list is just 'personal computers' in the most general and literal sense rather than the generally accepted 'Wintel/IBM PC-compatibles' definition, then I'd also like to nominate:

Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K
Psion Series 5

And yes, I am British. What gave it away? :p

Re:WTH?

[plover]

They listed the Amiga 1000, which was the first generation of Amiga, and was truly a novel machine. Everything from the multitasking OS to the custom graphics chipsets was new.

The 500, while still a cool box, wasn't a great technological leap forward. It was merely a mass-marketing-wrapped version of the 1000. (And Commodore poorly mass-marketed it!) As the easter egg hidden inside one of the later versions of Workbench said: "We made Amiga, they [Commodore] f*cked it up".

If they wanted to glorify Commodore in this list, a better representation might have been the Pet. That was probably the pinnacle of Commodore's technological achievements.

Clearly a contentious list

[topical_surfactant]

Many people who have read this wonder why the Commodore 64 and the VIC 20 were cut out. I think that the biggest excuse the authors may use is that those two machines were not breakthroughs in technology, but breakthroughs in affordability. I still believe that this is an incomplete argument though, especially in light of the huge popularity of the 64 and the resulting massive available software and reference rag libraries. In the United States, the 64 jump-started the home computing craze by being flexible enough to be a do-it-all machine: productivity suites, games and scientific tools were all available.

A friend who used to work at Lockheed told me how they once developed a communications bus that worked on the 64's parallel port and allowed the computers to be used as a multi-node supercomputer. They used the rig to calculate "safe" trajectories and orientations for a stealth fighter jet when flying through hostile radar zones. They bought the machines at Toys R Us.

Ok, now for -my- list, and...

[jd]

...I bet that no matter how much people disagree with my personal picks, more people will at least comprehend why I picked them, unlike the original article's list!

1. Ok, I have to admit the Apple II was cool for its time. If you plugged in enough cards, it could even fry an egg on the back of the case.
   
2. The Commodore PET 3032 was at least as impressive, and even came with bullet-proof steel armour plating.
   
3. The ZX-81 was powerful enough to be used in robotics and was one of the smallest computers ever built.
   
4. Commodore's Amiga had one of the most amazing colour graphics systems of the time. It even had some support for parallel processing, as you could plug in additional processors in the back.
   
5. The BBC Micro Model B had far more sophisticated I/O than any machine of its age (and is rarely equalled to this day) and supported both multiple processors and parallel memory banks in upper memory. Some of the earliest LAN party games were developed for this machine.
   
6. Acorn's Archimedes wasn't spectacular, but had a damn good pre-emptive OS and was a very solid machine. Oh, and it also introduced programmers to the notion of RISC, which sparked a revolution in computer design.
   
7. The Viglen 386 machines had some cool memory management - unlike most machines of that time, you could use both the mainboard and the extra memory at the same time, so you had an extra megabyte to play with.
   
8. Who can forget the Osbourne 1? The machine itself wan't amazing, but DID introduce the concept of mobile computers to the public, which revolutionized how people looked at machines. Greatness can come from altering perceptions.
   
9. Many machines could be used for multiple tasks, but the All-In-One was the first to really the first to get it through to people that this was a practical way to use them.
   
10. The Apple Macintosh was the machine that truly introduced the world to GUIs, hypertext (hypercard) and action-based (as opposed to command-based) computing.
    
11. The Simon, however, has all of the above beat. Designed and mass-marketed in the 1950s, it was the earliest PC ever built - LOOONG before the Altair and long before even the microprocessor.
    
12. The Apple G5 was the first well-known 64-bit personal computers (a market AMD and Intel are only now dabbling in)
    
13. The Transputer was arguably an entire 32-bit PC on a single chip, when most computers were still 8-bit or 16-bit at best, with support for infinitely scalable parallel processing. In terms of design, it was utterly revolutionary. In terms of its impact on parallel programming, it was phenominal. In terms of Inmos' ability to sell them, it was the greatest disaster to have ever walked the Earth. Mind you, Thorn EMI (who owned Inmos, and were mostly into selling records and music equiptment) didn't help matters.
    
14. The AMULET is another system-on-a-chip, but is also totally asynchronous - an amazing achievement for a modern CPU, never mind a SoC. A variant, called the OCCULET (which runs Occam) is freely downloadable.
    
15. Gateway PCs. The design was crap, the reliability was questionable, the cowprint was sad, but it seriously kicked ass on price for a long time. Mind you, at one point they used convicts to build them. Gateway's contribution was to kill the overinflated prices and overinflated egos. That was an impressive achievement by any standard.