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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!
I wish that webpage with the article didn't have links with weird ads. On one hand I can see this is interesting but really, what are they measuring? It's very hard to say just that these are the best. I don't like this type of articles just listing top xx of everything listable. Maybe it's just me.
+1 Agree -1 Disagree
Let me guess... Toshiba sponsored this article?
Self built beige boxes must be the greatest PC's of all time because I've not owned anything else in over a decade.
The Commodore 64!
The Amiga 500!
A PC is by definition a Personal Computer.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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:
:p
Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K
Psion Series 5
And yes, I am British. What gave it away?
You must think in Russian.
In the 80s, Apples and Commodore's were popular, but the IBM PC was one that truly brought the "modern" pc to all houses. Only middle/uppermiddle class and above bought a "computer" back then, but it was the IBM-PC (and later, the "100% compatibles") that truly brought PCs to every household...
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.
By my definition "personal computer" and "Personal Computer" have totally different meanings.
I'm not responsible for your definitions. PC is simply an abbreviation for "personal computer" and that's the way IBM used it. IBM did not sell 5150 "PC"s. They sold "IBM PCs."
KFG
Ya know, I thought about making that joke, but decided it might be too lame. Thanks for confirming my suspicions ;)
What about the Macintosh? The first time I saw one I completely forgot why I was at this chicks house and spent the whole night playing on her brothers computer(instead of playing on her bed). If it could take my mind off breasts(hers were amazing) it could do anything.
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.
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.
I learned everything on that little guy. Kyan Pascal. Deep Blue C. Action! (a C-like language tight enough to write side scrolling shooters in) Atari Basic and later a version of BASIC that would compile to machine code for decent speed (QuickBASIC???). 6502 assembler. Even FORTRAN and Forth.
Christ on a cracker, I feel old. :(
"Apple ][? iMac? Kaypro? TRS-80? Half these things aren't even PCs, because a PC is by definition IBM-compatible."
I would have modded this -.5 Naieve instead of Troll. Oh well.
In the olden days, what we call PCs were called IBM Clones. Everything else was called PC in some form or another. (As memory serves, it was usually spelled out as 'personal computer'.) Over time, x86 machines took over and marketshares for everything else were in the single digits. The term PC, by de-facto, became 'a Windows machine using an Intel or AMD processor'. I'm not saying the definition was/is super-strict, (Linux boxes have been called PCs, for example...) but when you see mags like PC Gamer, you start building a new impression of what PC commonly refers to.
What parent poster is saying isn't totally false. We've all heard of Mac vs. 'PC' debates. I don't think the current generation is as aware of why the PC distinction took place originally. Back in the olden days, a computer occupied a huge room and only the gov't or big corps had them. Maybe I'm being a little dramatic here, but the reason my definition of PC changed was because I've been reading a lot of Asimov. His stories were rather vague about people having their own computers, but there was always some big major computer (Multivac) that everything was centralized to. It wasn't until.. what.. the 70's until people actually had significant computing power in their homes.
I think we should cut the guy a little slack. It probably would have been a little clearer if the title had said Personal Computers instead of PCs. (Though I'll grant that his post was superficially nitpicky.)
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
In our closet^H^H^H^H^H^H new museum.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
My understanding, and I would love an authoritative source on the matter, is that Ed Roberts was the first to use the term "Personal Computer" to describe the Altair. So "personal computer" predates the "IBM Personal Computer" by six years.
As the article states, there is plenty of debate over whether the Altair was the first personal computer, but most of that debate isn't arguing whether or not an earlier computer was called a "personal computer" but rather whether or not it took the role of a personal computer. (i.e. a computer used by a single person)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Another great one that is missing is the Timex/Sinclar 1000, a $99 machine with 1k of RAM.
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.
Fine, fine machines those Packard Bells were. And by 'fine' I mean 'train wreck'.
Nice to see this machine on the list. I carried one around the country for about 18 months. Wrote trip reports, meeting notes, etc. Tracked expenses. Had BASIC programs that downloaded error logs from a bunch of custom test equipment over the serial link. And it did have one of the nicer keyboards I've ever used.
...is the choice of model. The 600 series Thinkpad, released at the height of the Dot-Com Boom, has got to be the epitome of Thinkpad-dom. It was light, (5 pounds!) it was versatile, it could run as a "3 spindle machine" (HD, Optical and Floppy) if you put the Floppy Drive in an external case that connected to a proprietary connector by a cable. During the Dot-Com Boom, the 600 series Thinkpad was a status symbol. It was the laptop the Big Dogs carried, unless they were Mac fans in which case they'd have a "Wallstreet" PowerBook.
The 600 series was the first to have official instructions on the IBM website on how to install Linux. (Red Hat, for the curious.) There was always a problem with the quirky sound chip, and it took IBM years to put out a driver (F/OSS, to their credit) for the MWave modem chip. Red Hat actually "certified" the 600 series Thinkpad, in spite of those problems.
The 600 "DNA" was transfered to the T series of Thinkpads, a series still in continued manufacture by Lenovo. Whether the T60 is a worthy member of the line is something the jury's still out on, but the T4x series remain classics.
Yes, the 700C was first. The 701C with its "butterfly keyboard" had more panache, and might have been a better choice for the Thinkpad niche. But the 600 series would have been the best choice of all, because it's the beginning of a continuum of perhaps the "best of the best" of the whole line.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
It's not you: I'm just this horrifically socially awkward with everybody.