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The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the where's-my-compaq dept.

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!

10 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Case mods wouldn't count, so... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Self built beige boxes must be the greatest PC's of all time because I've not owned anything else in over a decade.

    1. Re:Case mods wouldn't count, so... by KozmoStevnNaut · · Score: 5, Insightful

      How the hell did an IBM Stinkpad make the list?!?!?!?!

      Let's see...
      Perhaps because it was one of the first proper and usable laptops?
      Because Thinkpads are some of the most dependable laptops you can find?
      Because they have always been and always will be quietly stylish (black is always cool) instead of in-your-face?
      Because Thinkpads are the laptops most often chosen by companies whose employees depend on their laptops working perfectly all the time?

      I have a T42 myself, and the only laptops currently available that I would even consider switching to are:
      A) A newer Thinkpad, preferably an X model.
      B) A Panasonic Toughbook (One of the "semi-rugged" ones).
      or
      C) A Macbook (If they finally figure out how much thermal paste to apply and sort out a few other bugs in the process).

      It may not be flashy, it may not have all kinds of silly features or ultra powerful graphics or a super high resolution monitor, but it's built tough, every built-in function works perfectly every single time, the bundled Windows software is actually useful, the keyboard is the best laptop keyboard ever made, the Linux support is second to none and the configurability is very nice (4- or 8-cell battery in the main battery bay, DVD-drive can be swapped for another type of drive or an additional battery).

      Yes, I am very happy with my Stinkpad. It runs Windows XP and GNU/Linux better than any other brand of laptop I have encountered, and it does what I need perfectly.

      --
      Eat the rich.
  2. Re:WTF? by Gothmolly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A PC is by definition a Personal Computer.

    --
    I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
  3. 'Personal computers', but not 'PCs' by payndz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

    --
    You must think in Russian.
  4. Re:WTH? by plover · · Score: 5, Interesting
    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.

    --
    John
  5. One of many "missing" by Frequency+Domain · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. I gotta say it by popsicle67 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Clearly a contentious list by topical_surfactant · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. Ok, now for -my- list, and... by jd · · Score: 5, Interesting
    ...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.

    --
    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)
  9. Re:IBM PC not #1? by Rob+the+Bold · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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...

    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.