Slashdot Mirror
Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes
Harry writes "Once upon a time, it wasn't a given that PC owners should be able to format their own floppy disks. Or that ports should be standard, not proprietary. Or that it was a lousy idea to hardwire a PC's AC adapter, or to put the power supply in the printer so that a printer failure rendered the PC unusable, too. Over at Technologizer, Benj Edwards has taken a look at some of the worst design decisions from personal computing's early years — including ones involving famous flops such as the PCJr, obscure failures such as Mattel's Aquarius, and machines that succeeded despite flaws, like the first Mac. In most instances — but not all — their bad decisions taught the rest of the industry not to make the same errors again."
Patents and proprietary, closed standards -- Open standards lead to innovation and better hardware for consumers. Look at some of the junk in that article... Engineers need the challenge of having other people improve upon their ideas. Open standards and open-source *will* win because people work best working together. Capitalism certainly won't die but it needs to learn this lesson.
Honourable Mention: Keyboards -- Most computer keyboards are designed for some other lifeform -- one with a single arm bearing 10 or more fingers. Consumers accept the familiar "conventional" keyboard because it's familiar and conventional. The keyboards that are best for human beings have a "split" or curve in the centre. There are many horrible keyboards, so I'd like to mention some excellent ones:
GoldTouch
Adesso Ergonomic
original Microsoft Natural (not the later rubbish that claimed to be "ergonomic" just because it had a fake leather wrist support -- while maintaining the straight-row key configuration that is bad for wrists)
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Yeah, mod me down, I dare ya!
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Well... at least it wasn't spread out over 15 pages.
Those machines that had 512MB of RAM that ran Vista is surely a mistakes that hopefully won't happen with Windows 7.
Problem #1: No Power Supply Fan
Problem #2: Limited Apple II Compatibility
Problem #3: No Way to Format Disks
Problem #4: EM Pulse Erases Tapes
Problem #5: Printer Required
Problem #6: Rubber Keyboard
Problem #7: Non-Detachable AC Adapter
Problem #8: Miserable Keyboard
Problem #10: Sidecar Expansion
Problem #11: No User Expandability
Problem #12: Slow BASIC
Problem #13: Sidecar Expansion
Problem #14: Bulky Expansion Modules
Problem #15: Unreliable Proprietary Disk Drives
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The general trend from the article seems to be when you try to make things "easier" for your users, you end up failing. And even though its not classic, I think the "underpowered" Vista machines deserve at least a mention.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
IOCHRDY signal is active high instead of active low. Causes no end of problems.
Who else has been burned by less popular keyboard layout? I'll still occasionally be hunting for the ` and end up with a [ thanks to the TI-99 or click the bottom-left key expecting a \ thanks to my old Packard Bell keyboard. Maybe not a mistake, but definitely a massive frustration.
First of all, we had a great time playing 7 cities of gold on the pcjr, so just back off. Second, the worst design decision ever is not hardware, its software: the path editing text box found on all windows systems.
Sun got it right on their keyboard design, but everyone else kept the CapsLock key. I've been using computers for 21 years, and I use Ctrl constantly. I do not recall ever having used the CapsLock key (except out of curiousity to see whether it actually does anything.)
(Well, that's a bit of a lie. Of course I use it, after reassigning it to Ctrl. But the point is, having to take that step is a waste of time.)
CapsLock was useful once upon a time, when there was no \section{} or \textbf{}, and when pressing `shift' actually required strenght. But those days are gone.
My personal list...
- 15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
- Beige Only. You can pick any color, as long as it is beige. Why did it take so bloody long to offer any other color then beige? Critical mass?
- LOUD systems. Have to thank George for showing me just how nice a quiet system is.
- Power hunger systems. 2 molex connections for a GPU ?!
- Crap 3D Video cards in laptops, and almost no benchmarks from the "classic" hardware review sites so you know how bad it sucks compared to a "real" GPU. (Thankfully the S3 Virge is gone from desktops, but laptops are still stuck with poor performance unless you pay an arm and a leg.)
--
"World of Warcraft (TM) is the McDonalds (TM) of MMOs."
-- Michaelangel007
O/S in flash (possibly upgradable / patchable from BIOS)
Integral flat screen
no user accessible parts inside
LCD monitor form factor, not desktop box with screen on top
machine uniquely identified by MAC address, or something like it
This sounds a lot like a loptop - I wonder how many of these points would make 2019's list of greatest design mistakes?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
has always been the cup holder. That shit always snaps under the strain of my 48-oz. coffee.
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison
the choice of IBM to use the 8086 CPU. It set back the computer industry several years. The PC would now be at least 2 generations ahead if IBM did not use the retarded 8086 design.
Obviously, IBM did not believe in personal computers and thought they were gimmicks.
1 square inch of Scotch brand #33 electrical tape.
Our family once owned an old Sony VAIO desktop. It came with a floppy drive, but as it was the year 2000, floppies were quickly becoming unfashionable. Because of this, Sony hid the floppy drive behind a small plastic hatch. The problem? The hatch attached to the case with a small but fairly powerful magnet... which corrupted every single disk inserted into the drive. To this day I'm wary of Sony products (and VAIOs in particular) because of that little screw-up.
--- Bwah?
Having to press a key on the keyboard and click has got to be the most entertaining solution I have seen as 'good' in a long time.
I think it is funny the genius bar people practically tell people to get a microsoft mouse.
multiple cable speaker systems, its about time we had a single cable solution for attached speakers that provided easy to implement separation of channels. USB for everything please, or something similar.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
It amazes me how advanced this system* was for it's time and that it didn't catch on better than it did. The graphics and sound (just for starters) was many years ahead of it's time; x86 was still in EGA and speaker beeps at the time.
[*] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Graphics
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
There's still twice as many pages as needed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Does anybody know what the "unique document management metaphor that has yet to be replicated in a mainstream OS" is, and why it might have set a new standard in computing? It sounds terribly intriguing. Might this be something that could/should be added to Linux?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Smart phones are current decade's generation of personal computing like PDAs were in the 90s, and PCs in the 80s. We see some of the same trade-offs between of proprietary vs openess, short-cutting essential hardware features, clunky GUIs, etc we saw in the 80s. Will Apple's clean, but proprietary SDK win over the more portable, but clunky Android? Does a darkhouse OS like the new Pre, Windows ME, or micro-Java stand a chance? Will non-keyboard phones win over keyboard phones? And so on. Some of these debates have clear answers and others we are waiting for the market to decide.
I had one of those rubber-chiclet-keyboard Aquarius machines, as well as many add-ons. The expansion was not as bad as the "sidecar" models (PCjr and 99/4A), but it was still cartridge-based. This was fine if you only wanted one cartridge -- say, the 16k memory expansion -- but if you wanted more you needed an even bigger cartridge that allowed you to plug two cartridges into it (vertically). Ugly, ugly, ugly. The spreadsheet software came on a cartridge, so if you wanted to run that and have a reasonable amount of RAM (if you can call 20k reasonable), you HAD to use the expansion unit. This also is where you connected the Intellivision-style game controllers.
The printer was thermal and 40 columns, and it printed only in BLUE. Not black, blue. This made it absolutely useless for classwork.
I learned the rudiments of BASIC on this machine, and wrote a text-mode baseball game, but that's about all it was good for.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Putting CAPS LOCK key next to 'A' on the keyboard? It was the first thing I thought of.
I really love technologizer.com; there are some terrific articles on there, and lots of "top n lists". Quite nice to browse if you have downtime at work--you can learn a lot and get some laughs too. Another fun read from these guys, keep it up!
10 FILL MUG WITH COFFEE
20 DRINK COFFEE
30 GOTO 10
The standard non-ergonomic keyboard.
You call that a keyboard? THIS is a keyboard!
Second place: Point-and-click electronic-device-plus-finger-paradigm user-interfaces.
It's pretty hard to create something more inefficient... (as an UI. Even the command shell is faster.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
A dirty trick that is still around in even the newest X86 processors and causing problems for hardware engineers and has security implications. The first xbox was hacked partially because of the A20 gate (pdf description of vulnerability) and maybe Intel will stop using the A20 gate in the upcoming Nehalem generation.
Also, the number of people with 68000 experience was limited. Many, many programmers were familiar with the base 8 bit architectures and could easily convert. This was important for a cheap product which, in its early years, was mainly doing 8-bit character based stuff, while the 68000 found a lot of early use in relatively high-end systems like workstations and laser printers where the more efficient 16-bit operations could shine.
To use the famous car analogy, Ford would not be two vehicle generations ahead had they decided from the outset to use 4 valve per cylinder DOHC fuel injected engines rather than cooking two valve carb engines. They would be a niche manufacturer.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Installing Windows on a PC with special hardware (like a raid controller) STILL requires a floppy drive to load the driver.
... you have to type a lot of acronyms (and not in TeX, either). Also, strength has nothing to do with the use of CapsLock... the point is having to avoid constantly shifting from the left Shift key to the right Shift key as you type a passage in all caps.
You can have my CAPSLOCK key when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!
That was one of the most serious design mistakes of the last thirty years, but it's only really interesting because it's symptomatic of Apple's design philosophy, which is: "Do as I wilt".
The one-button mouse spanned multiple generations of Apple computers and underscored Apple's stubborn unwillingness to produce computers that do what their users want, and not what Jobs or Apple's HID team think they should do.
Really. Apple refuses to correct the annoyances of the UI that should not exist. Why doesn't OSX have a maximize window button? Why does clicking on "one hour before event" for an ical event reset the clock to one hour before the time you click the button, and not one hour before the event? Why doesn't finder support afp connections over ssh?
None of those things seem to be complex, every one of them is a failure of the UI, and yet none of them have been corrected.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
A: No PSU fan (leading to thermal warping of internal components)
B: Limited Apple II Compatibility (Limited Compatibility)
C: No way to format disks
D: EM Pulse Erases tapes (unreliable media)
E: Printer required
F: Lousy Keyboard (#6 and #8)
G: Non-detachable AC adapter
H: Ridiculous external expansion options (10, 13, and technically 14)
I: No user expandability
J: Slow BASIC
K: Unreliable disk drives
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I believe the biggest mistake was IBM using an Intel8088, instead of a Motorola68000.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if IBM choose in the early 1980s a 32 bits processor for the first successful Personal Computer!
The biggest single problem with the PCjr was that it was late. In 1984 it was supposed to be on the shelf in the fall - October is the usual month when things are supposed to be shipped so they are stocked and on the shelf in November.
Didn't happen. Macy's had received $50,000 to hold shelf space for the PCjr and they left them empty.
The PCjr came out in February. A little late for Christmas. Everyone had created products for Christmas 84 specifically for the PCjr, but there wasn't anything to run them on. January 1985 CES was pretty dead - lots of PCJr games that nobody cared about. Parker Brothers closed down their electronic games division, as did lots of other companies right about then. It was a year or so later that the Nintendo finally started making inroads into the home game market but between the PCjr and Nintendo things were very, very dead.
You can say all you want about a poor design of the keyboard and limitations of the hardware. But it is even more difficult to use when it doesn't exist and cannot be purchased. Not having it in time killed it, not any stupid design decisions.
when there was no \section{} or \textbf{}, and when pressing `shift' actually required strenght. But those days are gone.
Don't you ever, no I won't do it that way, shout? If it only prevented people from shouting so much, I think getting rid of the caps lock would be great.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
hmm, they must have been running the webserver on that Apple III and it burnt to a crisp
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Well, way I see it, not really. At _least_ half the mistakes there are about cutting corners (e.g., the crappy cheap keyboards, an ultra-expensive computer shoved out the door with an unreliable floppy drive, etc), and most of the rest are about blatantly trying to nickel-and-dime the users (e.g., the lack of a format command so they have to buy their floppies from you only, or all the connectors on the PC Jr being incompatible with the standard PC ones, etc.)
Unfortunately both types of failures are standard stapples of capitalism, so don't expect them to go away any time soon. Even though those particular 15 manifestations of them might not happen again, we're just seeing new and innovative ways to do the same two things. E.g., when EA cuts costs on testing their new game, _and_ launches a new game with over half the content sold separately (check out The Sims 3: from day 1 there was more virtual furniture for sale for real money on their site than included with the game)... I'm sure you can see the same two things at work.
E.g., for hardware, when as you correctly mention a system that's waay underpowered for Vista is sold as Vista ready, you have the first failure mode in action: they wanted to sell a system as Vista ready, without actually including the expensive hardware needed to actually be ready. It's just cutting corners.
E.g., nickel-and-diming... well, let's just say HP's whole printer ink business is based on that. It recently even reached such absurdity as including chips to make the ink or toner cartridge artifficially "expire" after a while, even if there's actually plenty of ink left inside. For some users that already was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I expect some bright MBA to try something even more ham-fisted soon.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Mac started out on the 68K. Ok it was more advanced than the PC to start but I think its fair to say that the only thing (arguably) slightly more advanced about Macs these days (and certainly not 2 generations ahead) is the OS. The hardware is commodity PC.
As for commodore and atari, well, we know how well using the 68K panned out for them. Just proves that ultimately marketing wins and technological ingenuity comes a poor second.
Crap 3D Video cards in laptops, and almost no benchmarks from the "classic" hardware review sites so you know how bad it sucks compared to a "real" GPU. (Thankfully the S3 Virge is gone from desktops, but laptops are still stuck with poor performance unless you pay an arm and a leg.)
That's thankfully improved greatly now that Intel's moved beyond their GMA 950 lines. Lack of hardware T+L was really murder, no vertex shaders, no hardware geometry... those features are coming up on 10 years old and we still saw laptops powered by this hardware as recent as a year ago.
My Lenovo T61p, now about a year old, was quite cheap (under $1200) and came with an NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M. It doesn't exactly play the latest games on full settings, but it's good enough for most.
I'm glad they mentioned the TI 99/4A sidecars. I had a couple of these before getting the P-box. With all the engineers working at Texas Instruments, had none of them heard of "cables"? With a memory expansion and a floppy drive (which still needed it's own sidecar for the controller) your TI was already taking up the entire desk. And god forbid you nudge anything accidentally, and cause the whole thing to crash.
I was involved in a project about that time to roll out PCs to the all the UK dealerships of a certain Japanese car manufacturer. Every machine that went out had to have certain hardware installed, like ISDN cards and (I think) removable harddisk cages, so we had to open each one up. In the end we we had to make it part of our standard despatch procedure to check the cases for blood stains before packing them up..
(This was the same time that PC cases moved away from simply being held together by those terribly user-unfriendly things called screws, and instead had all sorts of cheap and nasty plastic clips that had to be yanked apart with brute force. Our major cause of blood-letting was getting the front panel off, which - I think - was required to get at whatever it was the secured the side panels.)
16 intel GMA video and systems with no agp back when agp was all over place. also at the same time ati and nvida had better on board video at the same price as well.
too bad apple fell in to this.
Why do so many MOBO's have the SATA connectors behind the PCI Express slots? It is amazing that this problem is still around. Do the designer's even do a cursory simulation of SLI boards being installed before finalizing their layouts?
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
I was programming in x86 assembler (by necessity - not choice) at the time and the X86 instruction set sucks big time. The 68000 was far easier. No programmer worth his salt would choose X86.
The X86 still used 32 bits for the address but they overlapped the two 16 bit pieces so there were many ways to form the same address. It was INSANE!
IBM missed the boat, created a major competitor in the process and short themselves in the foot many times as a result. About all that saved IBM's PC bacon back then was that they had a lot of feet to shoot at.
IMHO when I read the article - its great. It shows how the rush to market can put a company out of business real quick.
BTW, I looked at the Lisa. I didn't buy it. I looked at a lot of the other computers in the list. I didn't buy them. Apple has not EVER sold me a computer. Funny. IBM has not EVER sold me a computer.
I have been running clones since 1986.
I'll predict that Microsoft's days are numbered as well. I think the number might be large however given their cash reserves. However I am hearing people tell me they are sick and tired of the shoddy windows code and the problem with malware. I think a lot of this problem stems from the X86 days and windows 3.11
The way I see it... the general population in many ways is like a school of fish. They tend to clump together for safety reasons. However, few have much in the way of any enduring investment and just like a school of fish they can all change direction rather quickly. If/when this happens then we may see the fortunes of a company like Microsoft turn sour about as fast as we saw the fortunes of GM and Chrysler turn sour.
If this happens then people will not go back. These paths tend to be traveled but once.
From wikipedia:
An often overlooked feature the Lisa system used is document-centric[citation needed] computing instead of application-centric computing. On a Macintosh, Windows, or Linux system, a user typically seeks a program. In the Lisa system, users use stationery to begin using an application. Apple attempted to implement this approach on the Mac platform later with OpenDoc, but it did not catch on. Microsoft also later implemented stationery in a limited fashion via the Windows Start menu for Microsoft Office. Document-centric computing is more intuitive for new users because it is task-based[citation needed]. The user needs to knows which task he or she needs to perform, not which program is used to accomplish that task.
It isn't really a 'classic' mistake, but the biggest PC design problem today from where I'm standing is over-reliance on fans. High volume fans will result in fuzzy lint growing on the devices which can least afford a layer of fuzzy lint.
In the past year, I've revived dozens of computers, and nearly every failure can be directly attributed to lint induced by fans.
It's been a long time.
I could go on...!
AT&ROFLMAO
The Next Page Button.
Put the Article on ONE fscking page, not 4 !
When the Mac came out, every software user's manual had to explain how to use a mouse. I witnessed early Mac users would couldn't grasp the idea that the pointer on screen was controlled by their hand on the mouse. People would watch their hand moving instead of watching the mouse pointer on screen. A single button was the right choice in 1984. Nothing stops you from connecting a multi-button mouse to your Mac, and all of the buttons and scroll wheel work swimmingly.
People still don't understand double-click vs. single click. My father is brilliant, but he double clicks everything out of habit.
And what is "maximize" good for. Isn't it ironic for someone who derides a one button mouse to want a one window GUI ?
It would go something like this:
Well sonny, I remember it was back in the '80s. There were these guys who loved their Apple IIIs so much that, despite its faults, they kept them running for years beyond their useful lifetimes. They did this by filling their offices with industrial-strength fans pointed at those Apple IIIs. Ever since then, we've called people who continue to support obviously flawed products "fanboys"
Anyone remember the Atari 400? The budget version of the Atari 800. Had some sort of acrylic keyboard with pads that you really had to apply some pressure to for the press to register. Also had a lovely feature in the cartridge slot cover - spring loaded, and took several tries to make it latch. If the latch isn't engaged, the system wouldn't function.
16. failure to include a floppy drive in the iMac G5 and only use USB ports at a time when almost no one was using USB.
17. not really a pc design flaw but a decision that would haunt Outlook users for years, "Allow ActiveX in email made even worse with 'preview window' on by default" by MS
18. Any pc produced by Packard Bell. At one point when someone would start to ask me work on their computer I would interrupt and ask "Is this a Packard Bell?" If they answered 'yes' I would run screaming from the room.
Is he strong? Listen bud, He's got radioactive blood.
After a while, you see it all, repeated every few years.
I've been in the field almost 20 years, and I've seen all-in-one computers be the latest wonderful idea, about every few years. Apple's the only company to really make it work.
Ditto tablets. They're only really starting to be useful now.
Oh, and how about this for a questionable design decision? Two common peripherals. They use the same plugs, they're not interchangeable, and not hot pluggable. And often not clearly labeled (only in recent years have they been color coded). Swapping them with the computer on, while it usually works, actually can damage the port. It's called PS/2.
I'm sure there is a special place in hell for knockoff case manufacturers who didn't file down or round off the edges of their cases. Presumably they'll be forced to replace components in their own cases for eternity.
Two power leads for a GPU is the inevitable result of the graphics arms race that has caused video cards to outrace virtually every other component of the system. Just be glad you don't have to plug in an external power supply. That said, if you have a problem set that can be solved by a GPGPU, you'll get it done [b]way[/b] faster than you would have if you had just thrown a basic CPU at it. Modern GPUs are practically tiny supercomputers that almost anybody can afford.
My rule of thumb when looking at video cards is this: If it's Intel it's crap, just total crap. Don't buy it unless you really know for sure that you'll never want to do anything 3D. Otherwise, look at the second digit in the model number, the lower that number is the slower the card will be. Anything 4 or less is going to be slow, but still miles better than the Intel card. It doesn't always work, but typically it works reasonably well. Just be aware that you can't put a fast card in a small laptop and not melt the thing down and reduce the battery life to mere minutes. The smaller a laptop is, the slower the graphics will be in general. If you want fast graphics, you'll be stuck buying a huge heavy clunker that will make you wonder why you didn't just buy the tower instead unfortunately.
I read the internet for the articles.
And to be honest, were those bulky expansions really design mistakes or do they just seem that way now that we have the benefit of a couple of decades of experience and design put into the problems they were meant to address?
Not to mention the fact that they show some ridiculous examples of fully-loaded systems... Everything you could possibly attach to the computer at one time...
It was pretty lame how they listed that one problem ("sidecar modules") three times - and once with a different name...
I'd have a hard time seeing USB coming out back in the era being described, and not just because every company was doing its best to lock people into their own platform.
I'm not sure what your point is here. Even back then there were established standard ways of interfacing with various types of devices: Parallel port for printers, RS-232 for modems... Only disk drives were entirely left to the computer manufacturers' discretion.
And even when computer manufacturers came up with their own interfaces for that stuff (like Commodore's IEC bus for disk drives and printers, and their TTL-level serial port that saved them the cost of a connector and a line-level converter) in most cases the peripherals were still connected by cords - the cited problem with these "sidecar modules" wasn't that they were very model-specific (most hardware was, back then), it's that the whole "sidecar" idea, while convenient, didn't work out so well as the number of modules increased... Had they just made it possible to insert a length of cable somewhere into the chain of devices, the problem would have been pretty much solved.
Bow-ties are cool.
You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
Almost? I used to cut the shit out of my hands on those things. Still have some of the scars.
Why did it take so bloody long to offer any other color then beige?
Apparently nobody bothered to read up on the Henry Ford's Model T and why sales went in the crapper when the competition started offering colors other than black. The primary difference being, that at least the Model T was black and not beige. You'd think the PC sector would have learned the lesson that was nearly 100 years old. It's not that much better now, but at least now most cases are black, grey, or silver instead of a sickly flesh-color that turns snot-yellow in the sunlight.
Proprietary hw interfaces haven't gone away. I have a dead iPod on my hands, and a couple of peripherals (eg an alarm clock) with interfaces tied to the proprietary iPod connector. So, now I'm faced with having to buy another iPod, or live with an incompatible collection of stuff. My own fault I suppose, but it's so very easy to fall into that particular clever pool of quicksand.
Oh noes, they forgot XML! In all seriousness though, I don't see how the mistakes listed are anymore classic, canonical or severe than any other set of 15 problems that you could list. So the article is essentially just a piece of flamebait, a troll article.
isn't the question. Apple's failure to include a relatively simple UI feature that many of its users want is the problem.
As I said, it's symptomatic of their approach to UI in general, which is: "we'll decide what you want to do", or "Do as I wilt".
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
The worst design decision in my mind is having the hot stuff inside the computer case. It would be very simple to cool the hot parts outside the case. The CPU is easiest, just put the CPU on the backside of the motherboard and have its hot side easily accesible on the outside. That way most CPU would be sufficiantly cooled by passive cooling given a large enough dissipating area. An added benefit would be that it wouldnt be heating the rest of the computer up.
Same goes for graphics, especially the kind that just tosses the same hot air around in the case. Its no wonder a modern computer is hard to cool silently since most of the cooling happens in a very hot enviroment and has very low delta T to operate in.
HTTP/1.1 400
- 15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
10-15 years ago? I still have a scar on my left thumb from losing a fight against a new computer case 2 years ago when trying to install the DVD drive.
The PCjr's serial port, monitor port, joystick ports, keyboard port, and others used different connectors from the IBM PC. In fact they were not only non-standard connectors, but completely proprietary connectors that couldn't be found on any other computer.
People, this is 1983. All connectors were "non-standard". Nowadays we're used to a standard connector and pinout for RS-232 and parallel ports on the back of PCs. But in 1983, exactly one model of computer used them: the IBM PC. It didn't more than a couple years for people to realize that the only way to compete with the IBM PC was to be extremely compatible with it. But when the PC Jr. came out, everybody (especially IBM) used business and sales models that paid no attention to the idea that computers and their components could be commodified.
Small qualification: the use of 25-pin D-shaped connectors with specific pinouts was part of the RS-232 standard. But 25-conductor, straight-across cables cost, and you actually didn't need most of those signals for typical applications. So making cables that would connect some random computer to some random modem or serial printer was a serious black art. There was even a book on the subject.
(Jerry Pournelle once wrote that he used internal modems because he could never remember the pinouts he needed to make cables. But by the time he wrote this, RS-232 pinouts had been standardized and cheap pre-made modem cables were in all the stores. Pournelle is the original know-it-all ignoramus computer pundit.)
Parallel printer cables were even worse. They all used the Centronic de-facto standard on the printer side. But to save money, everybody used 25-pin D connectors at the computer side, and the way the 36 Centronics signals mapped to those 25 computer pins was different for every manufacturer. It took IBM to standardize the pinout, and also to standardize making the printer connector female so you didn't accidentally plug a modem into it.
*nix could not succeed at the time primarily because of cost. Unix simply needed more hardware resources.
My 1st PC cost me $10,000 and I picked it up the day the Shuttle exploded so I kinda know when that was. As the teller in the bank handed me the certified cheque she asked if I had heard of the explosions.
Today that certified cheque would be over $20,000 and perhaps more than $25,000. This was for a high end XT clone that ran at 8 mHz. IBM's machines ran at 6 mHz as I recall.
A minimum 68000 based unix system back then was about $16,000.
It _wasn't_ the cost of the CPU. It was everything else - like bigger disk drives, more memory, and so forth.
the difference between the 8088 and 8086 is that one was 8 bit bus and the other 16 bit bus. BOTH had the same instruction set and BOTH used 32 bit addresses and they did it in the same way. Note the M68000 ALSO used a 32 bit address.
The thing is the M68000 was a linear address space with addresses counting from 0 to 2^32-1. The X8088 and X8086 _also_ had integers which could count from 0 to 2^32-1. However the intel chips overlapped 12 bits of the segment and offset registers. Why? So cows could fly? I dunno. It makes no sense to me.
This gave the intel chips a total address space of 2^20 and as Billy Goat said back then - who needs more than 640 KB?
IBM _could_ have used the 68000 CPU and produced a machine at about the same cost and this is illustrated by the fact that Xerox brought out a machine which did run a cut down version of unix (I forget the model - something like a B3T?) and it was 68000 based. Similarly Apple brought out the Mac but not running unix.
This is compounded by the fact that the VAST majority of people who bought these machines simply had no idea that the Intel X86 addressing was INSANE. It was only a few years later that we ended up with extended memory and expanded memory and special cards which tried to give us windows into the memory above 1 MB. Then the 386 and 486 addressed (pun intended) this issue but by then DOS and the applications it supported were so ingrained that they have dominated to the present day.
For example, why do we use different screws to fasten down hard drives vs. CD-Rom drives?
The Amiga 1000 had a DB25 serial port and a DB25 parallel port right beside each other. Same connector. They thoughtfully provided a bunch of +12V, -12V, and -5V lines on the serial port in case you needed to power external equipment. So, if you mistakenly plugged your parallel printer cable into the serial port you put +/-12v into the input buffer of your printer. A lot of people burnt out a lot of printers that way. The 2000 used the opposite-polarity DB25 and subsequent ones used a DB9, IIRC. I have a network analyzer that uses a 5 1/2" drive as part of its operating system, so it has to read from the disc every time it boots and every time I do any GPIB access to the machine. The machine can't copy the disc and it's a non-standard drive hardware so it can't easily be read/written in another 5 1/2" drive. Sigh.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
I've been at this a long time. And I had to explain how to set the clock on a VCR to my parents when I was a kid, and tune a UHF dial. But none of those things are important.
We're talking about Apple's failure to implement relatively simple UI features that its users want. And my point is that Apple's stubborn insistence that people use its computers the way Apple intended for them to be used affects their user acceptance.
I think your example supports my conclusion better than it supports yours. More people use a two-button mouse than use a one-button mouse, so I don't buy the "there's an intellectual barrier to entry" argument.
The maximize window button is just another feature people want that Apple won't implement. Some of us spend all day in front of our computers and we want to be able to read without eyestrain. The zoom button doesn't reliably size the window to fit the contents, even if the window will fit on the screen. That's a problem.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Some things I will never understand. We know already that these kind of keyboards are bad and yet some big companies, insist on making badly designed keyboards with the same flaws in this day and age still.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
- 15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
I got cut up 2 or 3 years ago, and I'm sure cases of equally bad quality are still on the market.
open source modern art: laser taggi
I don't understand why the PCjr is bashed so much. We had one and I thought it was pretty damn good. Granted I was quite young, but we did put that machine to good use for quite a few years. We did get the chiclet keyboard, but by that point IBM was already including a similar keyboard with conventional keys so it was a moot point. I actually thought the keyboard was pretty cool. It wasn't the best for typing, but I think it was more a consequence of the technology available at the time and the size of the buttons than anything else. I'd like to think that current Apple keyboards are a spiritual successor and show that the concept wasn't necessarily a bad one. As for the IR, certainly you had to be careful with anything getting in between the keyboard and the machine, but generally it was excellent and we never ran into problems. I must preferred that to having to deal with a cable.
As for the sidecars, it's not like people at the time were upgrading machines anywhere near as frequently as they do now. And there were tons of clumsy upgrade solutions for many computers at the time. When a 128K memory card was as large, if not larger, than most video cards today there aren't many options for efficient packaging. Actually, the upgrade we got was from a company called Legacy and it pretty much was a whole other case, the size of the PCjr which added 512K of ram and added a second floppy drive. It doubled the size of the machine, but that's just how things were back then; it never bothered us.
The PCjr was a better machine than pretty much anything else I encountered through much of elementary school. It was far superior than the crappy Apple IIs we had in school. It offered better resolution and 16 colors. What did suck, however, was that it was somewhat less powerful than the IBM PCs available then and later on. While it supported CGA, it's 16 color format was proprietary and not compatible at all with EGA. But regardless, for $1000 it was a great deal and generally compatible with most IBM PC applications.
I haven't gone through all the "mistakes", but it seems like this article is written from a modern-day perspective which is inappropriate given the era when these machines were designed and manufactured.
Problem #4: EM Pulse Erases Tapes
Hardly a design mistake. Its more a lack of testing mistake.
No, pretty sure that's a design mistake. The lack of testing is just the reason they didn't find and correct the problem...
Problem #6: Rubber Keyboard
It didn't hurt the Sinclair ZX Spectrum's sales too much. I'd say the same thing about most PC keyboards sold today but it comes down to money. $6 for a cheap rubbery key keyboard or $75 for a clicky microswitch keyboard.. most people aren't prepared to pay the extra.
There's a huge difference between a rubber membrane keyboard with plastic keycaps and one without... As for the ZX Spectrum - whether the thing was popular or not I wouldn't exactly say people were happy about that keyboard...
Problem #15: Unreliable Proprietary Disk Drives
I'd say all disk drives are proprietary until they become a standard. If the machine had been a success i'm sure everyone would have licensed it.
Back then each platform would usually have its own format for data on the disk, and all of these were incompatible. However, the media itself was generally compatible between platforms. If you had a 5.25" single-density drive, then you went to the store and bought yourself a 5.25" single-density disk and formatted it at home.
The Lisa used a new type of 5.25" disk developed internally at apple - it wasn't compatible with anything. It probably cost Apple a bundle to develop it, and the drives apparently were difficult to produce. All of this could have still worked out - people could have accepted the trade-off of a non-standard disk media in exchange for the increased capacity - except that in the end the drives were unreliable. It doesn't matter how much data a drive holds if it's always at risk of corrupting the data.
And then, if you look at these disks - it seems like they'd be real confusing for users, too. When you're holding a FileWare disk to insert it, you have to hold one of the corners: because the end that's being inserted into the drive and the end facing you both have exposed disk tracks. If somebody grabbed the media as they would a regular 5.25" disk, they'd fingerprint the media.
So the issue there wasn't just that you were stuck with this crappy drive and couldn't swap it out for something else. The issue there was that Apple put a bundle into trying to make a better floppy drive and tied the Lisa platform (and the Mac, too, while it was still under development) to this standard - and they didn't make it work right. The whole thing was a fiasco - a disaster from any reasonable perspective. It probably contributed to the failure of the Lisa and it could have potentially killed the Mac as well.
Bow-ties are cool.
I mean... uhm... YAY! The C64 didn't make the list!!
wÃÃt! (Just imagine those zeroes that have little slashes through them are light blue... if they show up correctly!)
~AA
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
Sorry, just popped up in my head: The totally crap place Atari chose to hide the mouse/joystick ports on the Atari ST-Series.
Under the computer. In a really narrow inset. With tight fitting ports and plugs.
The only structural support being the pins of the ports, soldered to a keyboard circuit.
Well, it was only a matter of time the damn port broke. I remember being really mad at atari for this shit.
I cannot count the number of times I've been using somebody's home or office computer for a few minutes only to stop whatever I was doing to ask if I could fix their screen properties so that the bloody thing would stop flickering at 10 htz or whatever the slowest out of the box refresh rate happened to be when their machine was first installed a decade earlier.
Actually, I quite enjoy it now. --I say, "Okay, seriously. You're going to love this! --Check it out. . ."
Then I set the screen to its highest available frequency and the image turns rock-steady. The owner/user, (depending on how long they've been sitting in front of the offending CRT perhaps?), will either shrug and say, "Yeah, that looks better, I guess." Or they will drop their jaw and say, "Oh my god! It could have always been like that?!"
I KNOW most of you have run into this exact same scenario at least once before. If that isn't a huge design flaw, then I don't know what is. It only seems to have been solved by the advent of flat-screen technology.
-FL
Anyone remember the NeXT's magneto-optical drive? At a time when floppy disks were at their zenith, and everyone used them, the NeXT shipped in 1990 with no floppy drive. Instead, storage was on a 256 megabyte magneto-optical drive, which was totally unreliable. The NeXTstation (pizza box) finally got a floppy (though a 2.88 meg one) in 1992.
You sure hit the nail on the head!
What this did was tie us to an obsolete architecture which probably should have been taken behind the barn and shot the moment it was born.
because of this we ended up trying to write programs which needed to be shoe horned into the hardware. The thing is if a guy has a computer on his desk and wants to run a new program then he doesn't want to go out and buy another computer just to run one new program (and then another and another). We ended up with clipped wings because of a short sighted marketing decision combined with the fact that the VAST majority of people had no idea how limited the design of that CPU was.
With a 32 bit linear address space we would have grown from the early PC into the present world far faster and far easier.
As a programmer I lost years of my life due to this. With MEGABYTES of memory I was still stuck with overlay linkers. Imagine! And this was in the 486 days as well!
I would estimate the costs of this botch to our economy to be in the billions.
We could have spent the wasted time at the lake or playing with the kids.
One of my favorites was the Zenith PC compatible... It came with floppy disk drives with the traditional "fold down" switch like most floppy drives of the day. What was different was that the switch wouldn't fold down unless there was a floppy in the drive. So the lab at school I worked in had dozens of drives with broken latches that had been forced closed without a floppy in the drive. Dumb.
Brawndo: It's what plants crave!
I have a scar from slicing a knuckle to the bone that indicates that the word "almost" should be removed from this description.
Those are mistakes an end user would see. Here are some deeper mistakes from an engineerings standpoint.
if Apple's UI was consistent.
Of the three examples I gave:
Really. You can tell me an OS can't be all things to all people, and I completely agree, but these are problems that need to be corrected, not "features".
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Short sighted marketing decision?
If it werent for the 8086 being designed to easily handle 8085, 8080, and 8008 binaries, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The reason the x86 line was successfull has ALWAYS, in part, been compatability.
You can argue that other processors were better... but being better wasn't good enough, was it?
"His name was James Damore."
I heard that beige was chosen because it is the same color as most dust so beige computers don't look dirty.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
In general, I don't reply to Anonymous Cowards, but your objection is fair.
Simply put: I work in front of computers all day, and I want the text larger to reduce eyestrain.
I want the window to resize to fit the content. In your example, the content is a line of text. In my example, it is the page of a document (PDF). If the right text size for me results in content larger than the current window, and I click the zoom button, I want the window to resize to fit the content. If that would result in a window larger than the screen itself, I want the window to occupy the whole screen. This behavior is not standard in OSX. That's a problem for me.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
IMO however, introducing a cable into the mix really doesn't solve the underlying issue that this purports to be. Now instead of a huge compact piece of equipment, you have a huge sprawling piece of equipment with a spiderweb of cords.
If I were looking at the issues presented by these 'bulky expansions' I would look at a combination of issues that really weren't solvable at the time they came up.
It might be silly looking to have every exapansion plugged in at once, but consider the fact that you probably had to power down the whole system just to attached/detach an expansion, suddenly you might consider having them all plugged in all the time actually more feasible than booting up and powering down everytime your needs changed.
This was the era where 'mobile' phones were called bag phones because they still required a briefcase. Expansions, by the pure nature of the beast, were going to be bulky. You can buy an external usb powered floppy drive today that would fit comfortably in your back pocket, that's a result of technology advancing, not of the folk back in the days making mistakes in their designs.
There is a reason why Ethernet was such a revolution, ring based networks break the moment anything on the network breaks. I've got a computer at home with ~10 USB devices plugged into it (mostly eternal drives, a keyboard and a mouse) and if any of them fail, just that component fails.
But the tech needed to make it possible to eschew daisy chaining (namely the ability to include a controller that ensures all the devices don't talk over each other) wasn't there yet. Hell even Ethernet was still struggling to make a dent at the time we are talking about (or in some of the cases, not around at all).
If I were looking at the examples provided, I'd say that they weren't design failures so much as issues which were presented by the tech at the time and weren't solved until much later.
Here is an article with a picture of one.
I'm a touch typist, took a class in it in high school. Fingers on the home keys. Left hand rests on ASDF. Right hand on JKL;.
If you move up a row from ASDF, you get QWER. My left pinky is A, move up 1 to Q. My right pointer is on F, move up 1 row to R.
Move up to the next row for numbers. ASDF becomes 1234. Now here's where we get to the mistake. We were taught that your left pointer goes up 2, and towards the middle 1 to get to 5. Likewise, your right pointer goes up 2 and over to the middle one 1 to get to 6.
Notice how the 6 is on the wrong side? When my brain thinks "6", my right pointer wants to see it right next to the 7. It's now the responsibility of my left pointer to be in charge of 456, and my right pointer is now only in charge of 7.
I can't tell you how frustrating this keyboard is to a touch typing programmer. It's as if nobody at Microsoft knows how to touch type.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Personally, I think that level of customization is beyond what most users require, and I don't have a problem with application developers controlling what the context menu is used for in their applications.
I know that I find clicking and holding the mouse button (or trackpad button, or trackpad) to be mentally equivalent to a comma, in the middle of a sentence. It's an unnecessary pause.
Yes, that was intentional.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Bullshit.
The reason the 8086 (and by extension 8088) was designed that way was to have source compatibility with those processors, true. Even Intel didn't think it was great since they were chiefly working on a different (and even worse) design (the 432) at the time.
The reason IBM picked it for the PC, however, had *nothing* to do with backward compatibility. They needed something that was cheap enough (which ruled out the 68k), capable of handling more then 64k of RAM, but not so powerful as to freak out the "real computer" IBM divisions (which also ruled out the 68k, as well as, so I heard, the 8086).
The POS 8088 that Intel had released as a cheap version of a product that was itself meant as an temporary upgrade path for embedded systems while they were working on a real CPU somehow turned out to be the only one that fit the bill.
What was the point of a 32-bit address space in 1980-81 when the cost of memory was insanely high? What was the point of a 16-bit data bus when the cost of 16 bit hardware was incredibly high, if not outright non-existent in many cases?
The IBM PC was designed to work with existing peripheral chips, meaning that it could be built relatively inexpensively from off-the-shelf components. It was still very much an 8-bit world in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and 16-bit machines were incredibly expensive minicomputers and workstations.
There's no doubt that in many cases the peculiarities of the PC's design caused problems by the end of the 1980s, when prices dropped substantially, but quite often in any engineering problem, you have to work with what you have, rather than tossing a decade's work aside. From a business point of view, the PC, even with all the awful hacks like EMS and XMS RAM and all the weirdo memory management that Windows had to do, was the right machine for the time.
We've got spoiled in an age of super-cheap RAM and super-fast chips, with super-fast, super-wide buses and super-cheap storage. We only began to see this in the late 1980s and more into the early 1990s. Prior to that, making a top end machine wasn't a $2000 or $3000 cost, it was more like a $10,000 to $20,000 cost.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
IMO however, introducing a cable into the mix really doesn't solve the underlying issue that this purports to be. Now instead of a huge compact piece of equipment, you have a huge sprawling piece of equipment with a spiderweb of cords.
Yeah, been there, done that. That was my computer desk around 18 years ago. And you know, it actually worked out rather well - a lot better than it would have if the devices were all sidecars.
I had a Commodore 128 (itself an indecently large machine) with two drives, printer, modem... If I could've afforded a RAM expansion or hard drive, I would have got one. Pretty much all the same gear they showed hooked up to that TI99-4/A except it didn't have to be all connected together in a straight line... So I had the drives off to the right, set back underneath the bookshelf area of my computer desk, I had the printer off to the side on a printer stand (which also housed the mass of tractor-feed paper), and the modem (I used an RS-232 line-level converted and a standard RS-232 modem at the time) off to the left. And because I didn't have to connect the peripherals directly adjacent to the machine, there was room on the right for me to use a mouse or joystick.
Daisy chaining wasn't a huge problem on the Commodores, either - I suppose it might have been if the cables were parallel links rather than serial - but it would've been rare for a drive to fail so completely that it could no longer communicate with the host - and even if it had, it wouldn't have broken the daisy-chain (the bus was wired straight-through)
So I don't think the bulk of the equipment back then was necessarily a huge problem. You just had to organize it nicely, and it was workable. With sidecars your options for "organizing" would have been very limited.
It baffles me sometimes when people choose to get an external hard drive or CD-writer which is then left permanently plugged in to the machine... I mean, the spider-web of cords is workable, but it's still a hassle. Why would you choose that when you've got a nice cozy internal drive-bay for the thing?
Bow-ties are cool.
There should be a standard laptop box, similar to a PC box. There are many standardized components, even tiny processor/motherboards, but not a standard laptop holder to put them in. If I need little CPU and long battery life, I'd build a machine with a low-power CPU and put an additional battery in a battery/disk bay.
as I said, the one-button mouse is only really interesting because it's symptomatic of Apple's design philosophy. And that philosophy results in problems Apple won't correct, which is a much larger problem than any single "classic computer" ever had, including the Macintosh or Lisa, because it's one thing all Apple computers have shared.
The "classical age of computing" and X11 have nothing to do with that.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
is that Apple will follow their own HID guidelines. You are correct that "appropriate" behavior isn't mandated by Apple. That would be intolerable. But window behavior isn't standard even across Apple's own applications.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
There's a reason for the crappy video in laptops as a general rule:
Heat.
I doubt you want that much heat energy in such a small space...unfortunately, that's reality. And even "fast" video in a laptop is slow.
I think the beige thing was because historically they were business machines...black is far too radical. Maybe beige paint is cheap cheap...not a lot of dye...not a lot of bleach?
When in doubt, dike it out. Saves some juice as well.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
Almost right. The choices at the time were 6502, Z-80 and 8088/8086.
Apple II's were 6502. Tandy/Radio Shack had some Z-80 stuff.
There was still a market for homebuilt stuff.. Commodore/Pet had some Z-80 stuff.
Sequence went something like this Intel 4004(4 bit, expensive, not used much).
8008 - 8 bit, and that was the number of transistors, IIRC, was used in early hp LED calculators. Was found to be somewhat programmable.. Heathkit, etc.. Late 1970's.
8080 - this was better, not so fixed function.
Z-80 - Zilog I think was second source for intel?!? Faster.
8088 = 8086 - the 8088 had an 8 bit memory bus. cheaper. same instructions as 8086.
Same architecture/family so porting from Z-80 was easy. Think Wordstar, Visicalc, etc.
Hand coded ASM - all of them..
Keep in mind, while IBM was cobbling together all these (crufty by todays standards) bits, it was cheap off the shelf, do not want it to work that well, do not compete with the mainframes, etc.
IBM was the Microsoft then..
"Software Stores" did not exist. There was a shelf in the hardware store (or maybe two stores in your top 10 US city)...
64k was acceptable with the PC with separate graphics mem. Apple II was 48, shared..
PC had interrupts, not polling, higher density drive, etc. Before that, we had a few K, maybe 2 or 4 and we liked it.
- Beige Only. You can pick any color, as long as it is beige. Why did it take so bloody long to offer any other color then beige? Critical mass?
It took Steve Jobs returning to Apple after having been kicked out previously. The iMac was probably the first line of computers to have colors other than beige and black. You really need to thank Jobs for making people realize that it's nice to have a PC that looks decent.
As well, normal people started using PC's, or perhaps PC's suddenly catered to normal people. While the technically inclined are purely interested in utility, normal people tend to factor in looks as well as utility.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
is one I'd have to add to the list. Much anguish was had from that design, and sometimes the keyboard PCB would flex in a way so that pressing Return or another adjacent key would actually reset!
http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~sedwards/apple2fpga/Apple-II-Guts.jpg
Firefox &
If you were talking about the 13" unibody Macbook that was availible up until a week ago, then it was the EXACT same machine as the Mac Mini.
Even, now, the macbook and the mini are both relatively the same machine (minor diffs in memory, hd proc speed) But I doubt that there's anything a "power" user can do on a Macbook, that they can't on a Mini, at about 10-15% slower speed.
- 15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
The operative words here are "cheap case," not "10-15 years go." This is still a problem (although even cheap cases are getting better.)
- LOUD systems. Have to thank George for showing me just how nice a quiet system is.
My personal peeve. Fast/Cheap/Quiet. Pick any two. :(
Unix existed when they wrote DOS. Inexcusable.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Almost? It's a well known fact that many computers require a blood sacrifice in order to work correctly.
I'm surprised their crap design decisions didn't make the list. I remember a time when I'd see 3 or 4 of those come across my work bench at the store I worked in during their heyday. Up until this point I think I had almost purged the experience from my mind, but if I recall correctly quite a few machines would completely stop functioning if the modem died, was removed, or replaced. Generally it had something to do with swapping a jumper to reconfigure a COM port. Combined with other horrible "features" of those machines it's hard to believe they were left off the list. Perhaps the article writers were sparing us from painul memories.....
Kiss.
Best PDP-11 look-alike. No end of programmers.
Programming model a dream, vs.....
IMHO, the 8086 (8088, if you really like 8-bit busses) was Not Really Good.
"Short" addressing, vs., "Long", vs. ?"Extended". Bwahararahahahahahah.
A Z80 could do same as "paged mode" (but slowwwwer) by a quick poke to the e.g., 74LS322. 12 years' earlier, too.
--
Intel iAPX 432: Fantabulious,
NOT.
Pleasae do go on.
Your list is highly valued and most of it rings ohhh so true. :)
MCA was a real wonder. Creative Labs Soundblaster II - ~150 USD. Create Labs Soundblaster for the Microchannel: ~450 USD...
I've a couple of devices that do that too (DVD player and TV).
The rationale must be that you'll always know whether they are being supplied by mains power, since they're either working, or have a light on.
I've heard they overheat and cause solder joints to fail.
With a 32 bit linear address space we would have grown from the early PC into the present world far faster and far easier.
As a programmer I lost years of my life due to this. With MEGABYTES of memory I was still stuck with overlay linkers. Imagine! And this was in the 486 days as well!
Of course, to play devil's advocate, if we had a 32 bit flat address space right off the bat, I wonder how much quicker RAM requirements would have grown. Many programmers love to complain about bloated code and system requirements, but imagine how much worse the issue might have been if there had been no architectural restrictions to adding oodles of RAM to your system. We might have already fully made the transition to 64 bit architectures.
Laptop battery doesn't hold charge one month before warranty is up :
Look up replacement battery specs on manufacturers site online, buy battery, CMOS flashes improper battery message, contact support,
their solution : 'ship laptop in for repairs', my solution : return battery, search online using ID number off old battery.
Buy identical battery +extra.
Laptop CMOS / BIOS battery might be dead (when swapping out laptop batteries, CMOS settings are lost)
contact support, their solution : 'ship laptop in for repairs', my solution : plug in AC power before swapping batteries.
If you want the mac machine but don't like the case, why not lose the case and just stick the innards in like a used shuttle case or an old small flat desktop case (like from way back in the bottom of your closet), something like that? If you are going to scratch it up anyway, might as well just toss their dumb non accessible case right off the bat and get something you are more comfortable with and is easier to upgrade, etc.
Sun: removing keyboard halted the machine.
Like the "resize the window to fit the content" problem that Preview has.
Or the "one-button mouse" problem. I'm not willing to debate the meaning of the word "consistent" in this context, because I have a feeling it would be useless, but the company that doesn't conform to the de facto standard is the one which lacks consistency, and in this case it was Apple. Apple embraced the two-button mouse, so that problem has since been corrected, but that doesn't change the fact that many other idiosyncrasies of Apple computers deserve to meet the same fate, and the sooner the better.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
- Power hunger systems. 2 molex connections for a GPU ?!
- Crap 3D Video cards in laptops
Sigh. Pick one.
Why did my computers stop having F13-F24 function!? God dammit, I need more keys not less!
'General: USB socket is same width as RJ45 so you can slide a USB plug into the network port and it feels 'right', but gets you nowhere until you look and check!'
The design of the standard USB 'A' connector has got a lot to answer for, even when you use the correct socket! Just by making the design more obviously asymmetric, they could have avoided millions of attempted mis-insertions, especially when the socket is hard to see properly. A few years back, some of Dell's standard office mini-towers had, for no good reason, front USB sockets angled downwards at about 45 degrees and concealed under a flap hinged at the top, which only opened halfway. This seemed deliberately designed to make inserting a USB plug as difficult as possible, as the flap effectively blocked your view of the two pointlessly angled, annoyingly closely spaced sockets.
However, one of my personal 'favourites' goes back to the 8-bit era - the infamous Sinclair ZX81 RAM pack wobble. For about 30 GBP you could buy an external RAM expansion box with the huge capacity of 16kb that slotted into an edge connector at the back in a rather precarious way. Nudge the computer, sneeze, or look at it in the wrong way, and bang goes the current contents of RAM (well, '3D Monster Maze', anyway).
Oh Gawd, plastic cowlings on the fronts of PC's, that you have to remove to get at stuff, are such a pain in the ass. I'll die happy if I never see one again.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Crap 3D Video cards in laptops....
Related issue: zero standardization of laptop components. Very few laptops are so amazingly unique that they justify having anything but standard innards. Were they standardized at least to a degree, swapping out crappy video controllers would be easy enough.
is a flaw. I want Apple HID guidelines to support a standard, and I want that standard to make sense and not restrict the way I use my computer because Jobs doesn't like buttons. I want my computer to be usable.
Apple occasionally makes poor decisions, then defends them with near-religious zeal, as do its legions of followers. I don't care about any of that. Apple's personality (?) as a company interferes with its ability to critically evaluate its own decisions. This has had a far greater impact on the company than the problems with the Apple III, Macintosh, or Lisa reported.
Anyway, the decision to put the minimize/zoom buttons in the upper, left-hand corner of the window is a decision that goes against my "technocratic" bias. I'd prefer to be able to decide where they appear, as I can in KDE. But I don't consider it a flaw, because it's not. It's a personal preference.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
Most of these flaws probably can be applied to the PCs and CP/M word-processors of Amstrad, a UK consumer electronics company who started to make PCs in the mid 1980s after having some success with their own 8-bit machines before then. Most problems were due to saving costs.
Early PCs featured the power supply built into the monitor, which, coupled with non-standard monitor ports, made replacement difficult. The power-supply wasn't rated high enough to drive many expansion cards. The units themselves, being maninly plastic, had terrible shielding problems causing severe interference. They keyboard and mouse also used a non standard interface; not only was the connector different, but the different keyboard drivers made the supplied version of MS-DOS mandatory.
Later models had better PC compatibility, but some suffered reliability issues due to Amstrad's proprietary hard disk controller. These were so bad that later units were retro-fitted with an standard off-the shelf controller, taking up one of the three expansion slots.
The CP/M word-processors originally shipped with 3" floppy disk drives, which were almost exclusively used by Amstrad. These units also had no on-board ROM; the printer ASIC supplied the process with the minimum instructions to boot off a floppy. The majority of the printer electronics were in the base unit, which meant that the printer itself used a non-standard interface and couldn't be replaced with purchasing a third-party serial interface. Although these machines were supplied with 256 or 512 MB RAM, the majority of the memory could only be used as a ramdisk.
Amstrad also produced a couple of portable machines. They did have a full-sized keyboard, but unfortunately came with a tiny LCD screen. They were also floppy only without third-party expansion units.
As a programmer I lost years of my life due to this. With MEGABYTES of memory I was still stuck with overlay linkers. Imagine! And this was in the 486 days as well!
I would estimate the costs of this botch to our economy to be in the billions.
I agree. And now, I apologize in advance to everyone on Slashdot for mentioning some more horrors of the time:
HIMEM.SYS, EMS, XMS, HMA, UMA, UMB, DPMI. QEMM.
People who think the one-button mouse was a mistake seem to be unaware of what mice were like before Apple introduced the Macintosh. For example consider the Xerox Alto, which had three mouse buttons. Actions usually required multiple clicks with different buttons. Copying an object could be achieved by clicking it with the Red Button to select it and then clicking again with another (Yellow?) button to paste it. Clicking with the Blue button would delete an object. But clicking with the Red button then the Blue button would do something else, so you had to remember if you'd clicked or nor or you could screw things up.
This is off of memory of a manual that I stumbled upon in the library years ago, the details may be off. I wish I could find a copy of it to give better examples, but the point is it was a mess. You had to use all three buttons just to do the same tasks that we can do today using just the first.
The Macintosh team combined click-and-drag, click and double click in a way that enabled you to do all these things with a single mouse button, and more "intuitively" to boot. It was a genuine step forward in GUI development. In fact when Windows was released, it copied the Macintosh behavior for the left mouse button exactly. The second and third buttons were used sparingly and inconstantly at first and didn't add much to the experience - the main reason that most PC mice had three buttons at that time was for the DOS based CAD programs that needed them.
It wasn't until Windows 95 was released that they had completely standardized on using the right mouse button for context menus, and that too was a genuine step forward. And in fact all of the UI folks that worked on the original Mac agree on this. They've also since realized that if they had used two buttons for the mouse - one solely for selection and another for acting on objects, the could have avoided many of the problems involved with drag-and-drop text, and accidentally moving objects when adding to the selection. Unfortunately, momentum makes it too difficult to change at this point in the game.
The continued use of a one-button mouse is a mistake, but it's creation was not.
"General: USB socket is same width as RJ45 so you can slide a USB plug into the network port and it feels 'right', but gets you nowhere until you look and check!"
lol, just discovered that the other day trying to reinstall a box under someone desk :( Placing them a few millimeters apart was also quite helpful...
Why in the HELL did they create the USB specification to have a 2 dimensionally symmetric socket without making it a ambidextrious connector design? I don't know how many times I've gone to blindly plug in USB only to have to flip it around because you can't 'feel' the correct orientation like you can with virtually every other connector design.
General: USB socket is same width as RJ45 so you can slide a USB plug into the network port and it feels 'right', but gets you nowhere until you look and check!
Indeed. that's how I destroyed the (in addition badly positioned) RJ45 of the laptop that I'm typing this on.
Linux user since early January 1992.
You have just reminded me of a stupid design problem: PC parallel ports and Mac SCSI ports used the same DB25 connector. My friend once plugged a PC printer into a Mac, and immediately fried the motherboard.
The funny thing is, several years after the incident, I happened to run into this friend while he was working as a salesman at CompUSA. A couple looking to buy a computer was concerned that they wouldn't be able to figure out how to put it together, to which he replied, "Don't worry, every cable can only be plugged into one place. It will be obvious."
usb sound sucks the bus is not built for it and hdmi / spdif is the one cable way.
I'm beating a horse that's been dead for almost ten years, and it's been called, rather amusingly, "Compatibility with the Monopoly". To quote an article written in 2000: "...95 percent of the world uses a two-button mouse."
Apple has had support for a two-button mouse for almost ten years. And that decision was made at the time to conform to the de facto standard. I'm not inventing any of this because I don't have to.
Slashdot is my Mercer Box.
- Power hunger systems. 2 molex connections for a GPU ?!
I hate to break it to you dude, but video cards still require two power connections, just they're not molex anymore!
Um. Design failures? How about moving the control key down below the shift? How about the introduction of the clumsy, RSI inducing mouse?
Let me guess: a "design failure" is by definition something that didn't make money, right?
The original model Macintosh was indeed severely flawed (e.g. it had no good way of adding a hard-drive). You might make the point that the Macintosh line as a whole suceeded because they quickly fixed this problem; but there were similar issues with the original model NeXt machines which were also relatively quickly fixed, and yet the the NeXt despite being very impressive for their day, never really did take off.
One can discuss design independently of financial success (which may, after all be due to tricks of marketing or just plain luck...).
A machine like the Atari 800 had a number of interesting features that were oriented toward making the machine more of a consumer appliance: software was burned onto ROM cartridges that the user could swap easily, add-ons such as memory expansion were packaged up into their own easily pluggable cases, and so on. These features still don't seem like particularly dumb ideas to me: they wouldn't deserve to be called "design failures", it just happens that the market went in a different direction -- people apparently liked the cheaper bare boards approach of the IBM PC and friends rather than the neatly packaged up Atari add-on boards; the ROM cartridges were difficult to update, and the flexibility of system software on floppies was a bigger draw than the idiot-friendly pluggable cartridges.
If I had to pick one single example of computer design idiocy, I think it might be the babble-of-scsi. Multiple signal standards, and multiple connector standards, but no coordination between the two... constant mysterious questions about cable length and termination, with no obvious way of debugging the problems (in contrast, the green status lights of ethernet are totally brilliant). SCSI *should* have ruled the earth, but instead we had to make do with IDE hacks...
(By the way: the DEC Rainbow had no ESC key. I saw a bunch of them in use as VT-100 terminals at Stanford... every one of them had "ESC" scribbled in magic marker, just above the F11 keys.)
If you have a laptop, then you can get an external keyboard and put it to the left of the laptop's keyboard. You'll have two keyboards, so you can angle them to the correct ergonomic angle. This is not an ideal fix, because the left and right keyboards would be far from each other, and it would be offcenter if you use your laptop's screen, as opposed to an external monitor. However, you do get the comfortable angle for your hands, as well as TY, GH, and NM keys on both the left and right side.
NMOS passes a "strong" 0V very well, but passes a "weak" high. This means that it takes longer for NMOS to reach the full value of Vdd, leading to clock trouble. This is why PMOS is on top and NMOS are on the bottom in CMOS logic. By making IOCHRDY signal an active high, I believe this means it becomes difficult to turn the IOCHRDY active, so the logic is slower.
My personal list...
- 15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
- Beige Only. You can pick any color, as long as it is beige. Why did it take so bloody long to offer any other color then beige? Critical mass?
- LOUD systems. Have to thank George for showing me just how nice a quiet system is.
- Power hunger systems. 2 molex connections for a GPU ?!
- Crap 3D Video cards in laptops, and almost no benchmarks from the "classic" hardware review sites so you know how bad it sucks compared to a "real" GPU. (Thankfully the S3 Virge is gone from desktops, but laptops are still stuck with poor performance unless you pay an arm and a leg.)
What is the point of buying a laptop with a powerful graphics card when its going to suck the battery life right out of it?
The Motorola 68000 had a much cleaner instruction set, with a flatter memory space (which would have avoided the 640k memory debacle in the early PCs). I remember that National Semiconductors also had a nice architecture (16000 series, became the 32000 series), which was even more RISC like.
Admittedly both of these CPUs were relatively new at the time. Another factor may have been the dominance of the Intel family amongst hobbyist computers of the time. Particularly if they were considering the possibility of porting CP/M from the 8080, it would have been easier to do so to the 8086/8088 than to the 68000 series.
Still, my feeling is that we would have moved to GUI based operating systems much sooner had we used a non-Intel CPUs (because of the flatter memory space and an instruction set more suited to graphics primitives), and would have had better compilers. It is no coincidence that Apple chose the 68000 and later the PowerPC. That isn't a criticism of the PC design team (who were very constrained by resources). Indeed, had IBM management expected how popular the PC would become, they may well have mandated the use of their inhouse processor (an predecessor to the PowerPC).
While that bit of hardware may have been dirt-cheap, it's flimsy and cannot take the stresses of properly manufactured gear. Second, it's probably a knockoff or will become one shortly.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And when they were the most popular computer in the world, they released the Plus/4 with integrated (and quite buggy in ROM) "Productivity software." And the system's ROM addresses, particularly for the graphics library, were different so virtually all the C64 software was incompatible. Not only did they release a computer to compete with their own cash cow, they released a computer that was incompatible with their star performer.
And I think they were in stores for about three months. Did I pay retail for one? Of course. It wasn't all loss because it also had a disassembler in ROM, a person could halt program loading part way, and I learned quite a bit about Commodore disk and program security back in the day -- which could also be thought of as a blunder by Commodore.
Hate to break this to you, but Ethernet runs on 10base/2 which is daisy chain thin coax cables.
You may not remember Ethernet over 10base/2 but I do.
A hub is basically used for turning 10base/T into 10b/2. It was with the advent of things Switches. There was a brief stint made by HP and a couple other companies that used a combination of Twisted pair Ethernet and token passing (the name escapes me at the moment) that surpassed for a brief period 100base/t hubs in performance.
The real advent was the star controller which was before switches, but brought network segmentation to keep congestion down.
Ethernet itself wasn't all that revolutionary.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Well actually, Apple was already late to that game. I remember you could already buy Packard Bells with interchangable plastic parts on the case which meant you could change the color, and there were also those green/black/purplish Acers. These were early Pentium machines circa 1996/1997 or so, which predates the iMac (which was originally only available in aqua anyway).
On the Amiga, if you ejected a floppy that wasn't cleanly the OS would demand you reinsert the disk, and then would proceed to flush out the tracks again to the disk. Since the Amiga always wrote an entire track at a time, it was no big deal that one had been half-written when you pulled the disk and it just wrote the whole track again. I used to show Mac and PC users this trick all the time. It was pretty cool.
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
the MCA was quite advanced, but proprietary. It failed to win a significant market share.
Also the Configuration system: a locked up thing.
IBM attempt to reconquer the PC monopoly bunked!
the 8088 decisison kept 8 bit SW for 2 decades longer than necessary
the segemnting of memory of this CPU design cost programmers and programs > 20% efficiency
which was remedied only by the 386. Then QDOS and Windows 1. At a time when Unix and even ROMable versions like OS9 were available to bet on this indicates what IBM thought of the PC:
a toy for managers and freaks.
- 15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
I have a scar on the back of my thumb from when I used to work in a computer repair shop and my hand slipped when trying to crack loose a particularly stubborn screw one time.
- Beige Only. You can pick any color, as long as it is beige.
What's wrong with beige? It matches my beige keyboard, beige monitor, beige speakers and beige mouse ;-)
Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
Computer case cuts are the worst. I've currently got... 5, all in visible states of healing, that I have acquired in the last couple weeks.
They're kind of an anomaly, really. I've got knives sharp enough to shave with, and I've cut myself with all sorts of things. But outside of a computer case, I've never been cut and not noticed it. With a computer case, I'll sometimes cut a huge gash in my hand and notice the wet sensation before any discomfort (or feel the sharpness of the cut). It's quite peculiar.
And newer cases have that problem, too. I'd wager up through about 3-4 years ago there were a number which would do a number on you before you knew it. The 'extraneous' thin-punched metal parts (eg. a metal shield for an unused drive bay or frill RF shielding where you really didn't need it, etc.) has been a problem long after they fixed the "punched steel is sharp" problem.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
...had options for the dirt-cheap Z80's up to the 68000's, as well as appearing very PC-like. Additional CPU, serial, rudimentary network cards were installed in the back.
One huge architectural problem: They in their infinite wisdom forgot to include an interrupt controller of some kind.
For this and a few other things caused them to dump them at a discount on the order of $3000 to employees. Not exactly generous in today's terms, but very generous compared to what Nuti's NCR would do.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Apple has had support for a two-button mouse for almost ten years.
Context menus on the Mac first appeared with MacOS 8, in mid-1997. Any (supported) two button mouse would automatically invoke them on a right-click.
And that decision was made at the time to conform to the de facto standard.
In 1997, meaningful use of two-button mice had been mainstream for about a year (maybe 18 months tops). Certainly not long enough to really be considered a "de facto standard".
What was the point of a 32-bit address space in 1980-81 when the cost of memory was insanely high? What was the point of a 16-bit data bus when the cost of 16 bit hardware was incredibly high, if not outright non-existent in many cases?
In two words: virtual memory. Just because the address lines exist does not mean that the physical memory does.
Remember, the computer world did not spontaneously come into being with the design of the IBM-PC; it has existed for decades beforehand. One computer architecture I worked with in the 80s (contemporary to the introduction of the IBM-PC) had a 40 bit address space, with the very explicit idea that the huge number of addressing bits be used for intelligent organization of data.
Then-contemporary data busses were also routinely larger, and often MUCH larger than 8 bits. The Dec VAX architecture, for example, developed a decade before but still very active in the 1980s, had a 32 bit native word size.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Short sighted marketing decision?
If it werent for the 8086 being designed to easily handle 8085, 8080, and 8008 binaries, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
The reason the x86 line was successfull has ALWAYS, in part, been compatability.
You can argue that other processors were better... but being better wasn't good enough, was it?
This comment should be marked as flamebait because that's so clearly what it is.
The one and only reason we're having this discussion is that IBM chose the 8088 for its PC, a project that was intended as an internal exploratory design exercise, and for which, nearly every EE who was alive and working at the time, lambasted IBM.
Remember the IBM-PC did NOT use the 8086, but the 8088, so lauding the 8086's compatibility is a mistake.
If the IBM engineers had chosen the MC6800 (Motorola's 8-bit equivalent to the 8088 which also had source compatibility with it's bigger and more advanced brethren) we would be about 10 years ahead of where we are now, because we wouldn't have lost so much worthless time worrying about broken memory architectures.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
You obviously don't know that the only difference between the 8088 and 8086 was the width of the memory bus.. so lauding either the 8088 or 8086's compatability is equivilent.
..but you want my post modded as flamebait? Your entire point depends on your ignorance.
The up-to 2mhz MC6800 was an 8-bit computer with an 8-bit word, an 8-bit bus, and 16-bit (64K max memory) addressing.
The 4.77mhz 8088 was a 16-bit computer with a 16-bit word, an 8-bit bus, and 20-bit (1MB max memory) addressing.
The 4.77mhz 8086 was a 16-bit computer with a 16-bit word, a 16-bit bus, and 20-bit (1MB max memory) addressing.
The MC6800 is only comparable to the 8080, which is one of the very processors that the 8086 line was leveraging a compatability advantage with.
Spare us your ignorance, because that MC6800 you are talking about was garbage compared to an 8086 (or 8088.. need I remind you that their only difference was bus width.)
"His name was James Damore."
> What was the point of a 32-bit address space in 1980-81 when the cost of memory was insanely high?
You're right. 4MB ought to be enough for anyone.
Ah, I love this keyboard. When they started changing the design, I started stashing the originals. I still have three spares left over, in addition to the ones I'm using. I can't stand a straight keyboard.
Place nail here >+
>> "that MC6800 you are talking about was garbage compared to an 8086.."
As someone who did assembly programming on an MC6800 and 8088, I agree with his statement.
I do wish IBM had selected the MC68000 rather than the Intel 8088, but I understand why they did it.
The IBM sales force was reporting that Apples were showing up in the accounting department running something called Visicalc. So the mission was to counter Apple by producing a low-cost machine to run Visicalc, but with some feature that would sell the machine (640K RAM vs Apple's 64K - hey it's 10x better!), but not encroach on the higher margin products. And get it out the door quick!
So it made sense to build a machine that could run CP/M and Visicalc quickly. It was simply a quick solution, not meant to be the foundation product it turned out to be.
Place nail here >+
I used to write reviews of CAD graphics subsystems for a couple of magazines, so a lot of the people in the business knew me. I'd see a screen flickering and ask why it was so crappy. The sales jocks would tell me how great it looked. So I'd change the refresh rate and they would be amazed at the improvements. Remember, these are the guys who sell the stuff, and work for the company that makes the stuff. I was always amazed at the complete lack of knowledge of these guys.
Place nail here >+
It also goes pretty decently with almost any other colour, so those post-it notes won't clash. Black or white wouldn't.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.