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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.
Problem #16: Blindingly intense blue LED on my new Dell that blinks when the computer is asleep.
All night long the computer constantly warns me: "I'm asleep. I'm asleep. I'm asleep." It's like Homer Simpson's "everything is OK" alarm.
/...
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.
This is the exact reason I went with a laptop that had a standard, full-size layout.
Nothing irks me more than having to go hunting for oft-used keys such as end, delete, etc. on every different laptop. I've seen them below shift, above enter, buried as an Fn-key... *continues on for another few minutes*.
Evolution - Est. 4500000000 B.C. Don't piss in the gene pool.
And even though its not classic, I think the "underpowered" Vista machines deserve at least a mention.
Can we stop with the knee-jerk microsoft bashing? The article is literally titled "Fifteen _Classic_ PC Design Mistake." There's nothing in the article that would make a vista reference even relevent. Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring like the parent.
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.
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.
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 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!
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?
I'd have a hard time seeing USB coming out back in the era being described, and not just because every company was doing it's best to lock people into their own platform.
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.
More like blindingly intense blue LEDs period on all current hardware. Give me back my soft red LEDs...
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 ?
Removing the eject button was a good idea; it prevented you from ejecting a disk without unmounting it and ending up with corrupted date.
Removing the eject button was an idiotic idea, and it illustrates one of the great failures of personal computer design philosophy - the idea that the system builder/designer knows better than the user how the user should use the system. If I want to eject a disk in the middle of an operation then I should be able to - maybe the possibility of corruption is preferable to the alternative of letting an operation continue. Maybe an electrical fire just started in the system power supply, and I want to get my floppy out NOW. Maybe a million things that the designer didn't think of. The assumption that the user is an idiot and doesn't know what they are doing, and that their control over the system must be severely limited for their own protection, is the single worst PC design mistake.