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."
IOCHRDY signal is active high instead of active low. Causes no end of problems.
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
This is actually still a problem - why does Apple have a UK keyboard layout which is different to standard UK keyboard layouts? You have the option to choose 'UK Keyboard' specifically when speccing a new Apple system, but its different to the UK keyboard prevelent. Annoying.
The best one from the Mac was putting the power button right next to the floppy drive. Removing the eject button was a good idea; it prevented you from ejecting a disk without unmounting it and ending up with corrupted date. Unfortunately, when the Mac came out, most users were accustomed to manual floppy drives with a mechanical eject button underneath. The natural way of getting a a disk back was to press the button under the floppy drive, which turned off the machine (typically losing data). Putting the power button on the other side, and a soft eject button under the floppy drive would have saved a lot of data.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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?
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!
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.
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.
I could go on...!
AT&ROFLMAO
There were other reasons for IBM to go with the 8086-family chipsets:
1) the 8086/8088's bus could easily drive the 8080-family support chips such as the 8251, 8255, 8259 etc. to build a complete system. The MC68k family support chips were even later than the release of the CPU itself (in some cases like the MMU several years late) and the MC68k bus could not be easily interfaced with the Intel family chips which were cheap and in plentiful supply.
2) the 8086 family's internal data registers and addressing modes were designed to simplify conversion of existing 8080 code to run on the new 16-bit CPUs. The 68k, although a superior CPU in all respects to the 8086 family, had no tools available to make code conversion from the 6800 or other sibling CPU family (6809, 6502 etc.) simple -- all 68k code had to be written from scratch.
3) the 68k was an expensive chip, not suprising as it was complex and required a large die, necessitating a 0.6" wide 68-pin DIL ceramic package. Motorola's target market for the chip was $10,000 workstations, not "toy" desktop computers only costing $2,000. By comparison the 8088 was cheap as chips.
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.
I wish someone would bring it back, duplicating the TY, GH, NM keys on both the left and right side.
This. Very, very, very THIS. Please. And hurry...
How do you figure it's not true? At the university I went to, there were both PC labs and Mac labs. You switched back and forth as necessary. I can't count the number of times (or the number of people) that had to play the game of: "I'll push the eject button and, crap! Mac. This is the power button. OK, I need to keep holding the power button while I use the other hand to save everything. OK, everything's saved. Now. Can I release and re-push the power button so I don't have to wait for the machine to reboot....".
...or the total overkill that is the Mac pro line...
As someone who also got bit by Apple's non-user serviceable part philosophy, I agree with you 100%.
I've got a Mac Pro. I'm not an Apple fanboi, I just hate them less than other computer manufacturers. My computer works great. But I didn't get the wireless card installed when I purchased it because I didn't need it. Later on, I needed the wireless capability, so I tried to buy the Airport Extreme card from Apple. The fuckers (yes, they are fuckers) wouldn't sell it to me because "it was not a user installable part." I had to make an appointment at my "local" Apple store that is 60 miles away to let some teenage "genius" install it for me. Yeah, OK, I'll get right on that, because I really want to drive my expensive 90-lb machine 120 miles on my day off so some 13-year-old-looking smartass can paw at it.
Instead, I bought it off a third-party vendor and worked out how to install it myself, since the only instruction it came with said "This is not a user installable part, please refer to the Mac Pro service manual for installation." It worked fine and I now have wireless capability, but I found Apple's actions with that upgrade really insulting.
If I am willing to pony up $4000 for a computer, chances are I have the necessary intellect and experience to screw a wireless card to my motherboard and plug in two antennas. Or I am willing to accept the consequences of my actions if I screw up. Why would a company make it hard for a consumer to use their product?
Apple's increasingly common philosophy of non-user serviceable parts, lack of mid-range user-upgradable towers, and forcing weird connectors down our throats without including the adapters for free are annoying and I think, ultimately, holding them back in the PC market. Window's recent suckage has been working to Apple's advantage, but I feel they could have capitalized on it more effectively. Of course, I am sure that Steve and his financial analysts have determined otherwise.
It's not just Apple that charges such a large amount for better parts. Dell (whose computers you can easily upgrade on your own) has prices on upgrade parts that are much higher than retail.
For example, a base model Vostro desktop lists the Core 2 Duo E8600 as an upgrade (over the Celeron 450) for $330; the E8600 can be bought for $267.99 with free shipping. Dell lists their 21.5" HD monitors for $260; I recently bought two Samsung 21.5" HD monitors for $189.99 each (with free shipping, and there are rebates available). Dell will upgrade your baseline Vostro from 1GB to 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 for $112; it's not hard to find 4GB kits for anywhere between $40.99 and $76.99, depending on what brand you prefer. On the same machine Dell will upgrade your 80GB hard drive to a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for $330; Seagate 1TB drives can be had for as little as $89.99.
(Those aren't affiliate links, don't worry :P)
If you were to get those upgrades, Dell's markup over retail prices is as much as $400, and they pay OEM price, not retail. (To be fair, the hard drive I linked above to is OEM, not retail.)
These days, I see very little reason to buy a desktop from Dell (or Apple or whoever) unless you're buying a laptop - and even then, you shouldn't have the vendor upgrade your RAM. I bought 4GB RAM for my laptop for $20 (after rebate), where Dell would have charged me $200. (Ironically, the RAM was marketed as "for Macs", despite being standard DDR2 SODIMM.)
As a humorous side note, if you want Dell to preconfigure RAID on a pair of 1TB drives, they'll do RAID-0 for $350 or RAID-1 for $250... same hardware, different price. Fun fun fun.