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."

Comments

worst: sharp unfinished inside edges in cheap case

[UnknownSoldier]

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

Sony VAIO desktop problem...

[Bagels]

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.

A few of my favourite things - from the workshop

[Linker3000]

• Olivetti/AT&T: On the M24-M280 series' used a 9-pin D connector for keyboard. If you plugged keyboard into your EGA port you blew a diode and lost (ISTR) green.
• Olivetti/AT&T: (See above). M290 model - putting the EGA and keyboard connectors NEXT TO EACH OTHER! (WTF).
• Olivetti/AT&T: (See above). If you killed your keyboard (coffee spill etc.), a new one was £160 ('no discount') and nothing else fitted. We actually used to repair these keyboards as they cost so much.
• Olivetti/AT&T: Low cost (M200 ?) series - no cover on PSU and integrated power switch on left side of case - when you slid off the case top without unplugging, there was a better than even chance one of your fingers would touch the live switch contacts - saw an engineer do this and then proceed to throw the system unit across the workshop while yelping in pain.
• Olivetti/AT&T: 'Integrated' UPS that slid into the bottom of some of their servers. NO covering on bottom circuit board and so if you didn't get the unit into its rails properly, the board would touch the bottom inside of the case and short out the batteries/weld itself to the case, leaving you tugging for all your might to break the contact before the batteries (or something else) exploded.
• IBM: Micro Channel Architecture's lousy licencing terms.
• Tulip: 'Fault tolerant' server with active pull-up on the SCSI bus powered from ONE of the 'redundant' PSUs - so if *that* PSU blew you lost your disk data and command channels even though the other PSU kept everything else running.
• General: Plastic clips on early SIMM sockets that snapped when you sneezed near them
• 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!

I could go on...!

Re:biggest mistake: PC = 8088 not M68000!!!

[nojayuk]

The MC68000 was not available in production quantities at the time the IBM PC design was being finalised. The chip was late and buggy -- I used a dev board with a pre-production version of the chip clocked at half-speed, 4MHz, in 1982. Attempts to run it at 8MHz (the datasheet spec speed) were a failure.

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.

It too, has a single tragic design flaw

[Weaselmancer]

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.