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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.
Well... at least it wasn't spread out over 15 pages.
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.
IOCHRDY signal is active high instead of active low. Causes no end of problems.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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"
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.
Clearly you're not thinking differently enough!
Those are mistakes an end user would see. Here are some deeper mistakes from an engineerings standpoint.
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.