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 Mistake That Still Needs Fixing

[Dystopian Rebel]

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)

Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing

[UnknownSoldier]

> original Microsoft Natural

That was a great keyboard back in 96! I would demonstrate a simple proof to others to show the benefit of its ergonomics:

* Stand up. Put your hands by your sides. Notice the angle of your hands.
* Now raise your hands up, keeping your biceps in place, and making an L, as if you were shaking hands.
* Now roll both of your hands inward, as if you were to play a wide piano. Seem how comfortable that is?
* Now slide your hands together so your thumbs are touching. Notice how awkward that is?

Took me a little while to get used to it, but it was good. My only problem was that the Y,H,and N keys (quite logically) were put on the right side. I'm a pretty hard-core gamer that uses most of the left side + partial right side of the keyboard, and found those keys "missing." (I used the right hand on the mouse.)

I wish someone would bring it back, duplicating the TY, GH, NM keys on both the left and right side.

--
"Necessity is the mother of invention,
but Curiosity is the Father."
  -- Michaelangel007

Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, DisplayPort isn't proprietary, it's the successor to DVI. Mini-DisplayPort is part of the VESA specification and is entirely royalty-free.

One classic web design mistake

[Quiet_Desperation]

Well... at least it wasn't spread out over 15 pages.

The 15 problems

[houghi]

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

Re: The 15 problems

[SlashDotDotDot]

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.

Re: The 15 problems

[Amazing Quantum Man]

I have two DVD players that have a helpful little red LED that lets me know the device is off.

Seriously. When I turn the player on, the LED goes off.

Re:The 15 problems

[demonbug]

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.

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

Re:General trend

[Anonymous Coward]

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 worst-designed case component...

[PotatoFiend]

has always been the cup holder. That shit always snaps under the strain of my 48-oz. coffee.

Re:The worst-designed case component...

[Critical Facilities]

Bah! You just have to spring for one of those "Dual Layer" Cold Drink/Refreshment Workspace (CD/RW) units. They hold up much better than the single layer ones.

#1 failure...

[master_p]

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.

Re:#1 failure...

[vonhammer]

Read the Motorola 68000 assembly language manual and marvel at its simplicity and elegance. I believe they had an 8-bit and 16-bit equivalent back then. That would be my choice. Advantages are the simple addressing scheme, many general purpose data registers, brilliantly simple assembly language.

Re:#1 failure...

[pz]

Why? What other processor(s) should have been used, and what would have been the benefits? No, not trolling. Just interested in what you said and would like more information.

The fundamental problem with Intel's instruction set architecture for the 8088/8086 line was that it was complex and intricate. To perform some instructions, the arguments had to be in very specific registers. Every register was, in some way or another, special purpose. The contemporary Motorola architecture, based on the 6800 and extended into the 68000 line, was completely the opposite: every register was, more-or-less, general purpose.

Writing a compiler for the Intel architecture is an exercise in masochism. Writing one for the Motorola architecture is one of simplicity and elegance. The Motorola instruction set documentation of the era was simple, clean, and definitive: it molded the way instruction sets were documented for generations afterward. The Intel documentation was difficult to understand at best.

One of the stark differences in the two instruction sets was the difference in instruction length variability. Intel instructions could be almost arbitrarily long. Motorola instructions were one or two bytes, with the one byte instructions being the ones most frequently used (inspired brilliance, that was). Also, for very related reasons, the number of cycles to execute an instruction was highly variable for Intel architectures, and more-or-less fixed for Motorola architectures.

I wrote assembly code for both architectures, back in the day. I hated, hated, hated writing for Intel chips, and breathed a sigh of relief whenever writing for Motorola chips. The inherent beauty in the Motorola instruction set created a certain kind of transparency making it possible --- seriously --- to see programmer intent when reading assembly code. With Intel chips, that was just not possible. With Motorola chips, you could reverse engineer code pretty easily; with Intel chips, it was painful.

The world would be a better place if IBM had selected Motorola.

Low-tech solution

[Peter Simpson]

1 square inch of Scotch brand #33 electrical tape.

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...!

This is a good opportunity for a new myth

[e9th]

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"

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.

Real mistakes

[Animats]

Those are mistakes an end user would see. Here are some deeper mistakes from an engineerings standpoint.

• Bus-type peripheral architecture. The IBM PC was a spinoff of the IBM Displaywriter, a dedicated word processor with no expandability. It inherited some design decisions from the Displaywriter that were reasonable for a word processor, but terrible for an expandable machine. Most notably, the IBM PC had the peripherals on the memory bus. That meant any DMA had to be on the I/O card, and thus any card could blither all over memory. Peripherals were thus trusted devices, and, in turn, drivers had to be trusted. IBM knew the right answer - channels, as on mainframes, and in the PS/2, they used a "microchannel" architecture. But it was too late - the industry had already standardized on "ISA cards". This is the fundamental reason cause of most operating system crashes - the I/O architecture gives drivers too much power.
• The Motorola MMU debacle.The Motorola 68000 first appeared in 1978, and it was a very good machine. Almost. There was a flaw. Instruction backout didn't quite work, and thus a paged MMU couldn't be added. So Motorola didn't ship an MMU with the 68000. The early UNIX workstations all used the 68000, and painful hacks were used to kludge together some kind of MMU to make it work. Apollo used two CPUs, one for the OS and one for the user, only one running at a time, to get around this. The Apple Lisa used one CPU with an Apple MMU built from many parts, and the compiler avoided generating any instructions with incrementation so that backout would work. Motorola came out with the M68010 in 1982, which fixed the bugs, but there was still no MMU. When Motorola finally shipped the 68451 MMU, it was a segmented MMU, and worse, slowed down the machine by one clock cycle per memory access. If Motorola had gotten it right by 1979 or so, the whole history of personal computing might have been Motorola-based using protected mode-UNIX.
• The Intel 286 CPU. Not enough memory management for a protected mode OS, too much segmentation machinery for an unprotected OS. That powered the IBM PC/AT and a whole generation of machines with the addressing system from hell. It could run a version of UNIX, but no process could exceed 64K in protected mode, although you could put a few megabytes on the machine.
• Baseband Ethernet. Coax-based Ethernet had some serious electrical problems. The thing really was unbalanced baseband, so you couldn't use capacitive coupling. The coax shield could only be grounded at one point, or you'd get ground loops. That created an electrical safety issue with the outside of coax connectors, and running coax between buildings was iffy. It was just bad electrical design. 10baseT, which is balanced, was far better from an electronics standpoint.

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.