Slashdot Mirror
IBM Did Not Invent the Personal Computer
theodp writes "As IBM gives itself a self-congratulatory pat on the back as it celebrates its 100th anniversary, Robert X. Cringely wants to set the record straight: 'IBM didn't invent the personal computer', writes Cringely, 'but they don't know that.' Claiming to have done so, he adds, soils the legacy of Ed Roberts and pisses off all real geeks in the process. Throwing Big Blue a bone, Cringely is willing to give IBM credit for 'having helped automate the Third Reich'."
I know that not every comparison involving the Nazis is invalid, but does this strike anyone else as being more than a bit reductio ad Hitlerum?
The truth about lulz : Edwin Black, an author holed up in his basement, spending years and years researching the details for a book, reading thousands of documents and talking with hundreds of people, will achieve far more lulz, in the long run, than hacking a website.
Black's book came out circa 2001. That is 10 years ago, and people still talk about it. And we still wait for IBM to open their archives.
your mom did not invent the personal computer, either.
They invented a product that was trademarked "Personal Computer". Before that time, they were usually called "mini" or "micro" computers.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
"Press hard, you are making 6 million copies."
Naw; Godwin's Law concerns *comparisons* to Hitler and Nazis. If you're *actually talking about them for a reason*, it trips out, to avoid a recursive black hole in the fabric of the Universe.
Hmm, I sold personal computers for around 5 years before IBM rolled their first PC out, so I guess all the people that bought them will have to look back in embarrassment now that its been revealed that those really werent either personal or computers. Imsai, Altair, Poly, Xitan, Alpha Micro...all came long before IBM rolled anything out the door. Plus we thought the IBM PC was lousy. It had a weird keyboard layout and it was slow. Real expensive compared to other alternatives of the day. You could get a much faster cpu with more memory and a larger capacity floppy drive for half the price.
It's not like he invented the single-board self-bootstrapping non-teletype microcomputer...
Yay, Nazis again. Computers are what got them to the moon! I saw it in a movie, it must be true! (btw: The movie looks like loads of fun)
Even if you ignore the Altair, and require a personal computer to be something with a keyboard and monitor, the Apple I and Apple II were out before the IBM PC (and far superior).
It seems to me that it's pretty clear that the speaker in the video is saying that that IBM invented the Personal Computer (upper case), not the personal computer, lower case. When you watch the video, the screen is showing the case where it says "IBM Personal Computer". And I think that's worth talking about, since the majority of toeday's personal computers (both windows & mac) can trace its roots back to this architecture.
Apple II, anyone?
IBM just made it mainstream for businesses.
Microsoft, by negotiating in such a way as to allow clones, made IBM's definition of PC explode (without IBM.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
With a title like that, I guess I'd expected the relevant content to consist of more than just the title repeated. In this case, the summary actually contains more information that TFA. That's F for Fucking BTW.
My employer is one of the biggest in health IT and I can confirm that the security is abysmal at the sites they manage.
Other clones copying the IBM PC helped a lot too, to the the point that almost all x86 processors are paired with a chipset that is software-compatible with the core hardware the IBM PC had and a IBM PC compatible BIOS, the result being often called the "PC". Even Apple have switched to x86 and use the same chipsets as "PCs", one of the reasons why IMO the "PC" vs "Mac" comparison is nonsense nowadays.
I wouldn't call the Apple II exactly "obscure". And Apple was marketing using the term "Personal Computer" for at least a few years before the IBM PC came out.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
"...and doesn't even tell us who, in fact, did, if not IBM."
That would be the "soils the memory of Ed Roberts" part of the summary and Cringely's article.
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!" How about a lameness filter for editors?
And brought us EJB. Nothing to celebrate here.
Apple was using the term "Personal Computer" from the advent of the Apple ][ in 1977. IBM's trademark was the "IBM PC" -- remember the Charlie Chaplin adverts? So, no, sorry, IBM can't even claim that.
sometimes i wonder,
about toilets from the sky,
how can they deliver such goodness,
in the twinkling of an eye,
such wonder,
such power,
those toilets,
from,
the,
sky.
IBM put the first real personal computer on the market. Yes, prior to that I could have gone to the electronic store and bought the parts.
The only people who call this a personal computer are idiot geeks who will go to any stupid pedantry and verbal trick to 'be right' and 'know more'.
If the altair counts, then you must consider the Kenbak-1. So I win the internet.
From wikipedia : "The original line of PCs were part of an IBM strategy to get into the small personal computer market then dominated by the Commodore PET, Atari 8-bit family, Apple II, Tandy Corporation's TRS-80s, and various CP/M machines.[2]"
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
Just because it wasn't popular doesn't mean it wasn't the first, else Apple 'invented' the MP3 Player.
Cringely still gets paid to write stuff about technology...
sorry no, there were personal computers before the PC, but there was no PC before the PC, if anyone gets credit for ushering in the personal computer age its Apple, they were on their 3rd edition and had market IBM wanted by the time IBM wanted it and joined in
various CP/M machines
Some of which used the S-100 bus invented by Altair.
S-110 Bus systems
Radio Shack TRS-80.
Apple I
Commodore-64
Atari-800
TI 99/4
These were all the first personal computers. IBM had nothing to do with any of it.
IBM's only claim to fame is that their hardware specs allowed others to make similar systems.. so the "IBM PC" became manufacturable by many companies... and as a result... it beat out the proprietary hardware guys.
IBM has invented many things, but the personal computer is nothing they invented.
E
There were many fully assembled and fully functioning computers well before the IBM PC. CP/M was released in 1976 and was used by dozens of small manufacturers to make fully working computers that could be bought, plugged in, and immediately used for usefull work.
dBase II, Wordstar, Peach software, Visicalc and SuperCalc were all used well before IBM had these ported to their new machine.
Microsoft even produced a COBOL for CP/M in 1978, as did others.
SCP themselves, the ones who wrote QDOS that later became MS/PC-DOS, had a range of Zebra CP/M computers. They wrote QDOS, which was functionally the same as CP/M, to use the 8086 CPU which first became available in 1978.
bullshit, you must be young. My friends and I had personal computers in the 70s, all of different brands.
Just like Columbus did not actually discover America, IBM did not invent the personal computer. However, just like Columbus for all intents and purposes put America on the map, IBM did deliver the PC to the world in a way that no other did (or could) at the time.
Your ignorance is astounding. There were many complete assembled computer systems sold in the 70s, used in small business and in homes. Even the fully assembled Osburne was introduced five months before the IBM PC
"dominated" as in "all geeks used it?" as in hundred people?
most of the world learnt of "PCs" by IBM.
Nobody "invented" the personal computer. Taking an existing product and making it cheaper/faster/smaller/cooler is not "inventing" anything, it is merely developing a better product.
Apple did not "invent" the smartphone, Toyota did not "invent" the hybrid, and Tivo did not "invent" recording video on hard disks either.
The answer is murky and it depends upon how you define a personal computer. If you're talking about computers in the home, then it was probably the Apple/Commodore/Tandy triad who deserves credit. If you are talking about a standalone desktop computer, it looks like the IBM 5100 is a runner (1975). Then, of course, there are all of the people who include hobbiest machines.
I'm surprised that no one (not even IBM) has mentioned the IBM 5100
By no means is it the first Personal Computer, but it is IBM's first PC. and its arguably the first portable computer as well.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
During a speech at work about 10 years ago, my boss started talking about innovation and how one day, out of their garage, two young engineers invented the IBM personal computer. I then corrected him but he just brushed us off. I lost all respect for this fella and transferred to another department. I still love to point out his mistake.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
There was the IBM 5100 computer, which was an amazing piece of hardware. It very likely could have been the genesis of personal computers.... had IBM any sort of vision and if their marketing department wasn't so paranoid about the concept to let it out of the laboratory.
One of the amazing things about this little microcomputer was the fact that it could emulate some of the mainframe computers then in use at the time and even could in theory run some of software running on those mainframes as native binaries.
Unfortunately IBM sat on this device and only sold it to existing mainframe customers (when it was sold at all).
Sadly, the only thing that is related between this particular computer and the later IBM PC was the part numbering system, where the more famous "IBM PC" had the part number 5150.
The first Computers were people, given math problems on paper, they solved such problems.
These computers worked for organisations / businesses / governments.
The first "Personal Computer" would be the first person hired for that role on a personal basis... Thus, secretaries and/or (lab)assistants would classify as Personal Computers.
Considering that someone could decide to perform the task themselves, they would be their own "Personal Computer".
Thus most humans have been born equipped with at least one Personal Computer -- The Brain.
Now, that we've argued and settled this ridiculous case, while ignoring ancient computers -- Which may have been single personal use only.
I suggest we argue who first invented counting. (Which was no doubt discovered long before written languages).
It has the all the main personal computing features we associate with pre-Macintosh/Lisa systems, like a keyboard, CRT, local storage and user programmability. It probably predates the systems you sold by a year or two.
http://oldcomputers.net/ibm5100.html
IBM *did* invent a few other things:
Magnetic Hard Drive
Reduced Operating Instruction Set architecture
Transistorized DRAM
Relational databases
Virtual machine operating systems
DES encryption
Scanning tunneling microscope
To name a tiny fraction. So, they do have some bragging rights.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Actually, I don't think Apple used the term "personal computer" until around the introduction of the Mac and the Apple //c. These would both be introduced well after IBM marketed their "IBM Personal Computer" in 1981.
Now get off of my lawn.
My blog
The Apple II was plastic, toylike and very expensive for what you got. (You might as well have bought a TRS-80 and saved yourself a good chunk of change.)
The IBM PC was also expensive, but had top quality hardware similar to their mainframe terminals, including: a substantial steel chassis and case, a crisp monochrome monitor that you could actually work with all day without going blind, and one of the best keyboards ever made. It was a serious personal computer that PHBs felt comfortable buying for their businesses.
So the definition depends on your perspective. If based on technicalities, the Apple II, the Altair 8800, the Atari 2600, the Commodore PET, etc. were all "personal computers" because they had microprocessors. If based on what was understood to be a computer in the business word, the IBM PC was one of the first business computers that was small enough and inexpensive enough so that most were bought to be used by one person.
Actually Allen Fulmer - a professor of mathematics in Oregon designed and I built the prototype of a small computer years before any of these dudes. It used flip flops built on circuit boards using transistors. I designed the cards, etched them and soldered in all of the components by hand. It used as ASR 33 teletype machine as both and input / output and used paper tape for storage. It was finally manufactured by one Gamco Industries in Big Spring, Texas and sold to a number of schools. That was in the 1960's well before MITS, Altair, IMSAI and others. If interested contact me bud at dotnetchecksdotcom.
The Scelbi Mark 8H, 1974. 8008 processor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCELBI
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Must've really pissed them off when the term PC got stolen from them and applied to all NON-Apple computers.
Maybe that's part of why they're a bit jealous with the "App Store" branding stuff.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
"The Apple II was plastic, toylike and very expensive for what you got. (You might as well have bought a TRS-80 and saved yourself a good chunk of change.)"
The original TRS80 was only black and white - the Apple ][ had color
Actually I had an Apple ][+ as my 3rd computer - The first was a TRS80
and the second was a Compucolor II it had 8 colors, 128x 128 pixel graphics, 32 KB ram and a 117 key keyboard. Unfortunately it had hardly any software.
But the Apple ][ was the first expandable computer, with card slots and a top that was easily detached. The 3rd party manufacturers that started with Apple products went on to the IBM PC and helped enable the PC industry. BTW the BASIC in the Apple ][+ was written by Microsoft.
And Visicalc was the first spreadsheet
I didn't buy a PC compatable machine until 1994 - 15 years after I bought my first computer.
Must've really pissed them off when the term PC got stolen from them
For a long time all the other brands couldn't call their machines a 'PC' - they had to do it all the way out: 'IBM Compatible PC'.
Nonsense. All IBM did was provide a brand name that was palatable to corporations.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Was a student when they were just gaining a foothold. I remember one grizzly bastard prof talking about how this PC + the just released Lotus 123 was going to put the IS group in its place.
At the time, IS departments ruled the roost, and anyone that wanted a customized view of their own data either waited an eternity for them to do a 5 minute RPG job, or had to have cum running out of their nose to get it when they needed it.
The PC changed all of that - suddenly IS lost its gatekeeper status on the data; and other than a few viruses and break-ins; we've seldom looked back.
Alas, now the cloud (new mainframe) will give the IS (now IT) group back its previous status. To paraphrase Henry Spencer:
Those that don't remember the past will reinvent it, badly.
But they did invent the pc and even trademarked the name. If it were not for IBM the computer revolution would have happened a decade later. Apple was a name of a fruit that didnt sound professional. IBM had clout
http://saveie6.com/
I looked at Radio Shack, Apple, Commodore, and some S100 stuff at several local computers stores. Apple II required constant hacking and had severe glitches unless lots of extra money was spent on a CP/M card -- unless all you wanted to do was play games. CP/M-S100 boxes were business- and hacker-only. Commodore PET had a calculator-button keyboard and a shape only Wonder Woman could love (IRA?). Radio Shack Trash-80 Model 1 came as a complete system in a box, for a reasonable price (about 1/2 Apple's), with manuals written in Real English, and just worked (until I started expanding it and had to disassemble every 6 months for cleaning the non-gold-plated card edges). Had many home and business apps, some of which came with source code. Used it for over 10 years, until for work compatibility reasons I finally had to get a clone 386 with Windoze 3.1 (a step down in usability).
I.E. einstein's letter to roosevelt.
IBM's involvement with various questionable rulers in the 20s and 30s was not done as an act of warfare, it was done for pure profit motive.
No, Altair and IMSAI were the Norwegians, Apple II and TRS-80 were Columbus, and IBM was the Mayflower.
Q: What is the person I'm replying to?
A: A troll who doesn't know I'm using a descendant of the Archimedes to feed him.
um, Sorry Mr Cringely, both your article and IBM are wrong with the assumption of the first personal computer, look up the KENBAK-1 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenbak-1) which predates the "IBM Personal Computer" and the MITs Machines by Ed Roberts, that the article mentions.
The IBM Scamp prototype was developed at the IBM Palo Alto Scientific Center in 1973, and it was the precursor to the IBM 5100 portable computer that came out a couple of years later. That was IBM's first personal computer product, though of course the Intel-based IBM Personal Computer did not come out for nearly 6 years after that. For information on the Scamp and the 5100 see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SCAMP or http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/ibm/5100/ .
As far as I know, the Scamp is on display at the Smithsonian Institution.
The IBM 1130 from 1965 is shown in use on slide 7. http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/16/ibm-celebrates-100th-birthday/
More details http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1130
Description
The 1130 became quite popular, and the 1130 and its non-IBM clones gave many people
their first feel of "personal computing." Its price-performance ratio was good and it notably
included inexpensive, removable disk storage, with a reliable, easy to use disk operating
system that supported several high level languages. The low price and well balanced feature
set made interactive "open shop" program development available to a large number of users
for the first time. The 1130 holds a place in computing history in part because of the
fondness its former users hold for it.
Care to try to boot Dos 1.0 on a modern Macbook?
Every one's excuse is they only did a little bit. Those little bits add up to a monstrous thing. IBM knowingly supplied equipment for the purpose, making them a collaborator to the Nazi regime.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Proud Italian Americans tend to say, that once Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered.
But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Valley's latest wunderkind. This was well before IBM got into the marketplace. But everyone knew they would, considering the surge, and the rapidly expanding business market. The thing was that at the time, IBM's entry was met with quite a bit of disappointment. We were all expecting great things, but that was decidedly not what the 1st IBM PC was. A run of the mill CPU married to an also-ran OS. Not a step forward so much as a step sideways. Also a significant departure was that none of this stuff was actually developed by IBM, but by Intel, and an unknown snot-nosed kid with a bad haircut, who's mom was on IBM's board at the time. And yet, it was destined to become a huge thing. The technology decision makers in business were certainly no more savvy then than they are now. Why did it take off? "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was what was often said.
So, as it turns out, the singular thing that IBM contributed to the PC was its logo.
PC was a trademark "invented" by IBM.
Also, the concept wasn't just merely creating a computer for personal use, the concept was creating a modular computer.
So, yes, the invented the PC, they just didn't invent personal computing.
And, yes, the invention was primarily for marketing purposes, not for actual engineering.
Columbus didn't put America on the map. He just happened to put "India" in a wrong place on the existing map. That's the same difference what IBM did. IBM did a wrong thing at the wrong time and someone else just happened to correct it later. Yet years later, we still recognize Columbus as a person who discovered the America. and IBM as a company which "invented" PC.
It is unfair and incorrect.
Man, Cringley is a right poser.
you call a post nonsense and then agree with it ;)
This program was made possible by a grant from the Ultra-Humanite, and viewers like you.
It was André Truong.
Actually, Commodore did.
Since when MacBook have a BIOS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-1
Nowadays we expect a PC to be more or less portable, but that's not of the essence. The key point is that the PDP-1 was intended for dedicated use by a single person. Others could gather round and offer advice, feed paper tape, etc.; but one person sat in the chair and operated the machine in real time.
It's almost impossible, in our day and age, to imagine how different the PDP-1 was from any previous computer.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture
I think this is what they had invented that made the computer a PC
Having owned both an Apple //+ and an IBM PC-1 I feel I must comment on this post. The Apple did not feel flimsy. The Commodore 64 felt flimsy. Amusingly, many C64s are still working after obscene quantities of abuse. There's a lot of computer in that box, too; a friend of mine added an ISA slot to one and planted a mono text card in it for use in a cafe terminal, for example. IIRC he added an XT keyboard interface as well. Maybe that was a 128, I don't recall at this late date. The Apple had a fantastic case that no computer before or since has equaled save possibly the Macintosh IIci. It holds up amazingly well, its function is served admirably by its form, and it is utterly apprehensible as such things go. And of course, I would say the same about the C64, but with the understanding that it is so much less machine in so many ways. If the Apple had come equipped with some kind of advanced music synthesis (as did the C64) I wouldn't even be using it for comparison today.
Nobody I knew had a TRS-80. I used to go play Thexder on it at Radio Shack in the mall. It looked and felt even more flimsy than the C64. I didn't even have a 64, I had a 16. Oh, the agony.
The IBM PC was expensive; luckily I didn't pay for it. I got mine for free well after its heyday, after the demise of my first Amiga 500. I'm pretty sure it was all my fault. Actually, I think I only killed the keyboard interface or something, but it's all hazy now. For additional comparison, the Amiga 500 felt pretty sturdy but looked like garbage, however cool I thought it looked at the time. I think only the towers looked good after the A1000 until the A4000, but maybe that's just me. Consider that I was a pretty diehard Amiga wingnut at the time, too. I've got a 1200, I've had a 3000, 2000, 2500 (came that way, that is.)
Now, when you suggest that the display of the IBM PC was "crisp", I have to take exception. I had that display, and it was muddy as hell just like the IBM terminals of the day. It did, however, have more characters than the Apple. I do have to agree with you about the keyboard, although I'm not sure any keyboard ever needed to be quite so loud.
The Apple was more affordable than the IBM, not least because you could output to your television. Indeed, this trend carried all the way through the Amiga computers; a decent monitor that would do what the Amiga's video output would do was expensive at the time. Remember what the original NEC Multisync cost? Yowza. I had a CGA display hooked up to my Amiga for a while; you can imagine how disappointing that was. I puttered around with CGA and EGA on my PCs for quite some time because I couldn't afford a monitor. My first VGA monitor was a 12" or so monochrome 640x480 unit... it hurts my eyes just to think about it.
The Apple 2 family was the first credible personal computer that gained widespread popularity in the USA. The IBM PC's primary contribution was that it was blown open and endlessly cloned. Having multiple manufacturers making compatible machines is what brought us the computing landscape we know today. It could have happened to anyone, but IBM had the credibility to make people want to copy them. Given that I was using the PC-1 many years after its debut and still getting stuff done (I had Lotus and Wordstar... and a 30 MB full-height Quantum MFM disk in an external case) I have nothing against the PC. Clearly IBM created a winner. It was hilarious to see them flail with the PS/2s.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The important thing that IBM did was create open standards, so anyone could make compatible hardware, and software. They then made enough of the things so that it became profitable to make software, hardware, and clones. If it hadn't been for IBM we might still all be locked into the "Apple Prison", that Android is now blowing apart in the tradition of the IBM PC. If it had not been for big blue, I could never have built the computer I am making this comment on.
if anyone gets credit for ushering in the personal computer age its Apple
Right. Just forget about the Altair, the IMSAI and other 8080 based microcomputers. HP used the term "personal computer" way back in 1968 to refer to their HP 9100A. But, why not give Apple credit for this as well since they can do no wrong.
Heil Jobs!
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
One can certainly debate whether the TRS-80, Apple ][, PET, or some other device was the first “personal computer”, but anyone who was paying attention to computers at the time knows that the IBM PC was not.
The headline on articles about IBM’s new PC was “The Empire Strikes Back“, and the text was all about whether this response from Big Blue would succeed against the upstart Rebels that were already sneaking into the workplace, against the wishes of the guys in Data Processing. I remember reading one of those press releases for the IBM Personal Computer, comparing the capabilities to an Apple ][, and (teenager that I was) thinking that it sucked rotten eggs because it didn’t even do graphics!
The IBM PC was a highly influential and successful product, and it successfully drove most earlier lines of personal computers off the market (the Apple ][ being the obvious exception, which pre-dated the IBM PC by 4 years and then co-existed with it for over a decade). But the only sense in which it was the first "personal computer" is that it was the fist one that had those words stenciled on the case.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
has always been a bad acronym to me, not ever even knowing what it abbreviates, it still has left a bad taste in my mind.. A 100 year old company with the same acronym as Inter-ballistic missile scares the hell out of me .
the Altair and IMSAI were personal computers but only super nerds in small groups could even operate one, apple you flipped a switch and your 5 year old was running math blaster
thats like saying the hand cranked cars of the eleite rich ushered in the age of the common man car and not henry ford, so quit being a hater for 1 second and give credit where credit is due
if you consider fiddle fucking umpteen dozen toggle switches just to get something to boot as something the masses could use you need your head examined
Regardless of what US case law may say on the subject, corporations are not, in fact, persons. Therefore, computers sold to corporations are not "personal computers".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
"The important thing that IBM did was create open standards, so anyone could make compatible hardware, and software. "
Nice try, but not really true.
When IBM created their Personal Computer, it was not an "open standard". They did not want other people to make compatible systems, and were assholey enough about it that competitors had to settle for making computers that were only sort of compatible. They designed machines using similar components, and licensed MS-DOS (from Microsoft, not IBM) to run on them. Application software that only made calls to the OS (rather than attempting to access the hardware directly, which was much more efficient) would run on them, but usually not the apps that people actually wanted to run. It wasn't until Compaq broke out with a 100% compatible BIOS that the IBM PC became an open hardware standard that anyone could duplicate.
IBM responded by creating a new closed architecture which they could better protect (the Micro-Channel Architecture of the PS/2 line). It failed in the marketplace.
(It's worth noting that the open expansion slots in the IBM PC – if that's what you were thinking of – weren't new either. The Apple II and various CP/M-running systems had similar slots, and third-party manufacturers were always encouraged to produce hardware for them.)
Bottom line: IBM didn't create an open standard; they created a proprietary standard that got opened up against their will... which worked out to their advantage for a while, but ultimately... well, seen any IBM-brand personal computers lately?
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
if you consider fiddle fucking umpteen dozen toggle switches just to get something to boot as something the masses could use you need your head examined
Then by your own measure, the TRS-80 model I or Commodore PET was the first personal computer because you simply had to take it out of the box, plug it together and turn it on. The Apple I was just a limited production circuit board so does not qualify. The Apple II did not come with a monitor and had to be connected to a monitor with NTSC composite video inputs (not common on most TVs of the time) or to a regular TV via RF modulator, which was beyond some folks technical abilities (remember the days when you had to help your parents figure out the VCR?).
The bottom line is Apple has their place in computing history, but they are (and were) not the end-all-be-all of everything as some here would suggest.
I was there at the time and recall looking at the PET, the Apple II and the TRS-80. I chose to get a TRS-80 because I was interested in writing software. The TRS-80 offered the largest opportunity because it had the best chance for commercial success due to the marketing reach of Radio Shack as well as it's appeal to business users who wanted something that looked like a business machine rather than a game console.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
ok troll I am not suggesting that apple is the end all be all, but its a fucking fact the apple II was the first PC in a nice consumer case for the masses sparking off the industry as we know it today
not a handful of fags toggling switches in their mothers basement
Well, yeah, Apple was officially first, but the TRS-80 followed by only 6 months, and outsold Apple II every year after its introduction.
People remember the Apple II selling like hotcakes, but in fact they didn't sell that well compared to other models. Especially after the Commodore 64 came out, which blew Apple away in sheer numbers of units sold.
IBM was the Borg of the personal computer revolution, setting the stage for the PC clone wars as computer manufacturing skyrocketed. without IBM, no internet would have exploded information through our minds...and most people would not be able to afford a computer outside of Apple. cheers!
a handful of fags toggling switches in their mothers basement
You shouldn't speak of Jobs and Woz in such derogatory terms.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
Well, yeah, Apple was officially first, but the TRS-80 followed by only 6 months, and outsold Apple II every year after its introduction.
People remember the Apple II selling like hotcakes, but in fact they didn't sell that well compared to other models. Especially after the Commodore 64 came out, which blew Apple away in sheer numbers of units sold.
You're right, the TRS-80 "owned" the market (around 75% as I recall) until the IBM PC came along. The only qualm I have with your post is that Apple doesn't even deserve the "officially first" title. The Commodore PET was announced in January 1977 and the Apple II wasn't announced until April. Additionally, the Commodore PET was far more an "appliance" computer than the Apple II. There was nothing to do but take it out of the box and plug it in. As I mentioned earlier, the Apple II required some "hooking up" and even when you got it hooked up, you were presented with a screen full of ? and @ characters with an asterisk at the bottom. You booted into the monitor (aka machine code debugger) rather than directly into BASIC like the TRS-80 and PET. This is admittedly a minor point, but details like this go to the matter of which machine appealed more to the techie vs the computer neophyte.
Sometimes the light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an oncoming train.
IBM was the first computer manufacturer that brought all the elements together,
Back in reality, IBM was the computer manufacturer with a monopolistic track record that ignored PCs for years, then panicked and brought-out a "me too" system running a clone of the already-industry-standard CP/M with a kludgey not-quite-true 16-bit processor. They then used their industry muscle to take over the corporate microcomputing market (and extinguish the previous CP/M practice of designing software to be easily patched to run on diverse systems) - then got their underpants pulled up over their heads when someone found a legal way of cloning their proprietary firmware (without which, however many bloody circuit diagrams they published, nobody else could have made a software-compatible PC).
Consequently, we got stuck with CP/M functionality and paged RAM for a decade, just when CP/M was reaching its sell-by date and proper 32-bit processors were becoming available.
That's the way I remember it, anyway - and unlike your version, my version doesn't require airbrushing CP/M systems, the S-100 bus, RS232, Shugart (disc interface), Centronics (printer interface) and all the other de-facto, pre-IBM standards out of history.
Hint: one reason why some cheaper systems like the Trash 80 and Vic had proprietary connectors is that they were a fraction of the price of an IBM PC and adding (e.g.) a floppy disc interface, or even a proper "standard" expansion bus costs money. Floppy drive connectors, for example, were perfectly standard by the early 80s, but not much good unless your computer had a disc controller.
but the "PC compatible" architecture's primary competitor on the desktop was, just about 14 years ago, still rolling-out computers that had an oddball monitor connector, used proprietary expansion cards, ran a proprietary OS, and had proprietary connectors for almost all their peripherals.
...would that be the proprietary "localtalk" connectors that implemented low-cost local area networking and printer sharing years before Ethernet became affordable? Or the monitor connectors that ensured that, whatever monitor you used, on-screen, 1 pixel = 1 point when doing DTP work? Or the desktop bus system that allowed keyboards, mice, tablets etc. to be daisy-chained rather than each having to have a lead going back to the computer? Or is "SCSI" the non-standard disc interface you're talking about? Standardisation is fine provided you've finished innovating.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
But Apple was first to ship - in June 1977, whereas the PET didn't ship until October.
Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. :)
No, IBM did not invent the first personal computer. But the IBM PC did invent the PC industry. The IBM PC was the right combination of hardware, software and design that made the PC a viable market. Just as Apple did not invent the MP3 player, the smartphone, or the tablet computer, Apple did invent the products that created a broad, viable market for those devices. In the same way, IBM invented the product that made the PC a tool that mattered to a broad consumer market.
Without the IBM PC, we would would not have the PC market as we know it, just as we wouldn't have today's smartphone market if Apple had not invented the iPhone. So IBM did invent the PC, in the sense that they invented the product that created a PC industry that did not previously exist.
IBM invented "Fixed Disks" ;-)
Besides it's very unlikely indeed. When IBM did business with Germany, Hitler was the champion of leftism everywhere : a form of leftism and redistribution that wasn't communism, and so wasn't scary because all the big Soviet guns. College sponsorship ! Unemployment benefits ! Pensions ! Invalidity assistance ! Free National Healthcare ! All of these were very rare, and no country went anywhere near as far as Germany. Not even the Soviets. Every politician worldwide pushed everyone to do business with him (companies just liked to do it without a German presence, because of the goons)
So everybody did do business with him. Hitler was nominated for a Nobel Peace prize, and all his anti-Jew propaganda was forgiven, just as it's unmentionable now when discussing Chavez or islamic countries (specifically the theocratic government of Iran, but also in general), or simply islam itself (let's not pretend there is any shortage of Jew hatred in islamic communities in America), for example.
So what did IBM help with exactly ? Well they helped organize the holocaust ... yes and no. They helped organize the national healthcare program that transformed into the holocaust over many years.
Sorry, I forgot to mention EFI. Yes Apple was one of the first popular systems to use EFI. It is becoming more common with other systems recently, particularly with the recent release of Sandy Bridge. Most EFI implementations has BIOS compatibility modules to boot old non-EFI OSes.
By way of comparison, look at Commodore's much later ads for their 68000-based Amiga computer: "ONLY AMIGA MAKES IT POSSIBLE!" You couldn't even be bothered to line up some of the major applications already out there and port them to your new platform.
Couple of things to bear in mind: First: MS-DOS was basically a CP/M clone, and not only were Wordstar and its contemporaries written for CP/M, but written at a time when it was essential to make the hardware-dependent parts easily modifiable - something that was rapidly lost as soon as software started becoming PC only. So, porting Wordstar to the PC was hardly the Manhatten project. AmigaDOS was, AFAIK, a full-blown, minicomputer-class multitasking OS and nothing like CP/M or DOS - and by that time a lot of "popular software" was hard-coded for IBM PC hardware.
Second: there was a lot of hype surrounding the PC launch, and a general premonition that IBM would rapidly dominate the market. I doubt that software houses needed much persuasion to port their software, at their own expense (nobody ever got fired for writing for IBM!) - Commodore would have had to be far more persuasive.
Third: the Unique Selling Point of the Amiga was always going to be games, graphics and music - it was massive overkill for office software (and, by that time, most businesses wouldn't even consider anything non-PC). You didn't buy an Amiga because you wanted a Word Processor - you bought an Amiga because you wanted a Fairlight CMI and a Quantel Paintbox but didn't have 100 grand to spare... What was it going to do with Wordstar? Wrap it round a sphere and bounce it about the screen?
The Selectric-style keyboard, for example, was a big hit with business users, as was their fairly high resolution Monochrome Display.
I suspect the main reason the PC got as many good reviews as it did was that a lot of journalists loved the keyboard :-)
You should also remember, though, that the IBM PC was expensive compared with other personal computers of the day, Other systems were designed around standard TV frequency displays for a reason. It was only after began, the clone wars had, that IBM PC technology started to become affordable by the masses, and that has as much to do with the general trend towards cheaper electronics as anything that IBM did.
ISTR also that the the IBM high-res display flickered like a fricking Sinclair ZX-80 every time it scrolled...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
...that Babbage had already invented a personal computer for himself. Yeah, he never actually built it, but hey, who cares?
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
Before IBM released their PC, these items were called microcomputers...