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'."

Comments

"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[atari2600a]

You know those wrist tattoos from Auchwitz? IBM-formatted punchcard serial numbers.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Yes, a bit hypocritical to just lay the blame at IBM's feet too. The US has a long history of doing business with criminal regimes from banana republics, to the nazi's, to apartheid South Africa, to regimes like Saudi Arabia today.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Penguinisto]

A little bit.

I'm not exactly IBM's biggest fan (having to hammer on 370-series mainframes made me quite the IBM-hater for awhile), but to say that IBM automated the Nazis would be akin to saying that {insert item here} helped to {insert what that item does} the Nazis.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that WWII Germany had light bulbs, motion pictures, aircraft, NCR calculators (the old mechanical kind), and lots of other things pioneered by American individuals and companies. I'm also willing to bet that many of them were used directly in facilitating the Holocaust as well.

Hell, Henry Ford was an open admirer of Hitler's policies before (and even in the pre-US stages of) WWII, and an unabashed anti-semite... does that make the Ford Mustang a Nazimobile?

But yeah, basically, TFA is a Godwin.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

If nazi's is correct, then you should write:: U'S, busine's's,regime's,republic's.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not also forget that the Third Reich accomplished good deeds, even if those good deeds were like 5% against their 95% bad deeds. I doubt the IBM equipment had anything to do with gassing the Jews.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to go ahead and eat my words here and admit that I instantly dismissed the link without even reading it, thinking it was a Godwin because I'm so accustomed to reductio ad Hitlerum. Now my comment looks just plain stupid.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Be honest, you made that comment just because of the humor in a grammar nazi pointing out the error in "nazi's" didn't you ?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like it.

Also, who the fuck is Robert X. Cringely and why should anyone care about his opinion?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh... but IBM actually did do a lot of contracting for the Nazis.

They weren't just Nazi sympathizers, they didn't just make general-purpose tools and end up having the Nazis use them, they worked with them extensively in a strategic alliance. They talked to them about what they wanted to get done, they helped them do it efficiently, and they put effort into hiding their role.

In particular, they were instrumental in accomplishing the identification of members of targeted ethnic groups, while being fully aware of the Nazi party's intent to persecute them. They provided the information infrastructure necessary to round up all of the jews and gypsies, knowing at the very least that they were to be rounded up.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[mother_reincarnated]

Actually lets totally forget that, m'kay? Sometimes there is no need for shades of grey.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[morgan_greywolf]

Also, who the fuck is Robert X. Cringely and why should anyone care about his opinion?

Cringely is the new JonKatz.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[hairyfeet]

While this is true to be fair the ones doing business with the Nazis were the German branch and from what I understand in Hitler's Germany you did what you were told or enjoy your nice trip to the concentration camp. His regime weren't real tolerant of being told no, just look at how the German commanders captured (and secretly recorded0 by the Brits were all in agreement that attacking Russia was a majorly BAD idea, but none had the guts to walk up to the Fuhrer and tell him that.

As for TFA, frankly he is full of shit. Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore? Of course not because IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.

As someone who lived through that time allow me to say thank you IBM, thank you for the 5150 and for being stupid enough to publish specs for everything back then which made building add ons easy. today it would be proprietary as hell and innovation would be right out the window, but thanks to IBM we don't have to throw everything out when we want to upgrade for performance. Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, nothing talked to each other, the drives for A wouldn't work on B, hell even computers by the same company often had incompatible peripherals. As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20 frankly it was a royal PITA.

Now thanks to IBM you can buy AMD, Intel or Via, add more RAM or even a new box from a different OEM, it really doesn't matter as it all "just works". Thanks to the hardware being open we were able to route around the douches, like Compaq and their "special RAM", and now it doesn't matter what hardware or even OS you get, your printer still plugs in, you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots, it all is basically compatible. And frankly that is a GOOD thing. Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX, to where we could easily repair or upgrade that would be heaven. Sadly it looks like proprietary in a box will stay in mobile land, which means designed for the dump since third parties can't make cheap parts. Damned shame but thank you IBM for at least giving us one platform that is easy to deal with.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget China.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Runaway1956]

The "German branch" of IBM? Buddy, there are no "branches" in a megacorporation. You do what the head honchos at the main corporate headquarters say, or you're out of a job. Look, I know that IBM wasn't the only company to do business with the Nazis, but IBM had more inside information on the goals of the Nazis than anyone else. Tracking and segregating the Jewish population is directly credited to IBM, and quite properly so. The Nazis TOLD IBM what they wanted, and IBM delivered. There is very little waffle-room left to IBM. Maybe they didn't completely understand the ultimate goal, but they most definitely understood the intermediate goals.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[kevinmenzel]

There's never a need for shades of grey. If they did a blu-ray version of TNG they could just skip that episode completely, never release it, and I don't think anyone would even notice.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[AHuxley]

Ford is a warning form history about wealthy networks, generational trusts and what they can print in their masters image.
IBM is interesting too, they have records from that era but how much have historians seen ;)
The next question is what did the people who sat in on this in the 1940's as younger staff fund in the 1950's, 60's ... as more senior staff and who was groomed to take their place?
Final solutions for a small planet?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Jane Q. Public]

Agree with the first responder. There are memos proving beyond a doubt that Thomas J. Watson himself was not only informed about what was going on, but himself helped plan it and actively engaged in doing business with the Nazis.

Part of that business was supplying machines that kept track of concentration camp prisoners via punch card.

Was IBM all bad? No. But was it some bad, especially during the Nazi Germany days? Hell, yes! The historical record has proven it beyond reasonable doubt. Of course, Watson and IBM were not the only corporate or finance bigwigs who did that kind of thing at the time, but do it they definitely did.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Jane Q. Public]

You missed the point.

IBM supplied Germany with machines and intelligence during the war, with full knowledge of Thomas Watson himself. Which at the time, if he were caught, would probably have gotten him charges of treason and aiding and abetting the enemy, at the very least.

There is strong physical evidence, including memos, invoices, and receipts, indicating that IBM (and I mean the US offices, not just some German branch) actively, during the war, supplied the Nazis with machines that were used to keep track of prisoners at concentration camps, and instruction on how to use them.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[haruchai]

Does that mean Henry Ford invented the automobile?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[AvitarX]

No, only custom designed equipment to get them to the shower

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[IICV]

In particular, they were instrumental in accomplishing the identification of members of targeted ethnic groups, while being fully aware of the Nazi party's intent to persecute them. They provided the information infrastructure necessary to round up all of the jews and gypsies, knowing at the very least that they were to be rounded up.

Exactly! It was a now-classic consulting scenario: the business (e.g, Nazi Germany) buys a big shiny piece of hardware, and with it they get some IBM consultants to customize it. The business comes up with its business rules, e.g, every generation the Jewishness halves if a Jew marries a non-Jew, anyone who is at least 1/64th Jewish is considered a Jew, and here's some census data that says who has claimed to be a Jew up until the current moment who has married whom (gotta ferret out those crypto-Jews, sneaky though they are), and we want names and addresses out of it. Then the consultants go hmm okay that'll be $lots and implement the system.

It would have absolutely impossible for IBM's consultant programmers to have worked on this project without realizing that Hitler would be using this information to round up citizens based on their ethnicity. I can totally accept that the consultants didn't realize that the Jews would be killed (it's hard to believe that people are going to die as a result of your work, honestly), but there was no way for them to have done this without realizing that, you know, the names and addresses are popping out of our tabulating machine and going straight to the Gestapo who all run out waving truncheons.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[jon_doh2.0]

Very dark. Those who could be proved to be knowingly collaborating on such projects should have been prosecuted. If there is any justice...

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[thunderclap]

>Hell, Henry Ford was an open admirer of Hitler's policies before (and even in the pre-US stages of) WWII, and an unabashed anti-semite... does that make the Ford Mustang a Nazimobile?

Yes, it does. ;)

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[UBfusion]

Could we please have some references on this aspect of Watson's activities?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[NotSanguine]

So instead of "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" it should be "Lots of people got fried when the Nazis bought IBM?"

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[noodler]

"While this is true to be fair the ones doing business with the Nazis were the German branch and from what I understand in Hitler's Germany you did what you were told or enjoy your nice trip to the concentration camp."

Riiight, so you, as leader of the German branch make the mother company cough up milions of dollars worth of equipment to satisfy your german overlord ?
I don't think the US branch had anything against making money from the european 'situation'.
It was another fat government contract.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Jane Q. Public]

This is only one item (an account of an interview about Black's book), but please read the whole thing, not just the first few paragraphs.

This by itself is not proof of anything, of course, it's just a taste. You can find lots more on Google. Some of it is hogwash, to be sure... but some of it isn't. It's usually pretty easy to tell real evidence, like memos and business records, from anecdotal B.S.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Jane Q. Public]

Pardon me: I did not mean to imply that the US branch(es) of IBM actually physically supplied the machines. But they were involved in setting up new branches in Europe, in concert with Nazi occupations, making sure that foreign branches of IBM did supply the requisite machines, and supplying information (and possibly even programs) for their use.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

As for TFA, frankly he is full of shit. Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore? Of course not because IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.

Technically, they didn't invent the personal computer, because, well, they didn't invent it.

Few people use them anymore, but there were dozens of personal computers before the IBM PC arrived. IBM was late to the game, and rode the coattails of the true inventors.

You can't even say they created the most commonly used platform today; Microsoft bought DOS and invented Windows, while IBM was trying to push Microchannel and OS/2.

No two ways about it - the claim is flat-out FALSE.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[mikeabbott420]

i've been reading cringly for a long, long time, although this post is uninteresting to me I have often found his writing to be interesting and insightful.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

This reaction you're seeing is an underlying distaste for the mannerisms of the internet. Not actually about arguing revisionist history or anything.

I mean, c'mon people. Virtually everything you love about technology, from personal computers, to landing on the moon, to all that pop-physics stuff you love some much, to the existence of slashdot itself... they're all influenced in no-small-part by the work of that company.

And yet today, on their 100th anniversary, the internet is awash with "IBM MURDERED THE JEWS" articles, as if we all didn't already know the story. What some of those people did 70 years ago was pretty awful. I guess we'll see similar articles for VW and Ford resurface at some point too. But I don't suppose, just this once, we could... you know, say, "Hey thanks for, like... the advanced state of human space flight and exploration, math, physics, agriculture, medicine and computing in general."

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Hognoxious]

Buddy, there are no "branches" in a megacorporation. You do what the head honchos at the main corporate headquarters say, or you're out of a job.

Unless someone much nearer with a gun tells you to do otherwise. Firing is bad, but a firing squad is worse.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[itsdapead]

Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore?

Of course not, any more than anybody runs Intel 8088 chips anymore, uses an ISA expansion bus, Shugart disc interfaces etc. I even believe that modern systems can have more than 640K of RAM...

The 6502 might not have had any official surviving children (ISTR there was a 16-bit variant used in the Apple II GS), but its pretty well documented that it was a major influence on the design of the ARM.

Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.

No, Apple uses chips based on the modern x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. I don't think the fact that these have legacy backwards-compatibility with the 8088 was a major influence on Apple's decision to switch. That has more to do with IBM and Motorola's failure to manufacture a mobile version of the PPC G5, at a time when Apple was doing rather well with non-Intel based machines...

As someone who lived through that time

You must have been very, very drunk, because you don't remember it very well.

Folks seem to forget that before the 5150 NOTHING worked together, [snip] As someone who had a Trash80 and a VIC20

Which is why, pre-PC, serious commercial microcomputer users tended to use one of the many CP/M-based systems rather than VIC20s, to the extent that there were even kludges available to run CP/M on Trash-80s and Apple IIs (the latter requiring a Z80 system on an expansion card). This is what IBM-lovers like to airbrush out of history because the "revolutionary" IBM PC was really just a "me too" CP/M-86 machine (MS-DOS/PC-DOS being, effectively, a clone of CP/M).

Now thanks to the failure of the IBM PS/2 and MicroChannel architecture you can buy...

There, put that right for you.

your printer still plugs in,

Nice to know that IBM invented the Centronics and RS232 interfaces, and that anybody who remembers using those on non-IBM computers is delusional.

you don't need IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots

You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.

Now if we could only get the same thing in the mobile space, to where laptops had standard motherboards like ATX and mATX

If only people didn't want their mobiles to be slim, and light, and, well, mobile...

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[KDR_11k]

Besides, the Nazis replaced all the top guys in companies with party-approved leaders. If the international leadership of the company doesn't approve, tough luck, have fun explaining that to the SA goons.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Jane Q. Public]

"... as if we all didn't already know the story. What some of those people did 70 years ago was pretty awful."

I agree. But I honestly think that many people did NOT know that story. I don't think they're all trolling.

The 20th century (and probably earlier) history of politics in the United States is chock full of politicians and industrialists playing both sides of the fence. Yes, it has most definitely been pretty awful. And no, it hasn't stopped.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[KDR_11k]

However it should be remembered that the holocaust wasn't common knowledge within the Allied countries. They heard of it but thought it was a lie fabricated to make their enemy seem worse. They didn't realize it was real before they found the first camps.

While we're throwing hindsight blame around, how about complaining that the Allied bombing runs didn't hit the German production plants for stuff like tanks, allowing the Nazis to increase production as the war went on without building any new factories?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[KDR_11k]

That was back in the day when most people were racist or antisemitic to some degree, they may even have believed that persecuting Jews and sticking them into ghettos would be a good thing.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides, the Nazis replaced all the top guys in companies with party-approved leaders. If the international leadership of the company doesn't approve, tough luck, have fun explaining that to the SA goons.

I know they are considered grievers by many online communities but srsy... O.o

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[noodler]

Can you please get your history straight?
IBM actually helped the nazis categorize the population.
It was the tool that made the holocaust possible.
It is silly to think that a company like IBM was not aware of nazi practices.
Their buisness was in automating big bureaucracies.
Governments are a big chunk of that.
The papers were full of what was happening in germany and there was already a stream of jews flighting from there to the US.
There is no way IBM didn't know.
And you know what?
It's still going on.
How do you think, for instance, the taliban got their non-russian weapons?
It's not from the russians for sure.
There are many examples of companies gaining from war and other nasty stuff.
And there is nothing holy about IBM.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[NoOneInParticular]

All IBM has to do to corroborate your hypothesis is to open up their archives, and show through written communication that the international leadership was indeed side-stepped by the SA goons. IBM hasn't opened up these archives, unlike most other companies involved with the Nazis, therefore I highly doubt that the head-honchos in New York at the time were innocent.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[drinkypoo]

I didn't know the story, but I did know that the service contract for the concentration camp management machines was paid directly to Armonk, NY.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Registered Coward v2]

As for TFA, frankly he is full of shit. Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore? Of course not because IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.

You point out a common feature of many businesses - the company that invented the concept is often not the one who is the most successful or even a survivor as the industry matures. It's often the fast followers, who learn form the pioneer's mistakes and ultimately grow large. MS is very good at that - something, BTW we can also thank IBM for enabling - to the point that many people think they created the concepts since they've become the de facto standard.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[drinkypoo]

You seem to think IBM invented the PCI bus. They didn't - the original ISA bus had "IRQs or futzing or hoping you have the right slots" up the wazzoo.

Indeed, IBM actually went the opposite direction with the PS/2, and you had to have configuration floppies to install MCA cards even for use under DOS. The only cool thing about the hardware I messed with while working for the county of santa cruz HRA as a youngun was the PS/2 model 70, I'd mess with one of those even today. Probably no point though. When I was leaving we were just getting 486SLC PS/Valuepoints... I mean, seriously?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[drinkypoo]

That was back in the day when most people were racist or antisemitic to some degree

When most people were? When most people talk about the gay jews in hollywood they're not as happy about it as some of us are. In many countries it is almost proverbial that you shouldn't work for a jew because they will cheat you; I'm not saying this is how it is or anything, I'm saying this is what people say. The jews I know are outspoken and assertive (to the last one) compared to most people and that kind of thing makes a lot of people uncomfortable, whatever else might be true. ObDisclaimer: AFAICT I am racially some kind of cryptojew in addition to all the other stuff mixed in. I have nothing against jews. Et cetera. My point is that antisemitism is still about as strong as ever worldwide.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM PC compatible is the standard PERIOD. Hell even Apple now is IBM PC compatible.

On the software side, though, almost every machine now has a GUI which descended from the Mac interface. Apple didn't invent the GUI, but they refined it and brought it to the desktop in a big way.

As Woz said, Apple knew that someday every computer would use a GUI - "we lost all the battles, but won the war."

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, a bit hypocritical to just lay the blame at IBM's feet too. The US has a long history of doing business with criminal regimes from banana republics, to the nazi's, to apartheid South Africa, to regimes like Saudi Arabia today.

Don't forget the ET's that want us as a food source.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Bing Tsher E]

And here I thought all the blame for the Holocaust was Rolodexes, and 3 x 5 Index cards.

Don't get me started on the fact that there were people throughout the Nazi regime wearing leather shoes. Blame the Cows!

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[hairyfeet]

Hell look at how many mainstream churches and leaders in the late 40s through early 60s were finding bible passages and any other excuse on why "them niggers need to be kept in their place"? if you dig back far enough in ANY large business you are gonna find something distasteful or even monstrous, because frankly times have changed by leaps and bounds in the last 100 years.

People forget that Nazi eugenics? Came from right here in the USA. We were sterilizing undesirables long before Hitler had the thought cross his mind, and publishing nice little books on how negroid and mongoloid features were an outward sign of an inferior race. These ideas didn't just magically pop up in Germany, nor did hatred for the Jews.

So maybe instead of rehashing some 70 year old info that frankly isn't gonna change a damned thing, would saying thank you to IBM for giving us a standard that to this day is affecting your life, really be so bad? Everything from the BIOS to the choice of CPU we owe to IBM and if it weren't for them opening up the 5150 all those years ago we might still have a giant proprietary mess on the desktop where you had to buy Compaq RAM to run in Compaq machines, and Dell printers wouldn't work on Acer desktops.

So frankly no matter what IBM did 70+ years ago (Henry Ford hated Jews too, should we put Ford out of business or bring it up whenever a new Mustang comes out?) on their happy 100th maybe we should just let them blow out the candles and sing happy birthday for once.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[hairyfeet]

Uhh they helped them put people into categories for eugenics purposes just like they did here in the USA or did you forget that we were sterilizing undesirables and putting out books on how negroid and mongoloid features were proof they were inferior to white races?

As someone who actually got to hear about liberating one of the polish camps from my grandfather who was there frankly nobody believed the stories until we actually got to the first camps, which is why Patton and Ike made the scenes be recorded and shuffled the townspeople of the nearby villages through the camps to witness the horror. We thought the stories were just so much bullshit just as the stories being spread by Lord Haw Haw and Axis Sally, which had the Nazis slaughtering the Americans in huge numbers while kicking the Russian ass.

So while hindsight is 20/20 most people at the time thought it would be used for sterilization (not nice either, but what we in the USA were doing) not for systemic slaughter. Sadly there are no true good guys with clean hands in that war, you had the Russians and the rape of Berlin as well as mass slaughter of German POWs, the rape of Nanking by the japs as well as experimenting on prisoners (which we let them get away with in return for the data) and you had the USA doing terror bombings as well as two atomics on a country that frankly had had it and was no longer able to put up any real defense.

Despite all the "America Fuck yeah!" attached to that war the simple fact is total war is a brutal thing but we were a little more naive back then and as my grandfather said "If I wouldn't have seen the cattle cars with my own eyes I would have called you a liar." because until they got to the camps they just hadn't seen any indication that the truth wasn't they had sent the Jews east, which is what everyone believed at the time.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are right about all that. Grandpa Bush was in bed with the Nazis at the same time.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[dave420]

But IBM NY invested millions of Reichsmarks into their German subsidiary when it was apparent what said subsidiary was up to. You can't simply say "IBM was powerless!" - IBM NY actively chose to participate.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[cyber-vandal]

Having seen a few IBM projects in my time I can see why the Nazis lost.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spelled "griefers." Off to the camp.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as that justice isn't weak, class-action, "accept-this-paltry-sum-for-the slave-labor-your-ancestor(s)-did" bullshit that the likes of mercedes-benz got. the companies involved should be stripped of their holdings post-haste!

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[pyrr]

Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees. None of your pedantic "points" have diminished the point of the post you're replying to. IBM was the first computer manufacturer that brought all the elements together, published their ISA specs (rather than patenting them and keeping everything proprietary), and tried to unify the desktop PC industry rather than making yet another shitty, unique platform that required shitty, unique expansion cards, memory, and peripherals. Not all of their choices were good, some of the things they wanted to make into standards failed miserably (and rightly so), but IBM definitely deserves the credit for setting the trend that the "PC-compatible" means; even today, that pretty much all currently-manufactured desktop computers all conform to the same basic specifications and have a rather high degree of interoperability for software and peripherals.

I realize it's kind of hard to remember how bad things used to be, 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. Imagine if nearly every computer manufacturer still did things that way, just as they did before IBM's 5150. Some clung to that model for a decade or so, but they all failed or conformed, because it's just stupid to "Think Different" when the only implication of doing so is that you actually just come across as being mentally-challenged..Not having to deal with all that foolishness and being a highly-available standard is what helped the PC reach critical mass and become ubiquitous.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[pyrr]

And yet, that would be the same PS/2 that gave us the mini-DIN connector in the context of connecting keyboards and mice, which is still found on many modern desktops and docking stations. A 20+ year old IBM Model M keyboard for those old systems can still be plugged-in to many modern computers, well over a decade after the superior USB interface came along.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[ScrewMaster]

Sure you may be able to say technically the first home computer that could be called personal wasn't an IBM, but does anyone run 6502 MOSFET chips anymore?

What? I mean ... what? I agree with itsdapead: if you lived through that period you were either asleep or in an alcoholic haze. The reality is this: IBM was responsible for foisting upon us the following: a fourth-rate "operating system" (and I use the term loosely, "broken Unix clone" might be a better description), a defective-by-design CPU, and last but not least, a drain-bamaged system architecture. I don't give them any points for that, especially because their engineers wanted to do it right (e.g., a 68000-based system, but management nixed the idea because they didn't want to be dependent upon a potential competitor.) IBM's "get it to market now" attitude, and their unfortunate success, left us with a legacy of technological inadequacy which we're still dealing with today.

IBM did do some things right, things that Apple, Commodore and the rest simply failed to do at the time, and which ultimately cost them the market. The Selectric-style keyboard, for example, was a big hit with business users, as was their fairly high resolution Monochrome Display. It made the system look and work much like the mainframe terminals that business users were already familiar with. Additionally, by the time of the official unveiling they had already paid to have all the major Apple ][ business applications of the time ported to their new system (BP Accounting, Peachtree, Wordstar, etc.) so that corporate users could make use of it right away. Some of those ports were pretty lame (blatantly obvious hacks of the original Applesoft BASIC to IBM BASIC) but they were there and they worked. Remember, at that time the Apple ][ was heavily used in business as well as personal applications, so it's incorrect of you to even begin to claim that IBM invented the personal computer. IBM merely capitalized on existing market conditions, and the abject failure the incumbent computer makers to take even a few simple steps to capture the business market. Apple had a commanding lead ... and they blew it.

By way of comparison, look at Commodore's much later ads for their 68000-based Amiga computer: "ONLY AMIGA MAKES IT POSSIBLE!" Oh, really? What does it make 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. The Amiga, at the starting gate, was nothing more than a high-tech demo. IBM, on the other hand, made certain that their new system was useful from the get-go. That was brilliant.

I was a contract programmer then, and had already developed a number of fairly sophisticated, networked industrial process control, monitoring and accounting applications on Apple ][ equipment. Mostly I used the Corvus OmniNet networking and storage products: they worked well for what they were. I even wrote a terminal emulator so that Apple systems could be used on IBM and Burroughs mainfraimes. So IBM was definitely not first, not by a long shot. Remember, at the time, for many people the magic letters I B M were synonymous with computing, and when it came to business sales (which is what IBM was angling for ... notice there weren't many games in their original software offering) the choice between Apple and IBM became a no-brainer. Apple eventually tried to recoup some of those losses with the Apple ///, but it was a seriously flawed product launch, a seriously flawed product, and it failed miserably. Too little, far too late. But the Apple ][ still beat IBM to the punch by several years.

Which isn't surprising: remember, the entire IBM Personal Computer project was in the nature of an experiment for IBM, who was still primarily a manufacturer of big iron back then. That their newfangled "personal computer" became as wildly successful as

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.amazon.com/IBM-Holocaust-Strategic-Alliance-Corporation/dp/0609607995

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[itsdapead]

And yet, that would be the same PS/2 that gave us the mini-DIN connector in the context of connecting keyboards and mice

[sarcasm]Gosh. What a legacy.[/sarcasm]

Actually, didn't the PS/2 also give us the immortal VGA D-connector?

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[hawk]

Even IBM wasn't "IBM compatible" after just a few years ( and to some extent, even the XT wasn't.

The difference between IBM and the oths at the time were those three letters, which cost you about $500 a piece. Their standard became dominant on that basis, not what they actually did.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[sjames]

IBM certainly improved things, in spite of their best efforts not to. They didn't exactly MEAN to do that though. You might recall all the clones whose BIOS had the NOT Copyright IBM string embedded strategically to trick IBM software into running. Then they tried to take us all for a proprietary ride on the PS2 with the MCA bus, it's just that the djinn was out of the bottle by then.

But to say they invented the thing is quite another matter, Theirs wasn't even the first one called a personal computer. Their biggest contribution was having a name big enough in conservative business that they could get traction. I'm glad they did what they did and that they fumbled when they did. If their management had had any inkling of where the PC would go, they'd have killed it dead before it ever saw the light of day.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[yuhong]

No, Apple uses chips based on the modern x86-32 and x86-64 architectures.

And they are almost always used with chipsets that are hardware compatible with the IBM PC/AT, and has been for a long time. Apple would be no exceptions.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[yuhong]

Yea, FYI while the MCA indeed failed, eventually not only the VGA, keyboard/mouse, etc. but also a number of smaller things like the 16550 UART etc. from the PS/2 became standard in modern PC systems.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[drinkypoo]

And with a 99 cent adapter you can plug the original IBM AT keyboard in, too. Meanwhile on most motherboards you can't swap keyboard and mouse and have them work (some intel boards will do it, and possibly others) so thanks to IBM we have identical plugs which don't work if you swap them. Gee, wasn't that a great idea? WTF was wrong with serial mice? Especially given that a PS/2 mouse is a serial mouse, at a different voltage? The big ugly DIN may have been big and ugly but it was also more durable than the mini-DIN.

So, that's not an "and yet", that's "and another thing that IBM did wrong".

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Citation please!

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[itsdapead]

And, the 3.5" floppy (the Apple Mac had already gone that way, but you could argue that they used a different, variable speed format).

So far, the "more closed" PS/2 is looking more influential (in terms of features that even turn up in modern non-PC systems) than the "open" (on paper) original PC. :-)

But, seriously, nobody is trying to claim that the IBM PC was not massively influential or didn't dominate the market for years - the nonsense is the claim that it was the "first true personal computer". It wasn't - it was an incremental development of existing CP/M business PC systems.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[itsdapead]

And they are almost always used with chipsets that are hardware compatible with the IBM PC/AT... Apple would be no exceptions.

...except Apple didn't start using Intel until long after AT compatibility was irrelevant, and the x86 had evolved into a half-decent 32-bit, multicore chip. The fact that it has a near-redundant "appendix" that can run old PC/AT code is pretty irrelevant. Its now widely reported that Apple are at least thinking about switching to ARM on some systems...

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is strong physical evidence, including memos, invoices, and receipts, indicating that IBM (and I mean the US offices, not just some German branch) actively, during the war, supplied the Nazis with machines that were used to keep track of prisoners at concentration camps, and instruction on how to use them.

Not only that, but US government funded scientists at Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory worked hand in hand with colleagues in Nazi Germany on statistical justifications for 'removing' the 'lesser' among us. In Germany the Nazis were overthrown and removed from power. Here in America undesirables were involuntarily sterilized for 10 to 30 years after the end of WWII.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[drinkypoo]

It's not about IBM opening up the 5150 but about Compaq prying open the IBM PC. You can, however, thank IBM for assembling a relatively simple architecture worth copying and for providing the schematics.

IBM stands apart from many other companies involved with the Third Reich in that they have not made relevant records available. This is probably due to the extent of their involvement. It wasn't possible for the systems to be put together without IBM knowing how they were being used. At least until they have been properly taken to task for this, no, we should not just let them sing happy birthday. They must be held accountable if it takes a thousand years. To do anything else is to send the message to corporations that it is possible to knowingly cooperate in genocide for profit without repercussions.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Soporific]

So who should be punished? The 130K employees who weren't alive yet when this was happening?

~S

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[drinkypoo]

So who should be punished? The 130K employees who weren't alive yet when this was happening?

Corporations want to be treated like people. Let us do so. IBM wants to be an entity. Let's try it for war crimes.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Soporific]

And how do you propose to do this?

~S

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[yuhong]

Irrelevant to Apple yes, but doesn't change the fact that it still exists in the hardware. In fact Apple has an BIOS compatiblity layer in the EFI firmware that provide software compatibility with the IBM PC/AT BIOS.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[yuhong]

And, the 3.5" floppy (the Apple Mac had already gone that way, but you could argue that they used a different, variable speed format).

Actually, 720K 3.5" floppies appeared in IBM PC compatibles in 1986, including IBM's own IBM PC Convertible. PS/2 introduced the current 1.44 MB floppy we all used today. Trivia: The IBM PC/AT 339 (released in 1986) BIOS had support for 1.44 MB floppies. IBM's own utility for configuring the CMOS (before that was built-in into the BIOS itself) did not expose it, but third-party ones like GSETUP did.

So far, the "more closed" PS/2 is looking more influential (in terms of features that even turn up in modern non-PC systems) than the "open" (on paper) original PC.

Yea, I have thought for a while that the IBM PS/2 model 30-286 (ISA-based, not MCA-based) is closer to the modern PC actually than the IBM PC/AT.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

B-24's manufactured at Ford's Willow Run plant in Michigan were used to bomb Ford factories in Germany. Why? Because your overlords could make a fuckload of money that way.

Better luck in your next life.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[haruchai]

What? Did you understand my point? I think you're replying to the wrong post.

Re:"Automate the Third Reich"?

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Hey, don't blame me. I was giving handjobs in Nanking during the war.

lulz research

[decora]

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.

Re:lulz research

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you mean his parent's basement.

Re:lulz research

[torgosan]

The book to which you are referring is:

IBM and the Holocaust

The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America's most powerful corporation

Published by Crown Publishers, N.Y., 2001

ISBN 0-609-60799-5

Re:lulz research

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Meanwhile the fact that IBM machines were used in the development of a weapon that could kill about 140,000 people at once is uncontroversial.

Re:lulz research

[Vinegar Joe]

And he didn't rape any Swedish women.

Re:lulz research

[creat3d]

No, just even more ignored. Thanks for bringing it up.

Re:lulz research

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a plus?

(This post was brought to you by the evil forces of lulz)

Re:lulz research

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously look into the Assange case, Sweden has some weird rules, i.e. if a condom breaks during sex - the man is a rapist!

http://www.news.com.au/world/assange-rape-charges-stem-from-two-one-night-stands-in-sweden/story-e6frfkyi-1225967407341

Re:lulz research

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Killed a lot fewer people. 12 million killed in death camps vs. a couple hundred thousand by the two bombs. But then, nobody seems to cry about the fire bombing of Japanese cities, which killed far more people, mostly civilians.

Besides, with the atomic bombs, it's not so simple. I think the deciding factor was that only 1.2% of soldiers at Iwo Jima surrendered, the rest fought to their deaths in a bitter battle, in the name of their emperor. If it came to that on the Japanese islands, the country and people of Japan probably wouldn't exist as we know it today if an invasion was required to secure an end to the war.

Re:lulz research

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Killed a lot fewer people. 12 million killed in death camps vs. a couple hundred thousand by the two bombs. But then, nobody seems to cry about the fire bombing of Japanese cities, which killed far more people, mostly civilians.

Very true, not just in Japan but Dresden too.

Besides, with the atomic bombs, it's not so simple. I think the deciding factor was that only 1.2% of soldiers at Iwo Jima surrendered, the rest fought to their deaths in a bitter battle, in the name of their emperor. If it came to that on the Japanese islands, the country and people of Japan probably wouldn't exist as we know it today if an invasion was required to secure an end to the war.

I think the accepted version of history these days is that Japan was ready to surrender but with terms and the US would accept nothing less than unconditional surrender so the bombs got used. Me, I'm just glad the germans folded before the bomb was finished so Europe wasn't bombed.

This just in

[drb226]

your mom did not invent the personal computer, either.

Actually they did

[msobkow]

They invented a product that was trademarked "Personal Computer". Before that time, they were usually called "mini" or "micro" computers.

Re:Actually they did

[atari2600a]

A minicomputer would be along the lines of a refrigerator-sized PDP, as opposed to the giant 360/UNIVAC/etc 'normal' computers.

Re:Actually they did

[digitig]

You must have a small refrigerator. The early PDPs were huge, but we had the PDP8E well before the PC came along and it wasn't really much bigger than a full-sized tower PC. (I'm qualified to repair them, although I'm a bit rusty...)

Re:Actually they did

[Waffle Iron]

The DEC LSI-11 from the 1970s was a PDP-11 minicomputer shrunk into a case that was about the same size as an early IBM PC.

Re:Actually they did

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey dumbass: "personal computer" was used before IBM "invented" the PC.

Re:Actually they did

[mswhippingboy]

The label "micro" or "mini" really had little to do with the size of the "box" they came in. Generally, microcomputers were computers that utilized a microprocessor (single chip) as the CPU, while minicomputers employed discrete logic or LSI (later VSLI).

Re:Actually they did

[Bing Tsher E]

Sure, the PDP8/e was smallish. But you're referring to the CPU portion of it. So long as you only want to program it in octal using the switch panel, you're correct. Set the box on a bench and plug it in. It has to be put into a rack with a high speed paper tape reader and have teletypes connected to it to be meaningfully useful as a computer in the sense that most people think of. And the rack that the PDP8/e box gets placed in is roughly the size of... a refrigerator.

Re:Actually they did

[Bing Tsher E]

I have a version of the LSI-11 that was put onto a pair of ISA cards. The one I have is plugged into a standard '486 motherboard that is installed in a rack-mount case. There are cables coming off the LSI-11 card that go to a more standard LSI-11 card cage. It's a compatibility kludge somebody paid a ton of money for.

Re:Actually they did

[digitig]

Well, I usually worked with an ASR33 plugged in, which wasn't a bad size for a keyboard plus printer -- and the paper tape reader came with that package!

Yes, they did

[Nemyst]

I don't care that some obscure computers have preceded the IBM-PC and could be considered "personal". IBM has defined the market for "Personal Computer" and ushered the way in for everybody else. This just sounds like a summary poster craving for attention by having a highly sensationalist claim.

I also like how the blog post barely speaks of that and doesn't even tell us who, in fact, did, if not IBM.

Re:Yes, they did

[yuhong]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[pluther]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[Anonymous Coward]

"...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.

Re:Yes, they did

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because it wasn't popular doesn't mean it wasn't the first, else Apple 'invented' the MP3 Player.

Re:Yes, they did

[Osgeld]

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

Re:Yes, they did

[rubycodez]

bullshit, you must be young. My friends and I had personal computers in the 70s, all of different brands.

Re:Yes, they did

[morgan_greywolf]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[Waffle Iron]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[CODiNE]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[magarity]

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'.

Re:Yes, they did

[Anonymous Coward]

Since when MacBook have a BIOS?

Re:Yes, they did

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[mswhippingboy]

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!

Re:Yes, they did

[tverbeek]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[Osgeld]

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

Re:Yes, they did

[mswhippingboy]

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[Osgeld]

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

Re:Yes, they did

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[mswhippingboy]

a handful of fags toggling switches in their mothers basement

You shouldn't speak of Jobs and Woz in such derogatory terms.

Re:Yes, they did

[mswhippingboy]

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

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.

Re:Yes, they did

[Anonymous Coward]

Commodore PET was announced in January 1977 and the Apple II wasn't announced until April

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. :)

Re:Yes, they did

[yuhong]

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.

Ad Hitlerum

[jra]

"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.

Re:Ad Hitlerum

[jra]

And to reply to Cringley's comments on identity theft, if everyone put their foot down and *forced service providers to stop using unchangeable, researchable authenticators like SSNs and Maiden names, all of that problem would dry up in a heart beat.

Not even close

[Cute Fuzzy Bunny]

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.

Re:Not even close

[geekoid]

You sold Altair? A mail order computer?

Maybe you should list a computer that was in existence 5 years prior to IBMs release, or, you know, just keep making shit up.

Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

You sold Altair? A mail order computer?

He didn't say that he sold Alairs, He said he sold personal computers. He listed Altairs as existing before IBM PC.

Maybe you should list a computer that was in existence 5 years prior to IBMs release, or, you know, just keep making shit up.

PolyMorphics existed in 1976, 5 years before the IBM PC. I still have a couple around here somewhere.

Re:Not even close

[Teancum]

I remember a computer trade journal article that came out about the same time the IBM PC was released, where they went through the parts list of the items that went into the original IBM PC. After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".

That wasn't entirely fair as there were some IBM engineers who had to piece the components together and sort of did help design the motherboard, but otherwise not a single major component inside of that computer was even made by IBM. Even that process of designing the PC motherboard was going way outside of the normal IBM development cycle process and only when a completed motherboard was presented to IBM management that anything resembling a formal project to make the IBM PC a reality was initiated.

What the letters "IBM" did do to the personal computer industry, however, was to legitimize the industry so far as to give conservative business executives an excuse to buy the equipment. Before they weren't about to buy a beige computer from a bunch of hippies in California or a video game console that also happened to do some computing on the side. Before IBM, the personal computer industry was mainly hackers and hobbyists. Afterward, the personal computer went mainstream into homes and medium-sized businesses.

Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

The Altair appeared in the January 1975 issue of Electronics World magazine. The IBM PC appeared in 1981. Granted, that's not 5 years -- it's six! And while MITS initially sold it as a mail-ordered kit, it did appear in retail shops well before the IGM PC.

Even the Radio Shack TRS-80, infamous as the Trash-80, came out a few years before IBM got into the act.

Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sounds familiar.
Apple did become Big Brother.

Re:Not even close

[stox]

The January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics introduced the Altair 8800, not Electronics World.

Re:Not even close

[morgan_greywolf]

After going through all of the components including the case, the only thing they could identify that was original components that was actually designed by IBM engineers was the sticker label that went on the outside of the case which said "IBM".

100% true, of course. The optional hard disks were made by Seagate (hence the legacy of the ST01 controller), the floppy drives were made by Toshiba or Chinon or somebody like that. The processor came from Intel. The optional printer was made by Epson. The motherboard was basically a reference design from Intel.

The BIOS was original, but the operating system, of course, was a 16-bit CP/M hack from a guy named Tim Patterson of Seattle Computer Products, who sold it to a tiny little company from Bellvue, Washington, for a few thousand bucks. Tim would go on to become a billionaire, of course, along with the founders of that tiny little computer company.

If I could go back in time, I would convince Tim Patterson that writing operating systems isn't a very good idea and he should do something else with his time.

Re:Not even close

[CapuchinSeven]

If I could go back in time, I would convince Tim Patterson that writing operating systems isn't a very good idea and he should do something else with his time.

Like help invent Visual Basic *shudder*.

Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

This. To me a early "PC" will always be an IMSAI, Northstar or Cromemco CP/M system or an Apple 1 or ][ etc.

I was into PCs in the mid-70s which when they were actually invented!

Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

The personal computers that preceeded the IBM PC are minor historical footnotes and commercial failures. The IBM PC launched a multibillion dollar business and revolutionized how many of us now work and play, and it's design was copied by all the clones that followed. That's worth some cred.

Re:Not even close

[tverbeek]

Building the IBM PC out of off-the-shelf components was a key part of their strategy in designing it, because they knew they were entering into an existing market with it. They wanted a CPU that programmers already knew how to write assembly language code for. They wanted a floppy controller that some geek in Seattle had probably already figured out how to write (or steal) the code to read and write to it. They gave it an 8-bit expansion bus (instead of 16, which Intel's 8086 would have supported) because they wanted to make it easier for manufacturers of existing 8-bit peripherals to refit them for their machine. The guys designing it knew that they were behind a bunch of other people on bringing a personal computer to the market, and they didn't have the years it'd take for Big Blue to go through the process of designing "proper" IBM-proprietary parts.

Re:Not even close

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worth some cred. A lot of cred. But not the cred for producing the first personal computer, because they did not.

And calling the Apple II – which sold over 5 million units and remained in production (in various forms) for over 15 years – a "commercial failure" is utter stupidity.

Re:Not even close

[Teancum]

Which also supports the point that IBM didn't invent this computer in the first place. Yes it was a key strategy to use off-the-shelf parts, but that was a double-edged sword as well.

One of the reasons why this computer became so popular was precisely the "off the shelf" nature of the beast, as it was easy to copy and didn't have all of the patents and other intellectual property nonsense that other computers of the era had. There were some really strange intellectual property strategies used for the "compatible" computers that were eventually built, especially when the BIOS of the original PC had a function call that essentially did nothing but return the string "IBM" as a way to validate the system. Instead, some people still did work-arounds to get past those issues, which is where the idea of computers that claimed a percentage of compatibility with the PC came, including computers that asserted they were "100% compatible" with the PC.

IBM did eventually try to bring more stuff in-house and even introduced some concepts like the Micro Channel Architecture in their PS/2 line that tried to stuff the genie back into the bottle when they realized they were losing market share. Attempts to push for even more proprietary designs in their computers only shrank their market share, to the point that IBM is not even remotely a player in the market any more.

Pay no attention to Woz

[atari2600a]

It's not like he invented the single-board self-bootstrapping non-teletype microcomputer...

Re:Pay no attention to Woz

[spiderbiten]

He even has the patent to prove it. Go Woz!
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=4,136,359.PN.&OS=PN/4,136,359&RS=PN/4,136,359

Iron Sky

[DaPhil]

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)

PC Invention

[kwiqsilver]

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).

Re:PC Invention

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

None of those were IBM Clones or compatible with them.

Re:PC Invention

[westlake]

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).

Not for office work.

Why do you think Microsoft's Z80 CP/M Softcard sold so well?

The Apple II has a 40 column display and NTSC or PAL output.

The Apple II keyboard - sans keypad - was awkwardly integrated into the hard shell case.

The IBM was keyboard perfection:

Byte magazine in the fall of 1981 went so far as to state that the keyboard was 50% of the reason to buy an IBM PC.

IBM Personal Computer

Re:PC Invention

[Tumbleweed]

None of those were IBM Clones or compatible with them.

That's the funniest thing I've read all day. :)

Re:PC Invention

[Teancum]

The IBM was keyboard perfection:

Byte magazine in the fall of 1981 went so far as to state that the keyboard was 50% of the reason to buy an IBM PC.

IBM Personal Computer

The original keyboard for the IBM PC was a pure piece of garbage. As a matter of fact, one of the early accessories that many PC buyers purchased was a keyboard from 3rd party developers, where important keys like the "enter key" was enlarged, along with the shift keys and a spacebar that actually felt right.

Re-read that article again, to realize how many people hated the thing. I hated it and told my professors at the time.... where they cringed in disbelief that IBM could produce such a piece of crap. One of the regular features in Jerry Pournelle's Chaos Mannor column was a review of a new keyboards to replace that piece of junk.

As if to add insult to injury, the PCjr decided to downgrade even this horrible keyboard that IBM made with something even worse. It was so awful that the CEO of IBM decided to apologize and sent a new keyboard to every customer of that computer which had registered with a warranty card. Surprisingly, this "replacement" keyboard for the PCjr was even superior to that horrible IBM PC keyboard.

Re:PC Invention

[Anonymous Coward]

>>> 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).

> Not for office work.

The Apple ][+ could and was used for office work, because it was what people had at hand. At the time, alternatives were CP/M based machines without graphical capabilities. Depending on your business (e.g. advertising) visuals were a must... also, it was not uncommon to use the same computer for multiple uses, since it was somewhat expensive (comparable to a small car, I believe).

> Why do you think Microsoft's Z80 CP/M Softcard sold so well? The Apple II has a 40 column display and NTSC or PAL output.

There was a world of business-related software for CP/M (which was THE professional OS of the time) -- to those who didn't know it, it was just like M$-DOS, but commands resembled more the Unix syntax. People wanted to run programs like Wordstar using the CP/M card; later, for developers at least, it was important because it allowed the use of Turbo Pascal, one of the best compilers made by man -- performance was astounding on barebones hardware of the time.

That said, there were lots of professional programs which didn't require CP/M, the most relevant probably being Visicalc. And there were useful text processors like "Magic Window", non-WYSIWYG but adequate for the printers available back then... for the 40-column problem, one could either resort to graphical mode and display more characters per line -- or simply buy an Apple 80-column card. In fact, it was the other way around, IIRC the CP/M card was best used if an 80-column card (or onboard circuit in some clones) was available.

> The Apple II keyboard - sans keypad - was awkwardly integrated into the hard shell case.

That was not awkward, that was the standard of the time. Actually, IBM products like the Selectric typewriter had integrated keyboards.

> The IBM was keyboard perfection:

>>> Byte magazine in the fall of 1981 went so far as to state that the keyboard was 50% of the reason to buy an IBM PC.

Indeed, not only was the keyboard superb, the concept of a separate piece well-thought and contributed to several positive points, ranging from easier replacement to ergonomic factors.

Now, I'm playing this from memory (so anybody can drop by and correct possible errors), but let me sum it up in a paragraph:

IBM tried before (in 1977, or so I've read) and created a small computer which could be mounted in a rack (can't remember whether it had or not a builtin 5" or so CRT screen). It was reported as unsuccessful, in comparison to the likes of Apple and TRS-80. IBM then formed a taskforce, which was given exceptional powers to: use non-IBM hardware (Intel's 8086), non-IBM software (M$ "DOS", reportedly based on QDOS, itself "inspired" on CP/M -- the inspiration included some original strings, or so I've read... lol). This computer was basically 100% equivalent to a common CP/M PC, plus 320x200x2bpp and 640x200x1bpp graphical modes. Nothing to write home about, but it was sold as a "commercial" PC (whatever that could mean) and Asian dudes which cloned Apple saw it as a big opportunity to expand by cloning an IBM machine. Pretty wise, btw...

You younguns cannot imagine how difficult it was having a computer in a third-world country; when IBM introduced standards like VGA, monitors jumped up in quality and -- specially -- in price. You cannot imagine how expensive these things were. and even more so for a kid, back then. 8-/

Re:PC Invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy fucking shit is this WRONG.

Here, let me try to correct, and thus educated you. I am certain even my IBM PCjr (which I still own, and still works!) was far superior to a fucking Apple II...

From Wikipedia:

Announced November 1, 1983, and first shipped in late January 1984,[1] the PCjr—nicknamed "Peanut" before its debut[2]—came in two models: the 4860-004, with 64 KB of memory, priced at US$669 ($ 1,475 in today's dollars); and the 4860-067, with 128 KB of memory and a 360 KB 5.25-inch floppy disk drive, priced at US$1269 ($ 2,797 in today's dollars). It was manufactured for IBM in Lewisburg, Tennessee by Teledyne. Roughly 500,000 units were shipped. The PCjr promised a high degree of compatibility with the IBM PC, already a popular business computer, and offered built-in color graphics (via a graphics chip known as the "VGA", which stood for "Video Gate Array," which was an extension of CGA – not to be confused with the later VGA (Video Graphics Array) chip and standard that IBM released with its PS/2 line in 1987) and 3-voice sound (provided by a Texas Instruments SN76489 which could produce three square waves of varying amplitude and frequency along with a noise channel powered by a shift register) that was better than the standard PC speaker sound and color graphics of the standard IBM PC and compatible machines of the day. The PCjr was also the first PC compatible machine that supported page flipping for graphics operation. Since the PCjr used system RAM to store video content and the location of this storage area could be changed, the PCjr could perform flicker-free animation and other effects that were either difficult or impossible to produce on contemporary PC clones.

Additionally, its 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU was faster than other computers aimed at the home market (though the PCjr actually ran slower than the stated 4.77 MHz, because every 4th clock cycle of the 8088 CPU was designated to refresh the PCjr's dynamic RAM as it had no dedicated memory controller; its effective clockspeed was therefore 3.58MHz), and its detached wireless infrared keyboard promised a degree of convenience none of its competitors had. Two cartridge slots promised easy loading of games and other software.

And once again from Wikipedia:

The first Apple II computers went on sale on June 5, 1977[8] with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 KB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, upper-case-only (the original character set matches ASCII characters 0x20 to 0x5F) text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator. The original retail price of the computer was US$1298[9] (with 4 kB of RAM) and US$2638 (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes,[10] which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998. The earliest Apple II's were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas;[11] printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore.

Based on this information, my IBM PCjr still wipes it's butt with the Apple I and Apple II combined using voodoo magic and unholy zombie fusion.

Re:PC Invention

[Retron]

I completely disagree. The model F IBM-XT keyboard was one of the best keyboards I've had the pleasure to use, the tactile feeling is something I'll never forget. In fact, when I ditched the XT (bad move, it'd now be worth a bit as a collectible) I kept the keyboard and I still have it to this day. I took it into work (a school) a year or so ago for a teacher to use in their lesson, showing the evolution of hardware and everyone who tried it was amazed at how good it felt. It makes modern membrane keyboards feel like typing into a pot of mushy peas. No idea what you mean about the spacebar, having just tried it again it's super - it works no matter where you press it, it's six inches long and makes a clacky noise when you use it.

The layout was, erm, "interesting" what with control being where caps lock is now and caps lock being down at the bottom right but back then the "enhanced 101 key" keyboards hadn't been invented. Even the IBM AT in 1984 shipped with a similar keyboard, the famous Model M didn't come out for a while afterwards.

Due to the lack of cursor keys I grew up using the numeric keypad as cursor control - and to this day I still use the numpad as my cursor control, that inverted-T layout is just weird.

Re:PC Invention

[Teancum]

The PC-XT was not the original model. By the time IBM got to the XT model, there had been enough grumbling about the keyboard that the management in charge of the PC decided to get their act together and to make a real keyboard that worked.

I was referring to the original IBM-PC... which I did have the pleasure of using including trying to use PC-DOS 1.0. It was on that computer I took my first computer programming courses in college. Believe it or not, my entire college had only five computers that term, two PCs and three Apple ][ computers.

Re:PC Invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, strange how nobody invented an IBM-PC-compatible clone before IBM introduced the PC.

Idiot.

Re:PC Invention

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF? Why are you bringing up the PC Jr., which didn't come out until 1984?

We're talking about "personal computers" released before the original IBM PC.

Re:PC Invention

[Retron]

You're mistaken. The IBM PC and the IBM PC XT used the same keyboard. It's known as a model F keyboard.

Here's a picture of the original 5150 PC keyboard, from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_5150_Keyboard.jpg

Here's the picture of my 5160 PC keyboard, which is exactly the same:
http://i52.tinypic.com/24cf8ft.jpg

For further proof, look here:
http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/items.main/parentcat/11066/subcatid/0/id/350492

That's a US layout rather than the UK layour I have, but it's the same basic model. The IBM PC and PC XT had the same keyboards. It was only the PC AT of 1984 that saw a change (and the PCjr).

Re:PC Invention

[dfghjk]

This is correct. The original PC/XT was good, the AT keyboard even better. The chicklet PCjr keyboard was junk.

I can't imagine any college at that time teaching programming on PC-DOS 1.0. Don't believe it.

Re:PC Invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Whooooooosh.

Re:PC Invention

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Whoosh.

Re:PC Invention

[drinkypoo]

I had the original IBM PC-1, the one with the cassette port next to the keyboard port. At least that's what it looked like, I have no idea WTF that port actually did. And I had its keyboard, and I loved it. My mom hated it (to give you an idea of when I had this computer... it was a hand-me-down of course) because it sounded like someone was dropping ball bearings in a spring steel factory or something. As I recall it had a cast case with which you could easily bludgeon someone to death; it made it heavy and thus very stable on the desktop even during the spirited typing necessary to activate the keys. It came from an era of keyboard typists and it is very similar to the original Selectric II keyboard. I also had the matching monochrome monitor, and I had a 30MB Quantum disk on a Xebec MFM controller.

Re:PC Invention

[Bing Tsher E]

Did you have an original PC-1 or the much more common PC-2?

The PC-1 had a motherboard with four rows of 16K x 1 chips, and the card brackets and power supply were painted black.

The far more common PC-2 had a motherboard with 4 rows of 64K chips and the card brackets and power supply were unpainted 'silver colored' metal. If I had a dime for everybody who claims they had a PC-1 when they really mean a PC-2.... Well, I guess I'd buy a candy bar or something....

I have a stack of machines, including at least one PC-2, and a pile of PC-XTs, in the second bedroom here. It's next to the pile of five Commodore SX-64's that I have.

Re:PC Invention

[Bing Tsher E]

The main thing missing from the PC/jr was the DMA controller. So all I/O on it had to pass through the 8088 processor's accumulator. That, needless to say, made it far, far slower than a regular IBM PC. I have fond memories of running the wireframe 3-D Pacman clone game called 3-Demon on a PC/jr. If you turned in the game such that you faced down a long corridor, the game's graphics and the beeping would significantly s-l-o-w d-o-w-n as the cpu tried to keep up with the action.

3-Demon is one of the coolest games of that era, I am surprised how few abandonware enthusiasts seem to keep it around.

Re:PC Invention

[tverbeek]

The PC and the XT had the same keyboard layout. It kinda sucked. The AT keyboard finally made some changes (most of them for the better). IBM finally got the key layout right with the PS/2 keyboard (essentially the same one every desktop computer has used for the past 15 years).

But that's the layout. Mechanically, all of these keyboards were glorious, because IBM was a company that also made typewriters, and knew how to build keyboards right. Theirs were superior to those on any contemporary personal computer (some of which had XT-level-atrocious layouts as well), and so much better than the plastic crapboards we put up with today.

Re:PC Invention

[Anonymous Coward]

It's less funny when you read it again. There is a good point hiding in there.

Re:PC Invention

[drinkypoo]

I had 64kB RAM on the board total, and 384kB on an AST ISA card...

Re:PC Invention

[drinkypoo]

didn't really read your reply in detail... so here goes again. Definitely had a PC-1. Power supply was black and what, ~60 watts? Enough to run the PC and two floppies but not enough to run the PC, one floppy, and the hard disk. I tried running it internally once but it was "flaky". Those full height drives could really draw.

Re:PC Invention

[Teancum]

I can't imagine any college at that time teaching programming on PC-DOS 1.0. Don't believe it.

What is hard to believe? It was mainly introductory programming classes and a small town community college, not a major university so it wasn't nearly as big of a deal as you may think.

Earlier they had been using mainframe computers used by a major university (University of Minnesota at the time) and had a timeshare system (MECC) where the college students had dial-up access for their programming courses. It was that year they shut down the timeshare system and was transitioning into something else, and the college had contracted out to buy a VAX-11 system to support the computer science classes, but the system was back ordered and wasn't installed until the spring term. Once the VAX was installed, life got a whole lot easier, but the interim "solution" was a bank of PCs runing PC-DOS 1.0

Let's just say I learned how to code very efficiently, and that one term where we had several sections of programming classes on just two PC computers was where I learned how to use flowcharts and psuedo code to effectively design my software prior to actually committing it to a source file. The last couple of weeks prior to finals those computers were literally booked solid with appointments for their access, and it was just software development projects alone that were permitted as the other students would have killed you had you done any recreational activity on them instead of actual class assignments.

Let's just say the college president personally came into the class himself at the beginning of the term and apologized to the class as a whole for the situation, even offering tuition reimbursement for those who wanted to get out of the class and waived deadlines for that class that would normally only get a partial tuition reimbursement. Most of the kids in the class simply wanted to learn about computers and were willing to put up with the situation even as rough as it was.

Before you spout out what you think about early computing history, get a grip with reality and realize not everything fits your rosy world view and that sometimes crap does happen.

Non Issue

[joeflies]

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.

Re:Non Issue

[Retron]

IBM did indeed invent the modern usage of the term Personal Computer - for years afterwards you'd see "requires IBM PC or 100% compatible" on software boxes. Even today, 30 years on, if you say "PC" to someone they think of a machine running Windows (or perhaps Linux) but not generally a Mac despite the majority of the hardware being the same. Such is the legacy of the IBM PC that if you've got some 30-year old software it'll still run on a modern PC, assuming you can a) install a 5.25" disk drive and b) know how to boot into MS-DOS.
Over the decades PC has become shorthand for Wintel, basically.

I await the same arguments again in August, when the IBM PC celebrates its 30th anniversary.

No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did)

[Anonymous Freak]

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.)

Re:No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did)

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_machine

Re:No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did)

[djlowe]

IBM just made it mainstream for businesses.

"Just"? You make that sound trivial, when it certainly was not.

Having been there, I can attest to the fact that IBM's PC did indeed legitimize the personal computer for not only businesses, but later for home users who, having used IBM PCs at work, wanted a familiar computer at home as well.

Back then, the mantra in business was "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", and that "magical pixie dust" settled onto the IBM PC as well... and later, with the advent of Compaq, and its "clean room" reverse engineering of the IBM PC BIOS, opened the door for all of the IBM PC compatible clones that came later, with BIOS' made by AMI, Phoenix and Award, and together they not only legitimized the PC market for business, but standardized it and the home personal computer market as well, while driving down prices as third-party manufacturers created computers based around them.

Hell, I was running a home LAN with IBM XT and AT clones, some booting from diskette [1], with an AT clone server running NetWare v2.0a (with a Seagate ST-4096 80MB MFM HD [2]), using ARCNET[3], back in 1988. Being able to centralized my programs, data, and share a printer was a HUGE thing for me, and for my customers as well.

Later, I upgraded my server to an 80386 clone, running NetWare v3, but still kept the 80 MB HD, and it was rock-solid, and the most reliable server I've ever had at home.

Now, you could say that it was all crude, and certainly it was, by today's standards... but I installed hundreds of LANs for small/medium-sized businesses back then, and the benefit they all gained was very real.

NONE of the latter would have been possible without IBM's PC: It not only standardized the hardware and bus, but standardized the client OS as well, which resulted in an explosion of development of not only business applications, but games, and software in general as well.

So, yeah, IBM didn't invent the "PC", and there's more than a little historical revisionism going on... but, to dismiss their effect on personal computing as "just" making it mainstream for business does them disservice as well.

Regards,

dj

[1] Hard drives were very expensive back then, so it was cheaper to use one large, expensive HD in a file server, and boot the workstations from diskette... and keep a box of backup boot diskettes on hand, just in case *grin*

[2] Seagate's ST-4096 was a state-of-the-art HD then: With 28ms average access speeds, capable of running at 1 to 1 interleave, it was blisteringly fast, and very reliable. Not to mention the fact that 80MB was "Huge tracts of storage"... when I installed one a customer, long before I could afford one myself, I asked him "So, what are you going to do with so much storage?" His answer? "Anything I want" *grin*.

[3] We used ARCNET for our customers, because the NICs were FAR less expensive than Ethernet NICs. We used SMC's NICs, until Thomas-Conrad came along, and beat them not only in price, but performance - T-C's ARCNET NICs used less upper memory in enhanced mode (4K vs. 16K or 32K as I recall), and their drivers were a LOT more efficient/faster.. later, they sold a "Universal Turbo" ARCNET NIC driver that worked with any ARCNET NIC, but made their NICs a LOT faster, and that was HUGE, too, from a management perspective: We only had to use one driver, regardless of NIC manufacturer.

Back in the pre-Ethernet switch days, ARCNET also performed a lot better under load than Ethernet with the same node count per network segment, despite "only" running at 2.5Mbps vs. Ethernet's theoretical 10Mbps...and it scaled deterministically as well. In addition, ARCNET over RG-62/U coax could be run 3000 feet, active port to active port, which helped minimize the number of active hubs needed, and offered FAR more flexibility in the real world.

[4] This footnote has no referral - but I suppose that this is where I should say "You damn kids get off my lawn!" *grin*

Nostalgically,

dj

Re:No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did)

[Jane Q. Public]

As someone who was a sysadmin for a big company in '89, I can say that while your equipment might not have been brand new, it was upper-tier and expensive.

I remember getting a replacement for a borked 20MB hard drive from Dell for $400, and while I was outraged at the price, it was really only about 30% higher than the going market rate at the time. 80 MB drives were out of our office's price range, around 40MB being what we considered "affordable".

I agree about ARCNET and Ethernet. I actually ended up hooking most of the PCs (the # of which got up to 80 in the local office not long after that) using 2Mbps Lantastic cards daisy-chained together. (If I remember properly, we had to install 2 repeaters to get that many on the network.) Lantastic might have been aimed at the SoHo market at the time, but it was a pretty darned decent networking system at the time, if you could suffer the daisy-chain architecture, and relatively cheap.

Re:No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did)

[mswhippingboy]

I agree 100% with your post. I remember trying to get our IT department to invest in some TRS80 Model II computers back in the late 70's/early 80's and everyone just laughed at me, considering these machines "toys". All of a sudden when IBM introduced the IBM-PC, microcomputers were legit business machines and everyone wanted IT to begin providing/supporting them.

Re:No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did)

[tverbeek]

That was the basis of IBM's marketing strategy for their PC: It was a personal computer that could be brought in through the front door by Data Processing and approved by Finance as a capital expenditure, rather than having to be purchased by Accounting out of the department's budget for "office supplies" and sneaked in through the back door of the building.

Re:No, they didn't (was Re:Yes, they did)

[djlowe]

As someone who was a sysadmin for a big company in '89, I can say that while your equipment might not have been brand new, it was upper-tier and expensive.

You're correct, but in my "defense", I was quite the "hardware addict" back then. I spent all of my discretionary funds on it (and occasionally some not so discretionary funds as well...).

Add to that a boss that preferred to give bonuses in the form of hardware as opposed to raises[1], and it was relatively easy for me to feed my addiction.

I *loved* ARCNET back then, and anxiously waited for Datapoint's ARCNET Plus, which was going to run at 20Mbps, using existing cabling, though existing active hubs would need to be replaced, as I recall.

However, Datapoint got greedy, and the cost of their equipment was going to be VERY high, and the third-party licensing fees high as well... and by that point, the price of Ethernet adapters had dropped, 10-BaseT Ethernet NIC's and concentrators (which people called "hubs", though they weren't) were starting to become available and affordable... add switches, and later 100Mbs on the NICs, concentrators and switches, and ARCNET/ARCNET Plus was doomed.

Thomas-Conrad developed their own ARCNET variant, called TCNS, which ran at 100 Mbps... the company I worked for at the time was a TC dealer, and I got to test it. OMG, was it fast!

But, it was a proprietary/niche product, and never gained widespread support. I used it, for awhile, at home, to connect my main home desktop PC to my server, directly, until I upgraded my home network to 10Base-T, switched, and later 100Mbps Ethernet, switched... and now, Gigabit Ethernet, switched, throughout my home internally. I realized, early on, that "it's all about the bandwidth", you see.

Now, ARCNET is a minor footnote in computer networking history, which saddens me somewhat: I built hundreds of small/medium-sized LANS using it, and it was rock-solid in in terms of performance, stability and reliability.

Regards,

dj

Notes:

[1] Later, I came to realize that such "bonuses" really weren't: He knew that I'd spend hours of my own time getting them running, and that what I learned on my own time saved him the cost of training.

WTF is this shit?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Your health information is not safe

[Anonymous Coward]

My employer is one of the biggest in health IT and I can confirm that the security is abysmal at the sites they manage.

Re:Your health information is not safe

[Anonymous Coward]

1. What does this article have to do with that?
2. Do I know you?

Not by any measure was it the first

[geekoid]

IBM had theirs developed before ed.
Ed was a machine that could compute, but you put t together your self, and used switches

Altair was a hobbiest computer, not a personal computer as we think of them at all.

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.

Re:Not by any measure was it the first

[CharlyFoxtrot]

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]"

Re:Not by any measure was it the first

[yuhong]

various CP/M machines

Some of which used the S-100 bus invented by Altair.

Re:Not by any measure was it the first

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not by any measure was it the first

[rubycodez]

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

Re:Not by any measure was it the first

[Anonymous Coward]

"dominated" as in "all geeks used it?" as in hundred people?

most of the world learnt of "PCs" by IBM.

Re:Not by any measure was it the first

[Teancum]

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.

Warning: Lame-ass autoplaying video link *nt*

[Anonymous Coward]

"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!" How about a lameness filter for editors?

Automating the Third Reich

[sproketboy]

And brought us EJB. Nothing to celebrate here.

Actually they didn't

[jabberw0k]

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.

Re:Actually they didn't

[suso]

Actually, there was a store in Bloomington, Indiana called The Data Domain which claimed to use the term Personal Computer in advertising first. The guy who owned the Data Domain apparently talked to Steve Jobs directly on the phone to sell the Apple I.

Re:Actually they didn't

[drerwk]

I used to hang out at The Personal Computer Place in Mesa, AZ. I assembled a few SWTP 6800 systems, an IMSAI, and I think an ALTAIR for the owner who sold both kits and the assembled products. That was 5th grade, so must have been 1977. I recall him getting his first Apple II, it was awesome.

toilets from the sky

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Cringely

[Anonymous Coward]

Cringely still gets paid to write stuff about technology...

Re:Cringely

[Dahamma]

Cringely isn't even a real person, it's just a pseudonym for an InfoWorld column Mark Stephens (among others) wrote for in the early 90's.

I can't even believe people still reference, let along read, this guy. One of his most famous quotes (after having been caught lying about claiming he had Ph.D. from Stanford): "a new fact has now become painfully clear to me: you don't say you have the Ph.D unless you really have the Ph.D." Really, he had to "learn" that fact? Wonder how many other "facts" he's learned...

Re:Cringely

[Elbereth]

In his defense, he had done all the work, but he hadn't gone through with the paperwork -- but this is just from memory.

I never bothered to finish my studies, either. I don't go around claiming to have gotten degrees that I don't have, but I can understand how one might feel entitled to a degree that one technically doesn't own, because of bureaucracy and/or circumstance. Obviously, the problem is the "entitled" aspect, and that's why I don't do what he did.

Re:Cringely

[Dahamma]

No, he had "taken all the coursework". The difference between "taken all the coursework" and "finished your dissertation" can be YEARS. He did what a lot of people who take the course but don't do a dissertation did - he accepted a masters and left. Unfortunately he then decided to lie about it...

Re:Cringely

[technomom]

He's also had a huge hard-on for IBM for a long time. I think he's predicted IBM's demise about 10 times in the past 10 years.

Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[gavron]

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

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Also: Altair 8080, Altair 680, Imsai 8080, SWTPC 6800 and NS SC/MP were all well before Apple, Commodore, Atari, TI.

All those others were "me too, me too!" companies.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Mad Leper]

All the companies you listed were closed systems then and remain so today (even more so for Apple)

The IBM PC may have started closed, but it once the BIOS was opened up it opened the floodgates for cheap, open IBM-Compatible computers for everyone. So yes, I would consider the statement that IBM invented the personal computer to be correct.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

The C=64 wasn't even the first Commodore personal computer. Look up the Vic-20 and PET.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

"Once the BIOS was opened up"

Well, yeah. Thanks to Phoenix, the IBM PC compatible market opened up, and all the technical superior microcomputers (lacking clones) were doomed. (I'm aware of the other clones before Phoenix, when each manufacturer did their own reverse-engineering and built their own BIOS -- I assume you're referring to Phoenix's commercially available BIOS, and if not, I think you should be.)

But does IBM deserve any credit for that? They fought tooth and nail against it. The main reason IBM's box happened to be cloned was their heavy-weight name, not anything they "invented".

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Commodore spent most of the early 80s curb-stomping IBM.

Vertical integration gave them powerful cost advantages.

If mismanagement hadn't set in, they'd probably be the dominant platform today.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[yuhong]

CP/M was pretty open too.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[fermion]

Some of these computers are not what we now consider personal computers, or of 1980+ vintage, The TRS-80. The TRS 80 and Apple ][ are example of mid-to-late-70 computers that are identifiable as what most would call personal computers, that is general purpose assembled machines. My memory of the Commodore Pet annd the early atari machines were that they did not do all that much.

The early IBM machines were more mini computers rather than personal computers. Tandy also had a number of computer in this class. In school a hobby was going through computer catalogs, and these machines were not marketed as a computer for a individual users, rather it was a shared resource

IBM entered the market in 1980 along with many other players. Like Apple who established the GUI as a viable technology, IBM established the computer as a viable tool for the individual worker. I think It took IBM to do this because they controlled the typewriter market, and it would have been hard for a third party to displace this market. However, as IBM apparently saw the writing on the wall, rather than do what some do and continue to make buggy whips, they innovated.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[itsdapead]

CP/M was pretty open too.

Sorry. CP/M didn't exist. Its an urban myth perpetuated by conspiracy theorists and IBM deniers who like to pretend that there was some sort of industry standard for personal computing before the coming of Big Blue.

This "CP/M" nonsense belongs in the same category as pre-Colombian discovery of the Americas, evolution, and the existence of third-party expansions for any personal computer made before 1981.

You'll notice that when these CP/M crackpots talk about their mythical OS in detail, they're just describing something almost identical to MS-DOS with a few quirkily-renamed commands (suggesting that anybody would call a "copy" command "PIP" or a debugging tool "DDT" hardly adds to the credibility of this myth).

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you meant the Commodore PET.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Bing Tsher E]

But does IBM deserve any credit for that? They fought tooth and nail against it. The main reason IBM's box happened to be cloned was their heavy-weight name, not anything they "invented".

I have an original copy of the IBM/PC Technical Reference Manual here.

It contains the complete schematic diagrams of the PC motherboard and all the plug-in cards manufactured by IBM.

It contains the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS.

I have later addendums to the Technical Reference Manual including the Technical Reference for the EGA display adapter. It includes the full schematic diagram, and the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS extension rom on the EGA card.

I loudly call BULLSHIT on the assertion that IBM intended for the IBM-PC to be a closed architecture. At the same time that IBM was selling the Tech Refs for all their hardware Apple was vigorously suing the Apple/II clone vendors.

Granted, publishing the commented Assembly Language source code for the BIOS actually made it more difficult for Phoenix to clone the BIOS. Because putting it all out there for anybody curious to read 'tainted' anybody who read it and rendered them as individuals who could not participate in the work-alike re-write of the BIOS.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Bing Tsher E]

Well, CP/M is mythical in the sense that few of the CP/M users ever saw any original published documentation or original disks from Digital Research. There was usually one guy in each user group who had bought the actual stuff and had a printed manual. Everybody else had 'working copies.' And since what Digital Research sold you was a generally non-working copy of the binaries that you had to graft your hand-coded BIOS onto to work with your hardware, this makes perfect sense.

In the later period of CP/M usage, there were, of course, published manuals and turnkey versions of CP/M bundled with hardware by the vendors. But this is Slashdot, right?

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

There's a difference between "open" and "proprietary." IBM wanted third-party developers to make products compatible with their PC, not replace the PC.

IBM had seen the benefits of open architecture in the S-100 and Apple II expansion buses, so they published all the specs to facilitate that aftermarket.

They published the BIOS code specifically to make it hard for anyone to copy it without giving away that fact that it was IBM's.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[phme]

Don't forget the Micral.

According to the Computer History Museum, the Micral N was the earliest commercial, non-kit personal computer based on a microprocessor, the Intel 8008.

Re:Yes, IBM invented the IBM PC, but not the PC

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the most personal computer I had was a Heathkit H-8 because I actually had to build the whole thing from a parts box; that was pretty personal...

Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[tygr6x]

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.

"Invented" is overused

[sunderland56]

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.

Re:"Invented" is overused

[Dachannien]

Nobody "invented" the personal computer.

No one user wrote me. I'm worth millions of their man-years.

Re:"Invented" is overused

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody "invented" the personal computer.

No one user wrote me. I'm worth millions of their man-years.

Master Cloud Program, is that you?

Re:"Invented" is overused

[Anonymous Coward]

where does apple say it invented the smartphone? the treo, for example, was basically an iphone, but 5 years earlier. palm didn't invent the smartphone either, but it's an example of a smartphone too salient to allow for such nonsense claims (which i've never heard).

Re:"Invented" is overused

[spiderbiten]

Pretty sure Steve Wozniak has a pretty good claim on the title of Inventor of the Personal Computer though. He does hold the patent for "Microcomputer for use with video display" US Patent No. 4,136,359
Just spreading the love of Woz.

Re:"Invented" is overused

[The Dawn Of Time]

"merely"

Because I guess everything you didn't and can't do is trivial and easily dismissed, huh?

Re:"Invented" is overused

[Bing Tsher E]

Well, you can credit Woz for the fact that people assume that a 'computer' has an integrated keyboard and display. That's practically the definition of a crap/cheap consumer-grade computer from that era. The grownups had terminals that they connected to their personal computers, which mostly ran CP/M. You could at the time buy a CP/M card, manufactured Microsoft, to plug into your Apple computer, which turned the Apple II into, basically, a dumb terminal host.

The Woz's integrated keyboard/display design is, fast-forwarding to today, the reason that morons in the Minecraft Forums say things like 'where is the display and keyboard, I am not impressed' when Minecraft hackers come out with CPU designs rendered in redstone logic.

The answer is murky ...

[MacTO]

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.

Re:The answer is murky ...

[JBMcB]

Or if you count those funky HP programmable mega-calculators from the mid 70's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_9800_series_desktop_computers

Hey, it fits on a desktop :)

Re:The answer is murky ...

[MacTO]

And a single line display (?) would have made for a mighty exciting game of pong!

Re:The answer is murky ...

[Doctor Memory]

I had the chance to play with a couple of 9845s in college in the early 80s, and they were definitely superior to the original PC. Their tape drives might have been a bit slower, but not enough to make a difference (maybe 2s to save a file vs. 1s). And their display and graphics library were far superior, not to mention the fact that the ones I used had a bit-mapped thermal printer that could print anything on the display. To get anything comparable on a PC was practically impossible ($-wise) until the Epson came out with the MX-80 (which still couldn't print to the same resolution as the 9845-B).

IBM 5100

[Deathlizard]

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.

Re:IBM 5100

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM 5100 costed around 9k to 20k. Roberts' Altair 8800 costed less than 300 bucks. You don't go around calling computer costing over 9k "Personal" back in the 70's.

Re:IBM 5100

[Bing Tsher E]

My dad brought a 5100 home from work on the weekends back in 1976 for us to mess with. It was such a cool machine. A mechanical toggle switch on the side that you set before rebooting it set it to run either APL or BASIC.

Talking about pissing off

[dimeglio]

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.

Personal Computer

[VortexCortex]

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).

The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Burz]

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

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[CharlyFoxtrot]

From History Of Computing Project: "The company established what was then called the Entry Systems Division, located in Boca Raton, Florida, to develop the new system. This small group consisted of 12 engineers and designers under the direction of Don Estridge; the team's chief designer was Lewis Eggebrecht. The division developed IBM's first real PC. (IBM considered the 5100 system, developed in 1975, to be an intelligent programmable terminal rather than a genuine computer, even though it truly was a computer.)"

And $20,000 is hardly "personal", the Lisa was half that 10 years later and still spectacularly bombed.

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Teancum]

That particular price point for the 5100 was set by the marketing department, because they didn't want it to compete against their mainframe business. It could have been sold for substantially less, and did include a number of features that was well ahead of its time.

Simply put, it was never given the chance to actually be a real product because IBM didn't want it to be something an ordinary consumer could ever possibly purchase. About the only people permitted to even buy this computer were existing customers of IBM mainframes.

When the PCjr came out, they had a similar problem where the "low-cost alternative" was in many ways technically superior to the higher end mainstream computer system. So instead, IBM expended deliberate engineering effort to downgrade and cripple yet another product instead of simply letting the superior technology take root. Typical for IBM.

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[morgan_greywolf]

Xerox Alto. 1973.

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Burz]

The Alto was just a prototype.

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

Xerox made a couple thousand Altos. Granted, they didn't market it, but that's more machines than Apple sold in their first year. I think that makes it more than a prototype!

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

That website shows several microcomputers before IBM 5100, and it says : "That is why the Altair 8800 is considered by many to be the first successful personal computer, although they were called micro-computers in those days."

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

From the link you provided: It was also very expensive - up to US$20,000. It was specifically designed for professional and scientific problem-solvers, not business users or hobbyists.

I wouldn't classify this as a "personal computer", and apparently, neither did IBM at the time. They called it a portable computer.

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

If you claim that IBM 5100 is a personal computer then you put the bar low, very low, and by this definition there are a lot of PC:s existing before 1975. Regnecentralen (if you recognise the name and you're not from Northern Europe, then it is probably because they are the employers of Peter Naur, as in Backus-Naur form) did some "PC"s in the mid 1960s, Norsk Data produced Nord-1 in the late 1960's, Ericsson, Luxor, Facit and SAAB made portable field computers for the Swedish military in the 1960's, if you put the bar low enough you could even claim that they made military PCs in the 1950's, as did DIAB in the mid 1970s (it may or may not been before 1975). And, of course, there are a lot of "PC"s made by different Universities or military research centres in Northern Europe in the 1950's and 1960's.

I also think (but I'm not sure) Honeywell did computers with specs similar to IBM 5100, long before 1975. At least they made "portable", as in military field computers, very early on.

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

The Altair appeared in the January 1975 issue of popular electronics 8 months before the IBM 5100 became available in September 1975. Furthermore, the IBM 5100 cost $9K in 1975 dollars, It was not a personal computer (the Altair kit cost about $400, $600 assembled).

(All from Wikipedia)

The IBM 5150 was first available in 1981. At that point, at least 1 million non-IBM personal computers had already been sold!

http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/3

Re:The IBM 5100 was introduced in 1975

[Anonymous Coward]

It has the all the main personal computing features...

With the exception of "a price that was affordable for an individual person."

The 5100 was $20,000 at the time when the average home price in the USA was $40,000 and median household income was about the same. In today's dollars, that's $80,000+, which is an order of magnitude too high for any PC.

(By contrast, the Apple II was $1300 in 1977, or about $4,600 today, about the same as a loaded Mac Pro.)

Other things IBM did invent

[JBMcB]

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.

Re:Other things IBM did invent

[Mr. Arbusto]

CTRL + ALT + DELETE

Re:Other things IBM did invent

[Anonymous Coward]

How could you have not included the IBM's "ultimate" invention of all time which was posted recently by ./ ?

"How to Patent the Patent" http://slashdot.org/story/11/01/02/1534223/IBM-Files-the-Patent-Troll-Patent

USPTO link: http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=20100332285.PGNR.&OS=DN/20100332285RS=DN/20100332285

Re:Other things IBM did invent

[thunderclap]

actually Pioneer invented the Magnetic hard drive, IBM simply put it on stacked plates/ You forget tapes preceeded the discs.

Re:Other things IBM did invent

[laejoh]

Microsoft perfected it :)

The personal computer

[BudAaron]

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 First PC

[stox]

The Scelbi Mark 8H, 1974. 8008 processor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCELBI

Commodore PET, TRS80 and others

[rossdee]

"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.

q. What is irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

a. People using computers that are direct descendents of the IBM PC to argue that IBM did not create the first PC.

Re:q. What is irony?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[jedidiah]

Nonsense. All IBM did was provide a brand name that was palatable to corporations.

was almost there too.

[mevets]

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.

Maybe not the micro computer

[Billly Gates]

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

So what did I buy in '79?

[mrkle]

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).

Re:So what did I buy in '79?

[Jane Q. Public]

In 1977 my college roommate had a TRS-80, with the expansion rack holding a bunch of cards... I don't even remember now what they all were but one was a modem which came with some pretty decent software at the time. We set the computer up to answer the phone after so many rings, with a computer-generated voice saying "We are not able to come to the phone right now, please leave a message". It was great, for when it was. Of course regular answering machines with tape were already common, but they weren't computers!

even pacifists were involved in that

[decora]

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.

Re:even pacifists were involved in that

[Hazel Bergeron]

not done as an act of warfare, it was done for pure profit motive.

But you repeat yourself.

Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[michaelmalak]

No, Altair and IMSAI were the Norwegians, Apple II and TRS-80 were Columbus, and IBM was the Mayflower.

First Personal Computer

[Anonymous Coward]

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 in 1973

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

IBM's 1965 desktop computer predated Ed Roberts

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Apple is IBM PC compatible?

[Brannon]

Care to try to boot Dos 1.0 on a modern Macbook?

Re:Apple is IBM PC compatible?

[TheRaven64]

If you have Bootcamp installed, then it adds the BIOS-compatibility layer to EFI (actually, that may be shipped by default with newer Macs). With this installed, it will boot DOS 1.0, although I don't think DOS 1.0 had support for hard drives, so you'll have to use a boot CD in floppy emulation mode, and the display will probably only run in text mode.

Re:Apple is IBM PC compatible?

[yuhong]

Yea, Boot Camp initially shipped with firmware updates which added BIOS compatiblity to the EFI firmware. Since then, all later Macs has BIOS compatibility built-in.

little bits add up

[dutchwhizzman]

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.

Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[iggie]

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

[Andtalath]

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.

Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Suave baby, suave

[jon_doh2.0]

Man, Cringley is a right poser.

Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[mikeabbott420]

you call a post nonsense and then agree with it ;)

It's not Ed Roberts either

[Altesse]

It was André Truong.

Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Commodore did.

This was the first personal computer

[Archtech]

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.

IBM PC

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture

I think this is what they had invented that made the computer a PC

open standards are what got the industry rolling

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

IBM

[Anonymous Coward]

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 .

Re:Invented -- no. Delivered -- yes.

[tverbeek]

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".

Re:open standards are what got the industry rollin

[tverbeek]

"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?

bow before IBM

[wukka]

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!

Lets just pretend CP/M and S-100 never existed

[itsdapead]

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.

Re:Lets just pretend CP/M and S-100 never existed

[yuhong]

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)

Yea, that direct hardware access made multitasking DOS apps hard and running most DOS apps in 80286's protected mode almost impossible, seriously hurting Intel, Microsoft, and Digital Research (who already had MP/M that multitasked CP/M apps on the 8080).

And BTW, when the article is talking about Ed Roberts, they were referring to designer of the Altair, whose bus became a de facto standard that was later called the "S-100" bus. Now the fact that it was a de-facto standard caused many issues. People who worked with it spent a lot of time debugging the interactions.

Re:Lets just pretend CP/M and S-100 never existed

[yuhong]

And I forgot to mention caused the Intel 80186 to ultimately fail.

define "invent"

[cwgmpls]

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.

Re:define "invent"

[Anonymous Coward]

Without the IBM PC, we would would not have the PC market as we know it

True - we would have a completely different PC market, but probably just as large.

I don't know why people think that Apple and the other manufacturers would have just sat still if IBM hadn't introduced the PC.

Apple started work on the Lisa and Macintosh before the PC hit the market. Jef Raskin had a vision for information appliances that would have led us in a different direction, and perhaps put us 10 years ahead of where we are were it not for the setback of DOS/x86 standardization.

Sorry, but the notion that IBM created the PC industry is just bollocks. They entrenched it is what they did.

IBM never invented a Hard Drive

[cwgmpls]

IBM invented "Fixed Disks" ;-)

IBM of course willingly helped

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

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.

Re:IBM of course willingly helped

[NoOneInParticular]

Ah, you surely deserve your nick. This is about the biggest load of bull I've seen in a while. Hitler was a socialist, and IBM helped Hitler with his national health care program. Until deep in the second world war, with personal involvement of Watson. Watson must have surely cared for the health of the German population to risk charges of treason. As said, you deserve your nick.

Re:IBM of course willingly helped

[Hognoxious]

Hitler was a socialist

Do you know what "Nazi" is short for?

Re:IBM of course willingly helped

[NoOneInParticular]

Yes I know what "Nazi" is short for. Do you know that the socialist, communist, social-democratic and anarchist anthem. is called "The Internationale"? Now put 2 and 2 together, and think about what a Nazi would sing.

Re:IBM of course willingly helped

[Hognoxious]

and think about what a Nazi would sing.

Horst Wessel, of course.

Porting software

[itsdapead]

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...

Re:Porting software

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Commodore, like Apple, thought that IBM compatibility was a trend they could buck. They got wise later (like when Apple was selling PC-compatibility cards) but it was much too late by then. Clones had gotten too cheap.

The one thing Commodore should have pushed in Amiga productivity applications was multitasking. They had true, seamless multitasking at a time when the Mac was just getting 512k and Switcher, and PCs were stuck with TSRs.

Re:Porting software

[itsdapead]

Commodore, like Apple, thought that IBM compatibility was a trend they could buck.

Well, for a while, IBM PC and the first clones were priced out of the home/hobbyist/small office market and systems like the Amiga, Atari ST and (in the UK) Acorn and Amstrad did quite well. The killer was a bit later, when the "commodity hardware" market got going and a complete PC clone cost less than a plug-in x86 card for an Amiga or Acorn.

I think if these firms hadn't bucked the trend, the modern PC market would be horribly stagnant, because so many of the things we do with modern PCs started (or at least were first bought to market) with these system's brief moment in the sun (which usually ended a couple of years later when the PC world caught up and undercut them on price).

The PC's main contribution was, ultimately, commoditization of hardware, and that's nothing to be sneezed at if you like paying $500 instead of $1500 for a computer, but virtually every other feature and application of the modern PC (including the initial price drop from $20k+ to $1500) was assimilated from somewhere else.

The one thing Commodore should have pushed in Amiga productivity applications was multitasking. They had true, seamless multitasking at a time when the Mac was just getting 512k and Switcher, and PCs were stuck with TSRs.

I think that's a nerds-eye view. True multitasking on PCs, at the time, was a solution looking for a problem: the sort of collaborative task switching used by classic Mac OS, GEM, early Windows etc. was perfectly good at letting you switch between WP and spreadsheets, which was 99% of what users wanted. Bouncing balls around the screen was impressive (since it obviously heralded really good games) but who cared that they kept bouncing while you used the wordprocessor?. If God had intended PC users to multitask, he'd have given them Unix. Pretty much every year since about 1983 has been "the year when Unix will take off on the desktop" - it took about 20 years for Apple to actually make that happen.

Now, today, we've found all sorts of problems to that solution - like running servers, recording TV, downloading torrents, backing up, fetching mail, playing music (most of which did not make their debut on PC compatibles BTW) and we've got multicore processors and stacks of RAM to help. However, it probably hasn't escaped your notice that in current OSs there's a tendency towards full-screen, self-contained apps... which, if you set aside the conspiracy theories, is based on observations of the way most non-techie users prefer to work (I blame Windows MDI).

OT, talking of the Amiga, I knew that demo of the Windows 8 UI reminded me of something...

Little they knew...

[elsurexiste]

...that Babbage had already invented a personal computer for himself. Yeah, he never actually built it, but hey, who cares?

But they invented the name

[HighPerformanceCoder]

Before IBM released their PC, these items were called microcomputers...

Re:But they invented the name

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM invented the name? are you sure?

Re:But they invented the name

[Anonymous Coward]

This one's awesome:

http://www.macmothership.com/gallery/MiscAds/AppleII.jpg