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Review of IBM's Original Personal Computer
illiteratehack was one of several readers to point out that today is the 30th anniversary of the introduction of IBM's first popular PC, writing,
"V3 managed to dig up the original review of IBM's Personal Computer Model 5150, the machine that popularized personal computing. There are some great comments; the article's author wasn't sure if IBM would sell the PC outside the US, and he mentions the inclusion of a 'very high quality 11.5-inch' display. The article also shows that while the PC may have changed a lot on the inside, the way it was reviewed hasn't changed much in 30 years."
Other readers sent in reflections on 30 years of the PC by various tech icons and a speculative look at what the computing industry would have looked like without IBM.
FTA:
"However, a mysterious key called Scroll Lock doesn't actually do anything."
30 years ago... as useless then as it is now.
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My first PC was built on an XT clone motherboard. Being an electronics tech and having built the S100 bus-based computer I'd been using for years, I decided to borrow a desoldering station from work over a weekend, and desoldered every chip on the motherboard so I could install sockets for all the chips against the eventual need for troubleshooting and repair. I never did have to replace a single chip on that board the entire time I used the thing.
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If you go to the page and wonder where the text is: You have to enable JavaScript for the site to even get it displayed. ...
Of course all the other stuff gets displayed even without JavaScript
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I tend to think that the Apple II had a hand in popularizing personal computing
That amusing, fantastic, brain damaged hardware limit to 640 KB, even on 286s and 386s.
For the glory or Quarterdeck QEMM 386
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Written by someone who was born the year the computer came out.
Hands-On With the IBM 5150, Thirty Years Later
I remember in the original Civilization, if you had Scroll Lock on, the arrow keys would show you around the map rather than moving the active unit.
Is this a phishing site - I see no review but a bunch of ads...
http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/review/2099409/ibm-pc-original-review-personal-model-5150
Out of interest, you didn't live in Montreal did you? In the mid 90's I bought an XT clone from a goodwill there as a cheap source of a case and PSU for a 386 I was building. On taking it apart I found every chip, even 74 series glue logic was socketed! Took me several hours to depop the board and the resulting chips have gradually been reused in junkbox projects for the last 20 years!
It had gone from a niche hobby for super nerds to a multi million dollar industry by the time IBM got in, the only thing they did was sell to corporate whom presumably already had some contract with IBM for typewriters and other equipment in many cases
"However, a mysterious key called Scroll Lock doesn't actually do anything."
30 years. Cool. That might be enough of a soak to get the bugs out.
Microsoft, for example, was involved right from the beginning. However, at the moment the machine is only sold in the US. IBM will not say when, if ever, it will come to Britain.
This paragraph is confusing. Did the reviewer believe Microsoft was a British company?
"(It’s fun to toy with the idea of us all using computers directly descended from the Commodore 64.)"
I'm trying to imagine what a 64 bit descendant of the 6502 would look like...and it's not pretty :)
"However, a mysterious key called Scroll Lock doesn't actually do anything."
Less space than a Cray. CGA at best. Lame.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
As a die-hard Apple II user (still have my original //e and a spiffy Ethernet-equipped, Compact-Flash-card-as-a-hard-drive, maxed out IIGS), I've often pondered what might have been but for a few twists of computing fate.
With just between 16KB to 256KB or RAM, a pair of 140KB floppy drives, an 80-column green-screen or RGB color display, 5 card slots, and an 8-bit CPU bus with a CPU running at far less than 10 MHz, the IBM 5150 isn't that different than a contemporary Apple //e (typically with 128KB of RAM, a pair of 140KB floppies, a green screen or RGB display, 7 card slots, and a more efficient 1MHz CPU), and it wasn't obviously superior at the time. Both had similar expansion abilities (serial, parallel, game, modems, primitive hard drives in time), yet industry chose the PC to build upon because it was legally simpler.
What might have been if Apple allowed industry to clone and build upon the Apple II architecture, I wonder? Would we have had Compaq building luggable Apple II's with 16-bit CPUs and expanded memory early on? Might we have eventually had Apple IIs with 16-bit ISA slots, then VLB slots, then PCI slots, then AGP slots, and now PCI Express? Might we today have thoroughly modern computers with slick Windows-like GUIs, but if you did a Control-Reset or booted off of a USB-connected legacy Disk ][ you could still enter an AppleSoft BASIC program equivalent to booting off of an MSDOS boot floppy and doing a "dir?" Might our keyboards still have Open-Apple and Solid-Apple keys instead of Alt and Windows?
Now don't get me wrong, I love my PCs today and earn my livelihood with them, but as a former Beagle Bros employee, I sometimes can't help but wonder what might have been...
I'm trying to imagine what a 64 bit descendant of the 6502 would look like
The 32-bit descendant of the 6502 is the ARM architecture. But half a year ago, ARM had no plans to expand from 40-bit to 64-bit, at least not until RAM hits half terabyte levels.
"(It’s fun to toy with the idea of us all using computers directly descended from the Commodore 64.)"
I'm trying to imagine what a 64 bit descendant of the 6502 would look like...and it's not pretty :)
Unfortunately, not nearly as ugly as a 64-bit descendant of the 8088.
To us computer geeks, the PC was underpowered and expensive even for the time. And that broken keyboard... Ugh.
We got a few in at work when they first came out but weren't happy with them. It wasn't until clones with a 286 and Selectric-type keyboard started to become available that it really took off. (Wow, remember when a 286 was fast??)
Your mileage, as always, may vary, I guess.
And as far as the PC's role in popularizing computing, um, did I imagine those computer shows I attended before the PC came out?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
LOL, funny I just tossed 50 or 60 of those machines a couple of years ago. I was keeping them until I figured out that realistically they were end of life and better off being recycled. I could by a new low powered system that would use less wattage then the of that old system. All my 30pin SIMM's were turned into key chains. they were worth 99cents that way... LOL... Sure glad the day of $100 x 1MB for ram is gone.
Without IBM and Microsoft, other architectures like the Atari ST or Amiga lines may have had a shot, and we might have a more diversified industry.
That being said, the Wintel duopoly is at an end. The post-PC era is upon us, and we aren't locked into the monopoly any more. Ever more at coffee shops and in people's homes and work places I see iPads that are replacing the x86 PC for many people. The Microsoft monopoly is over.
works in the console and character terminals of most linux distros too, but not the X11 terminals unless you config it. ditto OpenBSD.
"IBM warns that certain televisions and monitors (not its own) can cause data errors on disk transfers unless the screen is at least 12in away from the system unit. "
The good ol' days before the FCC stepped in and did EMI screening
All for $11,000 ($6125 adjusted for 2011) you can get 128KB of RAM, a monochrome monitor, one floppy disk drive, a printer, and Visicalc.
Ow. My eyes water at the thought. If the BOM of that clone was anything like that of the original 5150 (and they usually were), the motherboard had as many as 100 DIP ICs.
That's a metric butt-ton of solder wick. I'd be crosseyed and incoherent after desoldering and resoldering over 1600 through-hole pads. And with my luck, I'd damage at least one of the ICs in the process, probably one of the harder-to-come by chips (like the 8288 bus controller), and maybe one or more of the solder pads too.
Good work on that, even if it wound up being completely unneeded.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Some of the early clone boards available through Jameco were socketed like this. They also had intresting manuals, translated from the original Japenese into something vaugly resembling English. Very polite if not very useful. Sections went something like: "If you wish to enable this function, please to turn switch 7 on. Else, please to turn switch 7 on."
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
I had to use a dual-drive original PC for a few years in the early 80s and my first thoughts of it are the lack of a proper reset switch was always annoying. Nothing quite like the "Big Red Switch" feel when you turned the computer on. The feel and sound of the full height floppy drive door clicking as you opened and closed it. The weight was amazing.for such a little machine. The CGA and monochrome output, before the Hercules card came along, was both annoying at times as well as pretty darn good when using a plain green screen. To this day I prefer my console access to be green lettering on black. The solid blinking cursor was cool.The keyboard was awesome and it must be if it is still being sold today. Booting a DOS machine with a floppy seems to about as long as a modern machine today, not much has changed. Clones quickly followed and the acid test then was Lotus 123 and if it ran Lotus you were fine.
Back in the real world, it survived by carving out a niche in mobile/embedded applications, which don't need 64 bits.
And I'd bet a lot of applications that aren't mobile or embedded don't actually need 64 bits in the first place. For example, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time made the jump from the 64-bit MIPS R4300 CPU in the Nintendo 64 to the 32-bit ARM CPU in the Nintendo 3DS because few parts of any N64 game actually used double precision.
Then, as now, people said 'it's too expensive...other machines (take your pick) are better/faster/cheaper.' Well, they were right, of course, but, as we now know, the IBM PC and its clones went on to absolutely destroy all of the other competition. Why? Were buyers just idiots who wanted the 'IBM' name on the front? Of course not. The reason the IBM PC and its clones went on to success was because they allowed businesses who were using typewriters, 'word processors (larger businesses),' and 'mini-computers' (even larger businesses)' to replace all of that with something much more useful. The IBM PC came with a detached keyboard, an open bus design that third-party companies could support with products that extended the capabilities with specialized gear, a reliable design, a simple DOS operating system (simple compared with the alternatives), a fairly readable monochrome monitor, and sales and support from a major player. For small businesses, it was a no-brainer to buy it, and they bought it in droves. I wrote and sold some early software for the IBM PC and most of the buyers were small businesses: doctor and dentist offices, auto repair shops, retail outlets, professional businesses, etc.
I really choked on the article when it said "The announcement of the PC was one of the most important moments in tech history, since computers based on the PC’s design quickly flooded the market and established a standard which lives on to this day in every Windows PC. "
Uh huh. This is the kind of drivel you get from someone who wasn't there. I remember the first, monochrome, IBM machines. They really were not that impressive, compared to the Big Three makers of 8-bit computers at the time: Commodore, Apple, and Radio Shack. Compared to those? Buy an IBM? No thanks. No thanks at all.
I remember the regret near the end of the 1980s -- nearly a full decade after the IBM PC was released -- when it was clear that those horrid 386 machines were slowly taking over. They just sucked compared to the Atari ST or the Commodore Amiga. The lack of true multitasking alone was a deal breaker for me.
Let's not forget the real reason the IBM PC won: Clones with Microsoft DOS (later Windows) were dirt cheap and plentiful. It hardly had anything to do with being a good computer architecture or a good OS.
If you can find an old computer magazine from the late 70s (BYTE, Dr Dobbs, Creative Computing, etc) you'll see ads for all kinds of different systems. It was like the early days of the automobile industry when there were many manufacturers that are all but forgotten now. Too many for it to last; there had to be what marketing people call a 'shakeout'. When IBM announced the PC, it legitimized these home computers in the minds of a lot of people who liked the idea of having a computer in their home with the 3 letters IBM on it.
But they were expensive and soon people were buying the cheaper clones. As I understand it, IBM was still mostly interested in their Mainframe business. They left the PC's architecture 'open', which allowed the cheap clones to be made. This was a decision that had important consequences I think. If IBM had suppressed the clones, what would have happened? Perhaps Apple would have become top dog in the home PC market, or perhaps some other company. Would there have ever been any 'open' architecture at all? The openness was spoiled by Microsoft cutting deals with the hardware manufacturers of those clones so that no other software had much of a chance. My feelings about Microsoft should be clear from my sig.
My big disappointment was that IBM chose to use the Intel 8086 chip. The Zilog Z8000 and Motorola 68000 were much more advanced, and I thought it was a pity that they became niche architectures by comparison. I realize IBM wasn't interested in creating something 'insanely great'. Mediocrity, or even downright inferiority prevailed. There were sound business reasons for IBM's decision at the time, but that doesn't mean I have to like the result.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
"All the hobbyists I know are beavering away on low-budget equipment, half the fun being able to make these puny systems really perform. I'm not sure they'd be happy with everything done for them."
Same now, and why I don't see myself using anything by Apple... I don't want everything done for me.
That's a metric butt-ton of solder wick.
Or a single solder-sucker vacuum tool - imagine a soldering iron with a hole in the middle of the tip, said hole connected to a vacuum. Not nearly as much fun on BGA parts as they were on DIPs.
It even has a fan club:
http://www.slhaters.cz/default.aspx?MenuId=27
I worked in an independent computer store when I was younger, starting in 1987, just on my 13th birthday. I was there on and off through high school and university for another 10 years until the PC Worlds and Games killed off the small indie. I would sell a lot of computers to people, mainly the Amiga, but some were hell bent on the ST, which I hated at the time.. Ironically I owned a few towards the end of the 90's for MIDI sequencing - but that's another story.. Anyway, to my shame, I do remember us getting a few of the first UK 286 style PC's in, with CGA and beepers for sound. Pain in the fucking arse to add cards for graphics and sound, then write bat(?) files just to get a fucking game running.. Not really impressive next to the Amiga/ST, and I confess I did tell people that I didn't think the PC thing was going to take off and that they would be far better off with a Commodore or an Atari... Sorry! As a postscript, Apple machines were not really readily available in the UK for a long time after they were in the US. I'm sure some enthusiasts might have imported them, but getting one at retail at the time was a lot more difficult than it has become.
As stated, I used a desoldering station, which has a vacuum pump, not something like a Soldapullt or similar manual desoldering pump. No way I'd do that manually!
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"the machine that popularized personal computing" mmmmm not quite accurate. Many of us remember a little startup company back then called Apple Computer Company.
BGAs
Imagine my face the first time I saw something with surface-mount ICs. What the hell, there's no way to socket these things! How I am supposed to repair.. oh, I see now. Planned obsolescence! Bastards!! Surface mount technology may have been a giant leap forward in miniaturization, but it's also more or less killed electronics for the hobbyist, unless you're willing to use a prototyping service to make a PC board for every project you're interested in building. It's also more or less destroyed any possibility of technologically-enabled end-users repairing their own electronics due to the expense and specialized skills necessary to R&R BGAs and QFP ICs (especially BGAs).
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For all who haven't seen it yet:
http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml
Of course IBM never foresaw the IBM PC clone market.
link
link
In short, it was the commoditization of the hardware that made personal computing an affordable reality for most people.
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In the early 90's, I worked at a computer repair shop, and one of the techs there would replace surface mount ICs with a heat gun. I think it was just an ordinary heat gun for removing paint. I don't know about individual surface mount components, but I think he did those too. Now they make hot air desoldering stations that automatically pull the chip off when the solder is melted on all the contacts
I took apart an iphone 4 the other day and had to use a 10x jewelers loupe just to see some of the components.. crazy
It depends on where you were living I guess. I was in the UK at the time
You're right as far as pointing out that the UK was somewhat different. But some aspects of your summary are open to question.
Most seriously, the fact that you completely fail to even *mention* what was AFAIK far and away the best-selling computer in the UK during the 1980s- the ZX Spectrum- renders your summary misleading by itself. The Spectrum's influence on bedroom programmers is often credited (correctly or otherwise) with kickstarting the strength of the early UK software industry.
Yes, most of them were bought as games computers, and it had its limitations. But like it or loathe it, you can't accurately discuss the 1980s UK computer market without mentioning it.
The BBC Micro? It was a great machine in many respects. But it was also very expensive compared to the likes of the Spectrum, and way out of most people's reach. While very common in schools (and probably influential that way), it was *never* a common home machine. In terms of getting the masses computer literate something like the Spectrum *would* have been a more appropriate choice (as Clive Sinclair wanted it to be). In fact, the Spectrum pretty much *did* do that, despite Acorn's more expensive machine getting the BBC contract.
While it's true that the C64 was never as influential here as it was in the US, the fact that IIRC it was the second-most-supported computer (behind the Spectrum, naturally) by UK games software houses suggests that it was *very* far from an "also ran".
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The parent is pretty much right, with some qualifications- it's a shame they were modded troll. Because the IBM PC clones and derivatives won out in the long term, there's a tendency to look back along its path and view history solely along that line, judging it as if the winners were always destined to be so.
The original IBM PC may have been powerful in some respects, but it was also as dull as ditchwater from a (crude) graphics and a (keyboard beeper) sound point of view, as well as being massively too expensive for home users. The hardware spec wasn't radical- mostly designed from off the shelf parts, though the processor was admittedly powerful.
The damn operating system wasn't radical either- the first version of MS-DOS was (at best) very inspired by and (at worst) a blatant ripoff of the 8-bit CP/M crudely ported to the 16-bit 8086 processor that Microsoft bought in. It hacks me off when people get nostalgic about the configurability of MS-DOS, because such configurability was only needed to get round the convoluted and dated architecture of the OS. And when they look on 80s/early-90s PCs and justify such crudeness as if "that's just how things were then".
No they weren't. That's how computers running a repeatedly-patched and hacked ripoff of a 1970s 8-bit OS were. The Commodore Amiga had full pre-emptive (i.e. "proper" multitasking) 8 years before Windows NT and a full decade before the then-mainstream Windows 95 did it. But the people who used PCs mostly didn't know any better.
Yes, the PC ultimately won due to its generic nature, and in the very long term, I don't know that this was a bad thing. (Er, I'll wash my mouth out later!) Much as the Amiga was miles better in terms of design than the PC in its heyday, the de-facto open nature of the PC has led to cheap, plentiful hardware that supports lots of stuff, and I don't know if the Amiga's advantages at the time would ultimately have led to its present-day descendants being better than (say) the present-day PC.
However, this shouldn't blind us to the fact that the original IBM PC *in itself* was a frankly unremarkable machine running an already-dated OS that became a millstone round the computer industry's neck for the next 15 years.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Wrote my first commercial software for one, Required a specialized IEEE-488 adaptor. The joke? WHen I left the company 10+ years later, that same PC was sitting there in my lab, still running every day, still logging the same data, with all the same hardware. It had become a dedicated purpose unit within the first year or 2 - but when I left, in the era of the 486, it just ran and ran - No hard drive, just two full height floppies
Yeah, I've used a paint-stripping heat gun to remove surface mount ICs before. I'd use some cut sheets of copper bent as required to shield the surrounding components from the heat. If you need to salvage the part it's OK so long as you get it off the board fast enough that it doesn't fry it; you definitely know you screwed up if the board delaminates. :-(
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Wait, wasn't the first popular PC, called the Apple II?
Without IBM and Microsoft, other architectures like the Atari ST or Amiga lines may have had a shot, and we might have a more diversified industry.
MS-DOS began as a serviceable 16 bit clone of CP/M.
It sold for $40 --- 1/6 of the price of CP/M 86.
$95 vs $568, adjusted for inflation.
Microsoft had a full suite of programming languages for the new micro.
MBASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN and Assembler.
The port of your business-oriented CP/M program to PC-DOS/MS-DOS was straight-forward --- and within a year or two most of the territory has been staked out.
So much for graceful degradation. At first I hit the site and thought "OK, where's the story?". Right-click, noscript, allow v3.co.uk, "THERE it is.". Funny how most if not all of the ads appear just FINE without javascript. So not cool.
If an IBM PC was the one that popularized personal computing I would vote for the IBM 5110/5120. I was a developer in 1979 using the IBM 5110-5120. It preceded the 5155 by about 2 years It had most of the features of the 5150 including a version of Syracuse BASIC. At the time I worked for a small custom software vendor in Florence, Al started by a small former IBM salesmen.We developed many production applications with the 5110/5120 and had customers all over north and central AL. Thus we helped IBM sell a lot of 5110's and 5120's as well as IBM Series One machines in AL and Miss. see http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/pc/pc_4.html for details.