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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.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
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.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
I tend to think that the Apple II had a hand in popularizing personal computing
Considering the 20 bit addresses in the 8088, I find it hard to get too worked up over the "brain damaged" 640KB limit on the original PC.
As for the 286 and 386 machines, they were limited by DOS, not by the hardware. You were only limited because you chose to run DOS.
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
The review can only be seen with JavaScript enabled.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
"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.
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)
Nothing about any of the other available options prevented them for being put to business use.
The only limiting factor was the lack of a respectable brand name like IBM.
You're entire rant can be summed up as "no one ever got fired for buying IBM".
Microsoft merely inherited the old monopoly.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I bought an Amiga... then went onto PCs... and here's why. My PC had 7 different autoexec.bat files, and 3 different command.com files for different games and startups.... it was a nightmare. I think it was mainly lack of funds and the fact I got my dad's old PC with a hard drive, just about when Civilisation and Doom came out that turned me (I know civilization was available on the Amiga too, but I didn't have a hard disk for it). When I got Doom networked on 4 computers in our house (damn ipx hack setup), it was revolutionary for me and my friends - it was just massive intense multiplayer fun, when AI opponents were truly laughable, and games weren't about stories.
I probably think that Doom had a larger effect than just about anything else in converting me to the PC.
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.