20th Anniversary Of The PC

cmowire writes "I didn't realize this till I was debugging a stock database and saw the PR piece, but today is the twentieth aniversary of the IBM PC. IBM has a tribute page."

How many people started with the IBM PC original?

[yani]

Well the PC is the same age as me, 20 years old. I doubt many people would have predicted it of all the computers at the time to trigger such a massive computing presence at home.

My first computer was an IBM PC (the original), I can still remember what a luxury I thought it was to have two floppy drives so I could keep Dos on A: and play frogger off B:! Ah...the good old days ...errr... well frogger anyway!

I'd be interested to know what started most slashdotters fascination with computing, I doubt it was the IBM PC. Only reason I had one was because my parents were both accountants and you didn't use a Mac for accounting ;-)

Re:How many people started with the IBM PC origina

[brocktune]

Ditto. My first computing experience (ignoring the six-digit calculator given to me as a child) was with the original IBM PC in 1982. 64k of memory, monochrome display (no graphics), came with DOS 1.1. I was 14, and had my first part-time job programming (in BASIC) a year later.

Games were the original Adventure (ported by Microsoft), Zork I and other early Infocom games, and "Friendlyware", a set of fairly imaginative games in BASIC that used ASCII characters for graphics. In 1984 I bought a CGA card for $300 that I'd earned mowing lawns and coding simple databases. I didn't have enough money for a monitor, so I connected the CGA card to a television set using an RF modulator. The display was completely illegible at 80 columns, so I ran DOS at 40 columns. ("MODE CO40" anybody?)

1982: parents bought IBM PC for ~$4500
1986: bought used PCjr for $900
1988: bought 10 Mhz XT clone for $1700
1990: bought 386SX/25 for ~ $1900
1992: bought used 486/33 motherboard for $400
1994: bought P/133 for ~$3200
1997: bought P2/333 in pieces for ~$2100
1999: bought P3/700 for ~$1700
2001 (last week): bought P3/1000 for $600

Christ, I sound like one of those old farts talking about punch cards. Somebody stop me.

Re:house built upon the sand

[kfg]

Indeed. Either/or Microsoft/IBM are generally given credit for the computer economic 'miracle.'

In fact it was the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS that let the Genie out of the bottle and let the clones out of the lab to ravage the land and the netscape, and yet this event, the KEY event in the development of the PC as we know it today, isn't even mentioned in most short histories of the development of the PC.

KFG

Taiwan, ROC responsible for the PC's success

[Andy Tai]

The IBM PC-compatibles owe their dominance to the hardworking, energetic people of Taiwan, Republic of China. While Taiwan's economy took off, Taiwan also provided the actual manufacturing of low-cost machines to flood the market. While Taiwan is not known for its own brands, the majority of PC companies sold products MIT or "made in Taiwan." A small island provided the essentual foundation (common components) to enable many companies, large and small, to sell essentially the same products under different names and the competition keeps the price in check, so PC can beat the alternative architectures and be affordable for the common people.

Whether it's a good thing, that Amigas, Ataris, etc. lost out because they cannot compete with the PC clones made in Taiwan, cost wise, is a matter of debate.

Wow, am I THAT old now?

[Arandir]

I had used friend's computers in high school to play games on, but it was the IBM PC in college that I first used as a serious computer.

Rememberances...

IBM PC: Rock solid, reliable, trustworthy.
Compaq: A rock solid, reliable and mostly trustworthy suitcase.
AT&T PC: An 8086 instead of an 8088.
Other clones: cheap knockoffs.

Macintosh: You needed a Lisa if you wanted to do any development. And what's this? You had to ask the computer for permission to eject the floppy? It was great if you just wanted to use the computer as a tool, instead of as an end-product.

Amiga: More great ideas per cubic inch than any other personal computer before or since. But it never caught the attention of the general public. Video artists and programmers still remember it fondly.

Operating systems...

The PC came with four: PC-DOS, UCSD P-System, Xenix and CP/M. I really wish CP/M would have been the standard. But with the small memory of the entry line PC, only PC-DOS could cut it. UCSD P-System wasn't really an operating system, but a glorified IDE. And Xenix tried to do too much in too small of memory (and was way overpriced).

DR-DOS: MSDOS was a joke, PCDOS was okay, but pricey. DR-DOS was affordable, reliable and did a heck of a lot of stuff that other DOS's couldn't do.

GeoWorks: An operating shell, not an OS. Just like Windows 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 95, 98 and ME. At one time GeoWorks was preinstalled on a few computers. And it was better than Windows. But there was no SDK.

OS/2: The best user interface before or since. But it was TOO compatible with Windows, so no one bothered to write OS/2 applications.

Freenix: Walnut Creek offered up CD's on a wide variety of topics. 44BSD-Lite, 386BSD, FreeBSD and Slackware Linux. Eventually I tried Slackware 96.

The big trends...

Compatibility: Hardware compatibility aided the proliferation of clones. But it also meant that we would be stuck with an archaic architecture to this day. Ditto for software compatibility.

Code Bloat: Word processors used to fit on a 360K floppy disk. Now you can barely fit them on a 360M hard drive.

Open Source: It was always there. But it was never mainstream. The average user will gain the benefits of Open Source, but only the developer and the ideologue will really ever care that the source code is available.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[roguerez]

But you can see it. Here's a page with the video fragment [cnet.com].

For the paranoid out there, here's the plain URL:

http://video.cnet.com/cgi-bin/visearch?user=cnet_n ews&template=playhiasf.html&query=*&squery=+ClipID :0++VideoAsset:t080901_1130&inputField=&ccstart=15 015&ccend=99533&videoID=t080901_1130&value=default &which=1&old=yes&override=http://video.cnet.com:80 /cnet_news/template/override_config.js&overrideChe ck=no

What would those be worth today?

[The Original Yama]

Would the IBM PC be seen as a valuable antique or as a worthless obsolete relic? I used to own one of these. However, my model had CGA graphics with a CGA monitor. Otherwise it was the exact same model, and it looked exactly the same. Unfortunately, all I have left is the monitor, the complete manual set and the original 5 1/4 inch discs (including MS-DOS 2.11, yay!). I haven't tried them in years, but everything should be fully operational.

Could I make anything by selling what I have?

Other "advantages"

[BLAMM!]

One computer expert illustrates the rapid advancement of personal computing by estimating that if the automobile business had developed like the computer business, a Rolls-Royce would now cost $2.75 and run three million miles on a gallon of gas.

There's a rebuttal list to this comment made by the head of some automotive company. I can't locate it right now though. Anyone else remember this? It was, of course, directed at MS with items such as: "And they (the cars) would stop running for apparently no reason, after which you would stop the engine, restart it and continue as if if nothing was unusual." and "When the roads were repaved would have to buy another car." I wish I could find the whole list.

Re:Bah! Stupid digital punk kids!

[norton_I]

Heh, the funny thing is, quantum computers (if they can ever be built) are analog computers. And the great thing is, it looks like we can still do normalization on them, solving the only problem that makes digital computers preferable to analog ones.

I also think it is funny how the supposedly "revolutionary" fuzzy logic from a few years ago was really nothing but an attempt to emulate an analog control circuit with digital microcontrollers.

I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually.

[DreamSynthesis]

I started out programming on a TRS-80, then moved to an AT&T PC 6300 (8086 w/ Wietek match coproc.), and on up the PC line from there. There's just one thing that really bothers me...

Why haven't other, arguably superior, architectures made it to prime time for home users? The PC (and by this I mean x86) has managed to blossom in homes and offices around the globe, but other architectures are still remanded to use in only "high need" or "unique" situations. Yes, I know it's redundant to use Apple as an example, but I just did. Give me a G4 running OSX any time, please. Then, of course, there's others (sun, etc) as well.

What's the deal with this? I know it can't all be due to the cost involved in manufacturing... does this really just boil down to marketing?

Of course, since my bread and butter is pretty much coding for x86 servers and desktop, I'm not complaining all that loudly, mind you. All replies welome!!!

Not Revolutionary

[Anonymous Coward]

I was at a Crescent City Computer Club meeting in New Orleans in 1980, and someone had a copy of the specs and marketing plan for the IBM PC months before it was announced.

I remember that the group consensus was that the only thing revolutionary about the IBM PC was that it was to be sold through Sears! Just because it was popular doesn't mean it was good, it just means that IBM had the money and the knowledge to market it.