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from the looking-back-in-the-past dept.
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."
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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;-)
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.
...we didn't have no fancy-shmancy 32-bit computers with "true" color and multi-tasking multi-threaded GUI operating systems! We had EIGHT bits, and if you wanted any more than that you had to wait three days for a calculation! We had DOS and 640KB limits! We had four colors with our CGA graphics, including black and white!
And we LIKED it! We LOVED IT!
We didn't have any stinking free operating systems. We had to pay $100 for shitty old DOS, and we loved it! We thought it was great!
We didn't have DOOM, or Quake, or Unreal. We didn't have texture-mapped anti-aliased vertex-shaded full-color video games! We had ZORK with its text-only interface! And we liked it! We loved it!
We didn't have any "internet" back in those days, not in our homes. There was no World Wide Web or DSL/cablemodem connections to your home. We didn't even have 56k modems! If you wanted to share things with your buddies you had to copy it onto a 300K floppy, and boy, we didn't know WHAT we'd do with all that disk space! And if you wanted to connect to other computers you had to use a THREE HUNDRED BAUD MODEM!
And we liked it! We loved it!
I'm a grumpy old man, and I don't like the way things are today...things were a lot better with disk-swapping 80-column text wait an eternity to download forty K of files that would take up a large share of a floppy disk that would go bad in three months, with games that would take three or four minutes to load that were rarely worth the cost of the disks they were printed on and a stinking 640KB limit! And we loved those days!
In my day we didn't have digital computers. We had analog computing! That's right, we used resistors, capacitors, inductors, op amps, and other discrete components, hand wired on a plug board to solve each of our differential equations. No lost precision to this "sampling" bullshit. Our circuits had INFINITE PRECISION! Apply power, wait for the system to stabilize, and read the answer at the output terminals on the multimeter needle (no digital multimeters either, you pansys). Digital? Bah! Saturation and cutoff were considered improper operation modes of transistors and was something we worked hard to avoid happening. It is only now that you digital punks are realizing the benefits of analog and how we had it right all along. Your early 110 and 300 baud modems were fully digital. You could HEAR each bit go by. And you were so pleased with yourselves until you discovered that that was as about fast as you could go with digital, right? With 1200 bps you introduced FOUR signal levels (sounds like analog to me) representing 2 bits each at your maximum 600 baud digital signaling rate to make 1200 bps. Note I use baud and bps correctly, unlike you digital wusses. How many signal levels does a 56K modem have? It's a fucking analog spectrum and yet you still won't admit that our generation figured out the good shit long before you were born! Ah for the good ol days. And the Doors LP spinning on the turntable in the lab. That's probably another device you've never used. Now you're cramming silicon into your cars like cattle lining up to die. Well, when the EMP comes, my generation will still be on the road in our 55 Chevy pickups that have this wierd carbeurrated engine and mechanical points vibrator system. Maybe I'll stop to give you a lift. Maybe. Note. No paragraph breaks. In my day, keeping messages as short as posible was of paramount importance. No one wanted to pay line charges to read blank lines, you wasteful digital fruitcakes.
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 was agreeing with you until I saw the sig. "Progressive New Wave" - what the hell type of hippie shit are the kids coming up with these days? Old-timer my ass!
You has 8-bit computers, with DOS, and 4 colors?!?
Back in MY day all we had were big rocks. And we sat around and watched the rocks because you just never knew what those rocks might do. Them rocks are tricky like that.
Someone says that their first computer was an XT. Dilbert then says that his computer was so old that he needed to use 1's and 0's to use it.
Wally finally says that he needed to use magnets, and he didn't even have 0's.
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.
I've heard the orignal "IBM PC" was wire-wrapped on an S-100 board.
Also, IBM desperately wanted to use CP/M as the OS, but Gary Kildall (of Digital Research) shunned their reps, so IBM ended up using MS/DOS, which was purchased from Seattle Computer Systems by Bill Gates for $50,000.00 (it was called QDOS, "Quick and Dirty OS"
I'd only add this addendum that most people these days don't remember. By the time the PC was released a deal HAD been reached with Digital and you could have your PC with either PC-DOS OR CP/M.
Why don't people remember this? Because CP/M cost $240 and PC-DOS only cost $40.
Ok, big business might have popped for the CP/M because it was standard at the time, and a few did, but most didn't because it just so happened that right at that same time Digital was introducing the next generation of CP/M that * wasn't backward compatible* with CP/M.
Ok, so if you were going to have to scrap all of your software *anyway* it made sense to buy the cheaper OS as long as it did what you wanted it to.
If the PC had been introduced either one year earlier, or one year LATER Digital would still rule and only a few of us old timers would even remember that MicroSoft had even existed.
I liked the N&O's article [newsobserver.com] better, it focuses on Dr. Dave Bradley. For those who don't know, he wrote the original bios code and, of course, "invented" control-alt-delete. Besides working at IBM, he's als an adjunct instructor at NCSU, and teaches programming and basic computer design classes.
In the article timeline they mention Thinkpads
with butterfly keyboard. I never owen one but I think
it is very smart idea. What happened to them? If
there are any modern laptops with butterfly keyboard?
Thats your opinion and it may very well be correct (i wont argue with it)
But you miss the point a little - IBM created the PC market in the corporate sector. The innovators (and there were legion) built great computers but corporates wouldnt buy off a company that might go broke (many of them did, MITS, IMSAI, Commodore etc) but they knew IBM and they knew their systems - they had their Mainframes in the data centers and machine rooms and their minis in accounting etc, so they trusted the name and bought the PC's for their staff based on the fact that IBM had been there for many years and they were a corporate company like them and knew their business.
Apple made a better product but they played on the touchy feely, hippy ethos too much for the corporate market (and they didnt want that market, didnt care about it till after IBM entered the marketplace really)
I would say that i started my career on thos 'retarded' mainframes and they were the best on the market (name me one competitor at that time with superior mainframe systems)
I wont comment on the keyboard etc as it is a matter of opinion - and with the keyboard its true as is the expandability (IBM knew nothing about expandability as they were used to telling customers what they were getting not the other way around) And i would like to know what written and real basis you have for the IBM paying off DR comment - as it is a matter of record that MS paid $50k for the DOS - they didnt write it thus if it was stolen its not their issue (not to mention that most DOS'es were copies of CP/M at that stage anyway just as most BASIC was a copy of Bill Gate's original Altair one.
But remember this - no IBM PC means NO pc as we know it - the rise of the PC on the corporate desktop led to the modern market place we have and enjoy - a market needs volume and real volume in those days could only come from business and big business had the most momey and staff - IBM didnt persue the cloners as they thought hardware wasnt worth it - thank god.
I would be interested in asking your age (i just like to see how many of the 30+ guys are still out there in this industry) as it has an impact on the mainframe computing opinion but im not flaming you as you have a right to say what you think - after all linux is all about freedom of choice and right to think different!
A reference to MS-DOS 1.0 containing CP/M code is here: http://www.aaxnet.com/topics/msinc.html#dr :
DR's Gary Kildall sat down at an IBM PC supplied by IBM and, using a secret code, got it to pop up a Digital Research copyright notice.
I've never seen any confirmation of this story, but it does line up with vauge Usenet ramblings and so on. Apparently the guy that Paul Allen bought MS-DOS from was building it as a part-time project. He didn't have time to rewrite all of the utility software, so he just transcoded some CP/M utils from 8080 to 8086 asm. The 'secret code' was probably a DEBUG statement or an easter egg.
I have seen this story and its never been proven but may be true - the OS undoubtedly contained bits stolen or borrowed from C/PM but then again so did every DOS on the market and most basic implementations were rip offs or copies of Bill Gates original altair one, still its a valid point and thanks for reminding me
Back then IBM asked TI, Motorola, Intel and others if they can supply to them in big quantities their processor..
Motorola couldn't (they didn't finish back then their 68000 processor if I'm not mistaken), same for TI.
Intel had promised to supply IBM their processor, and signed AMD as their 2nd tier contractor to supply processors to IBM (boy, I'm sure some Intel execs are feeling really sorry for this now)..
Yeah, that'll be great, we'll go out for drinks, the PC will finally be old enough to have to have one. Though i shudder to think what a drunk PC will do. I hope it doesn't do something stupid like install Windows ME on itself while in a drunken Stupor.
The PC timeline in Saturday's News and Observer may have goofed in saying that it was introduced on August 13th, or maybe they finished work on it on the 12th and intro-ed it the next day, but anyway they did have a pretty good interview with David Bradley, one of the original group of engineers who developed the 5150, and the one who chose which 3 keys would be used to reboot. The interview is online here [newsobserver.com], and includes an anecdote about the delivery of a prototype to MS.
Yeah, he was in a group interview/session to commemorate the anniversary along with Bill Gates, among others. David Bradley said that while he chose the keys, Bill is the guy who made them famous.
It was pretty funny... especially the look on Bill's face.:)
Yeah, he was in a group interview/session to commemorate the anniversary along with Bill Gates, among others. David Bradley said that while he chose the keys, Bill is the guy who made them famous.
Then he said "When you used it for NT logon. That's what I meant."
I remember the Jr very well. It was my second computer and was a work horse through high school and college. I still used it until about 92 or 93 when my office was flooded. I had replaced the 8088 with the faster NEC chip, it had 736K of memory, two floppies (a 360K and a 720K), and a 80M SCSI hard drive. It had the good keyboard though, not the chiclet one.
I can agree with you about the affordable part. The IBMs were expensive. A college friend had one of the original PCs. His dad originally paid $5000 for it. I originally wanted a Mac, but they were too expensive, so I had to opt out for a//c. I later traded the//c for the Jr.
To Celebrate MS has changed their slogan to: Microsoft: Inferior for twenty years and counting!
Seriously though, in Twenty Years, Microsoft STILL hasn't made an original Operating System:
MS-DOS: Bought QDOS for $50,000, which was in turn was a ripoff of CP/M Windows 1, 2 and 3: Too crappy for comment. Windows NT : Innovated directly from OS/2. Windows 95 : MS innovated huge hunks of it from Apple and even bigger hunks from NeXTstep. Windows 98: Win95 with the Finder ripoff replaced by a Web Browser innovated from Netscape. Windows XP: Windows NT with just about everyone's (AOL, Real, etc.) product innovated into the Operating System.
What I find scary is that Windows ME still is based off of a Twenty Year old OS originaly called 'Quick and Dirty Operating System'.
MS-DOS: Bought QDOS for $50,000, which was in turn was a ripoff of CP/M Windows 1, 2 and 3: Too crappy for comment. Windows NT: Innovated directly from OS/2. Windows 95: MS innovated huge hunks of it from Apple and even bigger hunks from NeXTstep.
Now didn't Windows 95 get its user interface from HP's NewWave? For customers I couldn't get onto OS/2, I would install NewWave over Windows and introduct them to the idea of OBJECT. Not just desktop icon objects but DATA OBJECTs. The way the got the long object names was via an index file which mapped into the real names. I had heard that Microsoft hired the NewWave people from HP to help with Chicago. It was really funny to hear how badly the OS could use threads. There still isn't anything on the PC that does threads as well as OS/2. IMO
Windows 98: Win95 with the Finder ripoff replaced by a Web Browser innovated from Netscape. Windows XP: Windows NT with just about everyone's (AOL, Real, etc.) product innovated into the Operating
System.
As opposed to Linux, which has made huge inroads in originality, striking advances in graphical user interfaces, etc...
Seriously, what would qualify as an "original operating system"? Can you name one? Can you tell me what features it has that can't be traced back to some prior development?
You know normally i try to resist the urge to comment on this sort of thing but im going to today. (note im not trolling or pushing the MS line i just cannot stand to see this stuff put across as the truth)
MS have never innovated. Hmm Bill Gates wrote the first BASIC for Altair Computers - considered the first of all 'PC''s - he did in on a legal pad in machine code, at 13 this was a guy who was hacking DEC OS code to find bugs in it for a place called C Cubed Computer Centre and at 14 he got caught hacking into a Control Data computer then linked into their network (called Cybernet) - he was known by his peers for those skills.
He wrote MSBASIC himself and he had written a DOS for pc'a however when IBM came calling they need a quick solution (BTW there are 2 very different storis on the QDOS thing - what is known is MS bought the OS in full so what they did with it is IBM's stupid fault for licensing it)
Now onto reality
Windows 1,2 - First and Second generation products but groundbreaking as they were the FIRST real saleable GUI's on the market (for the story behind the supposed theft from Aple/Xerox do a bit of reading - it was no such thing (Pirates of Silicon valley gets it very wrong)
Windows 3 - well may not be original (which i dispute) but it sure as hell worked and put the simple to use desktop on low cost PC's for all (note at this stage and even know the Mac is NOT low cost)
Windows NT - innovated from OS2 ?? what are you smoking - it owes more to X windows than that (hint - what happens when NT crashed - i dumps core) the back end is similar in many ways to Unix - OS2 is an IBM attempt to use the money they blue in a black hole called Taligent/Pink and it took them until Warp to even make it work - at which time the market didn't trust it anymore
Windows 95 - The similarity to apple is true - and covered under a license - but Next Step - well it has a kernel i guess - as for not original it was the only non unix (and considering the state of X at the time Unix isnt's a competitor here) GUI that worked as advertised (see comment on OS2) and it revolutionised the computer market place.
Windows 98 - I'll give you that one but it is much more than that - it was next generation tech that continued stability and useablity enhancements. And as for the web browser well yeah sure - just like everything is innovated off something else - Sorta like Linux is innovated from BSD
Windows XP - too soon to comment fully - yeah it has a lot of stuff - but it's a choice these days whether you want it or not.
Now im not saying MS is an innovative or good company (although read a bit about them and you might find some things out you didn't know) or that they are not a monopoly - only that you can criticise them for many things but if you do check the facts and learn about the history.
And my final point - how many of the people on here who use BSD/Linux Started off on a windows machine (win 3.11, win95 etc)??
Your choices in life change and so do your choices in software.
PS For more inforation on this and the very early days of MS and other companies read Fire in the Valley by Paul Frieberger and Micheal Swaine - ISBN 0071358927 - actually anyone who is into computers should read this and find out how all this got started.
Windows 1,2 - First and Second generation products but groundbreaking as they were the FIRST real saleable GUI's on the market (for the story behind the supposed theft from Aple/Xerox do a bit of reading - it was no such thing (Pirates of Silicon valley gets it very wrong)
Clarification: Win1 & 2 were Word/Excel fishtanks; they only really existed to support those apps and not much else used them. This was very similar to a few different GUIs on the PC at the time, except that MS made Windows.
Regarding your comments about MS Windows 1 & 2 - Sorry Sir, you're wrong..
There was a product called DesQView (and a bit later - DesQView/X) that offered what MS tried to offer back then - a windows enviroment. DesQView did it with console (no graphics, or simple graphics), and DesQView/X - which was using back then a port of X11R4 X windows)...
Yep and i have read about it and seen photos - there was also GEM from Atari and at least 3 others - none of the these however were general PC apps - they were not readily available to the market and i was not talking about X windows - yes there were several ports running X11R4 and some of them approached stability but no one will argue that X wasnt a readily available and stable system - MS marketed windows better maybe - but even you admit DesQview used console - thats little different to menu maker or many other programs - win was a GUI but you have a point - and it should be noted that i never claimed it was the only one
You call Windows 98 "next generation"? umm, how exactly is it next generation? because with Windows 98 they stuck you with MSIE 4 if u wanted or not, plus small modification - thats a next generation??
Windows NT - innovated from OS2 ?? what are you smoking - it owes more to X windows than that (hint - what happens when NT crashed - i dumps core) the back end is similar in many ways to Unix -...
Erm.. NT is actually not only "innovated from OS/2", it is completely based on the OS/2 codebase. (You might remember in the early days of NT those "OS2!SYS" error messages that kept coming up... What are you smoking?
NT is also heavily VMS based. Microsoft hired away most of the VMS development team to do NT. The thing is, NT3.x really doesn't suck. Unlike later versions of the OS, it actually ran the GUI in userspace, among other things.
I already conceeded the similarities - and the OS2 errors are NT3.51 and that was and is a very different product to NT4 - VMS provided a lot of the staff and NT probably has a lot of VMS in it - and a lot of OS2.
Name 1 general easy to use marketed alternative to Win98 that offered the feature set and stability - NOTE most people dont care it was bundled with IE4 - (Please dont mention Linux - i know it was there and i was using Slackware at the time (still am) but Linux was not at that stage, and not really now, an OS that the unskilled home user could run on his PC - it was next generation - Windows 95 was Generation 1 and MS Considered (8 (any many of us who have to support it as well) 2nd Generation - it still uses DOS as its underpinnings and thats a problem but from a stability front (having supported Win95 in large numbers) the product was an innovation (NOTE by stability i dont mean uptime - i mean general day to day write a document etc for which Win98 is very stable)
I really dislike the fact that anyone who puts forward the view that MS are not the evil satan of the world and produce pus ridden products must be a microsoft apologist - i resent the implication that im either a sheep of the MS camp or a sheep of the Linux Camp.
So heres my story - i have almost 12 years WORKING in MIS and IT (not studying thats after school) durting that time i have worked as an IBM RS operator, supported and admined VAX's, MDIS pegasus, been an AT&T sys admin, have a novell CNA in 3.11 and 4.11, supported OS2 desktops and servers (In a banking environment) and run desktop support in govt and corporate in both Win95, NT 3.51, Win 98 and NT4 and NOW win2000.
I have 4 PC's in this home office, A notebook on Win2k, this machine - dual boot Debian and Winb98, a gateway server on Slackware 6 and an Apple PowerMac 9600 (i also have a 386 notebook somewhere on Win3.11) I believe in choice and different horses for course - Linux offers me a lot and i love working with it and learning about t - im teaching myself to write perl and java at the moment. But i still use Win2k and win98 ?? why.
I have 500 users under support who use Win2k desktops (and its a damn good product) - this is a corporate decision and one i wont argue with until linux can be made foolproof enough for the average user (dont bother ive looked and none are yet - some are getting close but) Our Server backend is split - Win2k Active Dir for our global wan with BSD firewall and web services - SQL and ORACLE DB on Solaris for ERP and Financials and Some NT4 hold ons - mainly terminal server running citrix.
SO i have to support and use a wide range of products - SAP, COGNOS, SQL, INGRES etc, and i work 60 hours + a week.
When i come home i like to surf the web with no fuss and play games - thats it and i use Win98 for that cause its easy - no pissing around - i use IE5 cause it does everything i want with minimal fuss - i have broadband so i dont want to mess around with plug ins although i use Opera for some things and Lynx as well (PC and LINUX)
I dont need to be written off as some sort of MS marketing drone by the likes of you - i respect your opinion and your right to express it - thats what/. and the Open Source community is all about - but i would aks if you can lay out your qualifications and role before you brush off mine.
OHH and PS i work for a Global Real Estate management and Banking services firm - not MS (although i wil say i wouldnt say no to a job with them, nor with Red Hat for that matter)
(Note im not trolling or flaming just defending my honor here and if you want to post a comment that is intelligent feel free, i will reply - if you want to flame me - well hell i can't stop you acting like a child can i ?)
and if it wasn't for MS the IBM PC (and its open standards) probably wouldn't be around today if it wasn't for them.
That's partially true since Gates insisted on being able to license it to other parties. However, I seem to remember a story that the only reason they did choose MS was because they couldn't get in contact with their original choice (Digital Research??). It also didn't hurt that Bill's mom was a friend of some IBM bigshot.
Oh everything from MS is crap - and they stole everything from apple anyhow.
Is anyone else sick and tired of this simplistic way of writing off 20 years of revolution?
C'mon - we've got to give Bill Gates/Microsoft credit for one thing: they established *standards* where there were none (or only poorly followed ones) before. And I'm not talking about standards for huge mainframes or academic numbercrunchers, but for small (remember the term "microcomputer"?) computing devices used by "ordinary men and women". Before M$ and PC's, you might have a nifty C64 and your buddy a cool Apple II, but you couldn't swap software or documents. Twenty years down the line, everyone is using the same basic set-up, a pc, Windows, Office, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and can do just that: play games together, swap documents (and viruses!), share pictures over the internet, things "ordinary men and women" like to do. From an "ordinary men and women" point of view, that is a good thing.
Let's please all remember that as we sit, smug-like, typing on our linux box (not me, thank you, the computer I'm typing this on is for doing ordinary men and women things, not for serving webpages or what have you, activities for which, I'll happily concede, linux is far more suitable), sending messages to/. about how M$ is evil.
Microsoft and Bill Gates truly believe they're doing the world a favor by (forcibly) pushing their de-facto standards and by ripping of others' good ideas and repackaging them in such a way that "ordinary men and women" can use them. This is what the "pc-revolution" is all about.
Of course, as always, absolute power corrupts etc., and, right now, M$ is far too powerful for their own good.
There was CP/M-86 and the UCSD p-System. Both of which were substantially better than PC-DOS. The problem was that PC-DOS was cheaper than the competing operating systems, so people bought it.
PC-DOS 1.X was a warmed over port of CP/M-80, and the Microsoft development tools (Hey Bill!) were complete pieces of shit. I quickly gave up on PC-DOS and switched to the UCSD p-System, which had a Pascal compiler and operating system that actually worked. The UCSD p-System later died of self-inflicted wounds.
As I point out in other posts the PC at the time of release DID come with CP/M. . . for $250. PC-DOS was only $40. As always the consumer picked the cheaper product.
MS did not have a monopoly at the time as most people seem to believe. I think the real issue was the MS was a one trick pony. DOS was their one ticket to real profiability and they rode the pony hard.
Their competitors all viewed PCs as a side market that might not go anywhere and conservatively, and right so givent he knowledge at the time, continued to concentrate on those products and markets that made them they industrial giants they already were.
However, the point still is that the PC was available with CP/M from the day of release and had there been no MicroSoft there still would have been a PC based on an open architechture, a clone market, and multiple choices of operating systems, such as DR-DOS to run on them.
Just as if Daimler and Benz hadn't built cars we'd still be pretty much where we are today in the motor industry.
Actually, they licensed all of the original code from Spyglass (who got it from NCSA). Part of the deal was that Spyglass would get a cut from each copy of IE sold. Unfortunately for them, Billy gave it away for free and now they have been aquired by OpenTV.
I think this is aimed at my post as it quotes from it so i will reply (nicely and not flaming or trolling)
1. Said that windows was the first PC market ready GUI - read the post
2.It worked compared to the PC based competition (umm OS2 V1 Anyone)(and commenting on OS2 comes in my case from having supported it - by the time they got to warp it was a great product - but too little too late)
3.Maybe, maybe not - i see similarities in it to both so i'll concede that one may be a matter of opinion - i didnt say it was UNIX i said based on - and thats the thing about OS2 as well - maybe im wrong, hell i may be - so im human
4. I said commerically uasable - even the nicest linux and UNIX advocate wouldnt admit that X win was ready for realease to the world then - it was in Universities sure but not in general use - i agree on the client server side sure - but i dont agree with the click here stuff - windows is what you make of it and use it for - i use Linux and Win at work and home and they each have uses - i love Linux servers but am frankly scared of what my corporate desktop users would do to linux desktops and the support costs involved.
5. I never said Linus stole or in any way violated the BSD copyright - just as MS paid for its purchase of QDOS (and the legalities of what is a more than 15 year old sale are not for us to comment on - it was legal then and would be today - and as for the ripped off mac argument - well ask steve wozniak woz@woz.org about it - MS did no such thing in win 1 and had a license to use the features after all.
6. I dont consider software and OS's to be a religious crusade but i respect people who do - YOU will ALWAYS have a choice. And im not defending MS as you put it - I work in this industry - have done for more than 10 years and i dont FEAR anything that MS may do or otherwise - the PC industry grows and changes yearly - 10 years ago i was s sytems operator on IBM RS mainframes, then a Sys Admin on UNIX, now i'm an MIS manager - the one thing i know about this industry is Change is constant - Novell once were king in the Network OS area and now their money comes from other fields - why, they lost some ground to MS yes but the fact is they STOPPED INNOVATING ! new changes to the OS came too slow and people grew tired of the same old thing, saw a company that was interested more in Border Manager and other things and went to other solutions. Unix was proclaimed Dead and now its not again, Thats the thing about Linux i love -the constant innovation and change - but its also the reason why Linux isnt winning the hearts and minds and the corporate desktop - no stability in their eyes means large support costs.
7. True true and you are like me - my first PC was a BBC Micro then a Trash 80, C64, Amiga, Epson PC, IBM and thus on - i have run things including GEM, Deskworxs and many other OS'es - i meant this point as a question to the young guys.
And thats it - i love a good post and i wish your replied to mine and given a user name as yours is intersting - I dont agree with some of the comments but damn it thats what lifes about - I wont be using XP either BTW - my company wont be buying it for Min 2 years and we have some major concerns about it - as do a lot of corporates - it will as always end up winning in the home market - which pains me as i would love to see a usable and stable and 100% foolproof alernative from the Linux, hell any camp !
Dave Cutler and other guys wrote the so called "micro-kernel" (800K micro-kernel, oy), but there are tons of other parts which have been took from OS/2 - like the file system....
Remember - Until version NT 3.51 (including) - the GUI wasn't part of the NT itself, as it was a "plugin" (although more tied then X for example), and I imagine that if Dave would have known that the stuff he's writing is going to be glued mandatory to a GUI - I don't think he would have work there (well, he does hate GUI's if I read some articles about him correctly).
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.
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.
Aww, how sweet that IBM would take the time to set up a tribute page to their very own system that started a revolution.
Maybe Malda can set up a "3 years of CmdrTaco - A Tribute To Myself" page on Slashdot to honor the anniversary of Slashdot and everything great that has became of it.;)
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.
Of course that belies the fact that the car wasn't invented in 1960, it was invented in the late 1880s and by 1900 only the richest of the rich could afford one and the personel to keep it running, but by 1903 their engines had developed enough so that two poor bicycle mechanics could afford one to invent powered flight and the land speed record was faster than most street cars can go today.
By 1912 we had the four valve per cylinder double overhead cam engine that is now ubiquitous and the Model T Ford that sold for no more in real dollars than a Ford Taurus does now, and only a couple of years later the French were able to commandeer enough public taxi cabs from the streets of Paris to move an army.
The fact of the mater is that the automobile DID out perform the computer during the same period of its development.
Let's see how much the computer develops between 2060 and 2100. THAT will be a fairer comparison.
I could be wrong, but I think there were horse-drawn rail vehicles somewhat earlier. Rails could (and still can) support a great deal of weight and don't turn to mud when it rains.
There's a rebuttal list to this comment made by the head of some automotive company.
It was GM. I don't think the list is on their site (but then I didn't go looking for it there), but Google [google.com] came up with a few hits. This [geocities.com] is a list of things with which to finish the phrase "If Microsoft built cars..." This [annoyances.org] is a hypothetical "GM helpdesk" taking lusers' questions as if cars were like computers (someone ought to do a BOFH version of this).
With the passage of the Clean Air act, the auto makers have tried to thwart the sale of aftermarket parts and have dragged their feet on giving other people details. All the while that if they did, people could use the information to bypass or disable the emission control systems. It hasn't worked out for them, though. I'm sure they would love to have a DMCA type law to apply to cars.
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!!!
Well no, not JUST marketing. First of all there was accident. IBM adopted the open architecture of the PC because they came late to the market and then had to release product on as short a development cycle as possible. Thus off the shelf parts from outside suppliers. Had they gotten off their butts just a year or two earlier and developed from the ground up it never would have happened the way it did.
The existence of Microsoft as we know it is due to the accident of IBM not being able to strike a deal with Digital right off the bat, ( they DID reach a deal with Digital and by the time the PC hit the market you COULD by it off the shelf with Digital's CP/M, nobody did though).
The NEXT accident was IBM figuring that the open architechture was safe because the *BIOS* was propriatary. Little did they think that it would not only be reverse engineered but that the *courts* would find this legal.
The NEXT accident was the UNIX guys looking at the whole affair as "toy" computers and operating systems. Everyone at the time WANTED to run UNIX. Everyone knew it was the REAL operating system.
It cost $2500 minimum, CP/M was one tenth that and PC-DOS was one tenth THAT. Had the UNIX guys taken the PC seriously and realized the potential market and priced accordingly, about $50, we'd all be using UNIX today and not having to dual boot. *MS itself would have used UNIX had it been financially feasable.* Indeed, "Quick and Dirty OS" was a quick and dirty ripoff of UNIX needing a few years more development.
( As an aside have you noticed that depending on the circumstances MS attacks Linux either for being "Old" tech OR "Too new and undeveloped"? Cute, huh?)
And thus was the Intel/MS/IBM unholy trinity born.
Pure accident.
THEN came the marketing, and it was good. Good enough for a few years to invoke the third factor that has brought us the pile of cruft and kludge we all know and love today.
The leverage of installed base.
IBM/Intel/MS all realized the value of installed base and maintained backward compatability. All of their competitors relied on developing higher quality, more advanced systems. The consumer didn't want that. They wanted cheap, and they wanted to continue to run the programs they already had.
I was a Tandy guy. Why did I buy my first PC? Because none of my friends had TRS-80s. They all had IBM compatables.
This is the power of installed base.
What do we do about it? Damned if *I* know.
The fact of the matter is that the average high school geek could, at this point, pull an "Apple" and develop a new home computer and operating system combo that blows everything on the market right now clean away with an investment of about two years time.
But who would BUY it? THAT is the question. And the answer is clearly noone. Why not? Because we don't do it that way. The leverage of installed base again, although this time on a largely psychological factor.
Think about this. The most commonly voiced complaint about *NIX is that the CLI is too opaque. Why dosn't someone rewrite the CLI?
Well, the fact of the matter is that literally dozens HAVE. Linux allows anyone who wants to take the time to set up a directory structure, named however they wish, and a CL shell with any command structure they want. Many of those that have already written are in many ways superior to what we all use and available for download if you take a little time to search them out.
Nobody cares. Why not? We don't do it that way.
The power of installed base.
Gnome and KDE are most criticized for reproducing the Windows GUI interface. Just about everyone old enough to remember its introduction hates it. Remember seeing the "START" button for the first time and thinking "What the fsck is THAT and what goofball thought it up?"?
Other superior GUI's are available. We don't use them. Why not? Well, we just don't, that's all.
The power of installed base.
When will the PC as we know it die and finally be replaced with superior technology, most of it availble for years already? The instant no one cares about the installed base anymore.
[Unix] cost $2500 minimum, CP/M was one tenth that and PC-DOS was one tenth THAT. Had the UNIX guys taken the PC seriously and realized the potential market and priced accordingly, about $50, we'd all be using UNIX today and not having to dual boot. *MS itself would have used UNIX had it been financially feasable.* Indeed, "Quick and Dirty OS" was a quick and dirty ripoff of UNIX needing a few years more development.
I like your rant, but this part is not true.
Hardware costs were the main issue; DOS+apps ran (poorly) in 640K. Unix+apps required a minimum of 2x that amount and a fair more power. As for a cheap *nix, there was Coherent for $100...though it required a 286+ to run it. Once again, we're back to hardware costs.
Only reciently, in the past 4~ years, has hardware become insanely cheap and the cost of the OS and other software is becoming a major factor.
For reference, I'm about to buy a video card with 512 times the amount of RAM on it then I had on my first computer. The 64mb card costs ~$110 new while the 128k PC originally cost ~$3,000 used.
For further reference the IBM 360 that I was working on less than 10 years before the release of the PC cost $3 million, and you couldn't get a "video card" for it at all. Output was to an IBM Selectric typewriter, which we thought was pretty damn cool because we could * change fonts* by physically changing the typeball.
I think you underestimate the reticence of people to spend money on software at the time, *particularly* on an OS. As I've pointed out several times the real reason DOS won over CP/M was cost. DOS cost $40, CP/M cost $249. Even though CP/M was, at the time, the de facto standard people simply wouldn't pay $200 extra for an OS, even AFTER spending several thousand on hardware.
Remember, this is the same time era in which the FSF was born. People expected a computer to simply COME with both an OS and full development enviroment of some sort. The aforementioned IBM 360 had much of APL *hardcoded* into the cpu, not only was it free with the machine but it was literally impossible to uninstall.
I remember a company not batting an eye at popping $13,000 for a 386 server, and then putting up a fight for months over a few hundred dollars worth of software to make it actually useful.
Hardware is REAL. It sits on your desk or in your rack. You OWN it.
Software is invisible. It isn't REAL. More importantly you know, because the company that wrote it makes damn SURE you know, that you don't own it. You buy it and it isn't even yours. If you want to spend a bit of money and take a bit of time you know that you can hire a programer or ten to write a workalike that you DO own, whereas you arn't going to build a chip fab.
The cost of software has always been treated differently than the cost of hardware because software IS different. No one expects hardware to be free but there are now literally millions of people around the world wondering why software costs *anything.*
Particulaly an OS which, in practical terms, is really PART of the computer.
As for the fact that hardware for UNIX cost a premium over DOS that was *by design of the UNIX companies.* They wanted it to cost a lot, it wasn't inherent in the software. The more it cost the more "valuable" and "high tech" it was, at least in the marketing mind. They liked it that way. They made a mistake. Now they can't go back because, once again, UNIX has become free before they could retrench and make it cheap.
I stand by my point and suggest that if UNIX had been available for the 386 at the same price, or lower, than Windows Linux wouldn't even exist. The UNIX vendors blew it.
Well, think of the period between when the i386 chip started shipping in PCs (1987), and when most PC start shipping with a real protected mode OS (ummmm, Win XP ships later this year?).
MS and IBM were dinking around with OS/2 and Win 3.1. Later on Novell bought UNIX and essentially buried it. There was plenty of opportunity for Unix in the market, but SCO wanted premium dollar. It shouldn't have taken a college student to find a way to create a PC Unix that could be obtained on a MS-DOS budget.
I had MicroPort UNIX on my 286 back in the 80's and then shifted to Consensus 386. This was in the 1980's on 286 and 386 hardware and had real multitasking. The GUI really wasn't available on the PC but Windows and OS/2 were just starting, as was the XWindow System. I was amazed that WordPerfect cost me $250 for DOS but over $500 for these Unix's.
I think it was the fact that these UNIX vendors didn't go for volume pricing like Microsoft did and so it remained on workstations and up instead of on the PC hardware. But why did the application vendors do the same and charged too much for UNIX versions?
In 1991, NT 3.1 sucked compared to OS/2 2.0 since OS/2 would run on a 386 with 10MB of RAM and could run Windows, a Netware client, and tcp/ip networking along with a X-Server. The base system blew DOS/Windows out of the water but the extras were very expensive ( $250 for just the TCP/IP stack and another $250 for the X-Server ).
Anyways, UNIX's on the 386 were 32bit and provided protected mode OS's with a flat memory model in the 1980's and OS/2(32bit) had this around 1991. Microsoft already had it's monopoly by 1990 and started making full use of it to stop OS/2 while the UNIX crowd stayed high priced and on high-end hardware. I saw a pre-release presentation of NT 3.1 by Microsoft and when I proded the presenter on the hardware requirements he said that NT was being positioned toward workstations and that Microsoft had a project called Chicago which would be their new DESKTOP OS. Remember that NT WAS advertised as the next great desktop OS until it was known to have HUGE hardware requirments. The pre-announcement of Chicago stalled the market for 5 years and the press helped that along....
It's funny that a cheap UNIX-like system is around now which goes 180 degrees from the UNIX of yesteryear and both apps and the OS are essentually free and this combination has the monster of Redmond running for its life(scrambling at least;)
LoB
Yeah, what killed the market for any sort of advanced operating system on the PC until very recently was the price of memory. Given that you could have a productive DOS system with 1MB or less (and XT clones with that amount of memory were still being sold up until 91-92 when Windows started to get popular), the economies of scale never ramped up, and most PCs were sold with the tiniest amount of memory possible. (Even today, with RAM prices in the toilet, consumer box shops are selling 1.5Ghz systems with only 128MB.)
Anyway, the lack of RAM pretty much killed the market for OS/2, NT, and Unix, and allowed Windows 3.1 and later 95 to walk away with the prize. The comprimises involved in that are still buring users to this day.
Gad, 20 years ?! Who would have thought that a machine, built on something so lame as a 16-bit program counter, a 16-bit ALU, four 16-bit general purpose registers, along with a few 16-bit index registers, and oh yes, that all important 8-bit external bus, would have so forever changed teh face of computing ?
Personally, while the PC is significant, I believe it was the... and please forgive the bad joke, the attack of the clones in the 80's, that finally put the brain-damaged 80n86 PCs over the top of superior personal computer architectures.
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.
I'm not sure about the original PC but the XT technical reference came with the complete schematics of the motherboard and all expansion boards and complete source code of the BIOS.
Nope, he's right. There was no BIOS source code. There was, however, an extensive set of schematics. How do I know this? Well, my father didn't *buy* the technical manual with his pc, but because he got his first pc in a country with lax copyright enforcing (Indonesia), it was *given* to him along with his shiny, new peecee.
Incidentally, in said country, pc's were the first "personal computers" that gained any popularity... no one (almost) had an Apple or a C64, but as soon as pc's came out (clones, mostly)the country went computer crazy. Still is, as a matter of fact - there's a large contingent of Indonesian Linux programmers (copyright laws have become stricter since).
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.
I respectfully disagree. They KEY event, the KEY enabler of the development of the "modern" PC as we know it today was Micros~1's success in convincing IBM to allow Micros~1 to license PC-DOS (renamed to MS-DOS) to other computer manufacturers...i.e., to allow Micros~1 to give IBM a more or less non-exclusive license.
Without that event, Rod Canion and the boys at Compaq would *never* have even bothered reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS. PC-DOS was not sold separately at that time. You had to buy an IBM PC to get PC-DOS, and making a product that revolved around pirating PC-DOS wouldn't have been a very viable business model for Compaq.
Praise Microsoft for helping open up the PC hardware market.
MicroSoft deserves credit for a major change within the growing personal computer industry. It took it a while from happening. But it sent ripples throughout the industry, forcing established giants to take notice, and enabled MicroSoft to be come the giant that we know today.
In the early period of the microcomputer industry, it was all about hardware. Computer companies were hardware companies. Software packages (applications as well as operating systems) were almost comodities - they were offerings that facilitated the selling of hardware. And while the operating system, or the killer app, might have been key to selling hardware - software companies weren't power houses.
MicoSoft played that game. Most accounts show MicoSoft as being a small company doggedly nipping at the heels of giants, digging up business. They provided software to everyone from the makers of the Altair, to IBM, to Tandy. And when IBM fumbled control of the IBM PC platform and clones sprung up like mushrooms? More business for MicroSoft. And their business exploded as the industry took off.
Suddenly, computer hardware became a commodity. Microsoft was now the gatekeeper to this commodity hardware. What they did... what they decided... was suddenly very important to even the giant hardware manufactorers.
Microsoft helped legitimize the software industry. Software companies could stand on their own with legitimate products. Even the most conservative consumer didn't blink at paying a large sum of money for a shrinkwrapped box that contained just a manual and some media (even paving the way today where its legitimate to pay for a download - no physical product at all).
Sure - software companies existed before and during Microsoft. Microsoft didn't introduce killer apps like VisiCalc and Wordstar. But Microsoft was an important part of that transition.
Or were they simply riding the wave?
One final thought. This week's news is full of debate over WindowsXP. Consumer advocates want to delay release of Microsoft's new flagship product. Industry pundits warn that this delay will cause millions of lost revenue in the computer industry. Only a small portion of that lost revenue would be Microsoft's.
Think about that.
Software, and Microsoft itself, is now so important that an entire industry of hardware manufactorers are depending on the actions of a completely unrelated software company.
In fact, Microsoft originally offered a port of MS-DOS to Macintosh computers based on MC68000 processors, but it never caught on because the popular applications were binary-only for x86.
Well, I've never heard that particular tidbit in all my days of tidbit collecting, so I question if it's true or not.
On the otherhand, the first Mac port of MS Flight Simulator looked suspiciously identical to the DOS version, down to the fonts, so maybe there's something to it.
It was EXACTLY the same few years later when Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1 and then 3.5X for other then X86 processors.. You could have get some apps at the beginning (I think I've seeb MS Word 6 for Alpha back then), but almost no other vendors wrote software for those non X86 NT version..
I don't know about you, but this plataform is just sick. Do I get mad all the times I stop to think on what the home computer industry could have brought us. Instead, from the tenths of playfull, colorfull, imaginative toys from the early 80's, what did emerge as the "winner" for the 90's, and now, beyond?
The only "Personal Computer" of the time that was, ground up, designed for "serious businness", and thus could display 80 characters of green text in a row, and wow, it could even beep. Who would want pretty toys like the Apple II's, ZX Spectruns, Atari ST's, Amigas? SO much color capacity, sound, speed...it could not be possible fopr one to want to work with stuff like this.
You may be all happy and well with this crap, being refurbished over and over. Were it not for the other only alternative [apple.com] in the market, I doubt if today's almighty 80x86 PC's would ever had got advanced peripheralls like USB connection, 3'1/2 floppies, firewire --how? no firewire yet? sorry - and maybe even the mouse. After all...who would ever want such a toy on a Serious Machine like those sold by International Business Machines?
Be happy and party on. I am wearing black for this "Anniversary"!
Well, two off the top of my head are PCI (adopted by Apple in their Macs and Sun in their Ultrasparcs) and ATA hard drives (ditto). As for beige boxes with floppy drives... I really don't see why Mac people have such a hang up on what their computer looks like. I just stick my computer in the corner and never even look at it unless I'm loading a CD-ROM in it. My computer could be orange and green for all I care. I actually happen to like beige for what it's worth though. What would you prefer we had?? Cheap translucent plastic garbage like the iMacs and G4 towers?
It's the 20th anniversary of the first -IBM- pc, not the PC. The altair was made in 1975 or so, was it not?
I've been pondering the personal computer over this the past week. TechTV had asked if IBM was responcible for the popularity of the PC. While most people keyed on "PC" as being "IBM PC" and debated IBM's role in introducing the product line... I thought of "PC" as "personal computer" and thought back to a series of home computers before and after the IBM PC.
I had thought of the Altair... but dismissed it.
I see the label "personal computer" as denoting a consumer device. The Altair was a microcomputer for the home enthusiast. But it required an electronics hobbiest, and perhapse a mathmatics enthusiast, to put togeather and enjoy.
Apple was the first to realize the personal computer - not only a pre-constructed motherboard, but one that included a keyboard, a video driver (and a slick hack, at that) all in a custom plastic case. Granted - it may have taken a computer geek to appreciate it at first. But it paved the way for a killer app (the spreadsheet - VisiCalc, if I remember right) to make the personal computer a standard fixture in offices. And once it was in the office, the personal computer began showing up in households that otherwise wouldn't have had a computer.
I make it sound like the industry WAS Apple. I don't believe that. IBM had an important role. But that role was not origionating the "personal computer".
The first personal computer was probably DEC's PDP-8/m (started shipping in 1972) which pre-dated the Altair and Apple by several years.
That said, 'PC' as understood today means 'IBM PC compatible' (as opposed to Apples or workstations), and today's PC's are direct descendants of the original IBM PC 5150. The PC is by far the most widely used and most important architecture in use today. The 5150 was not the first personal computer, but was the first PC.
"It interesting to think that it took 20 years to get this far. How far will we be with computing in the next 20? Staggers the imagination."
Let's take a look...
1. Operating systems will ship with virii to save us the trouble of getting ourselves.
2. You will need 20 Ghz just to create a text document, and people will think nothing is abnormal about this.
3. You will need at least a gigabit ethernet line just to get a receipe from the internet. People will think nothing is abnormal about this.
4. You'll need to sign your soul to your OS vender just to swap your graphics card.
5. You'll pay a tax that goes directly to Music/Movie companies to pay for the pirating. The pirating will still be illegal. (yes I know this is true now, to an extent)
6. Despite the faster lines world wide, downloading a text document will still take a few seconds.
7. Your OS vender will disable your OS when you don't make your monthly payment. After 2 months your account will be canceled and your files deleted.
Virus is a Latin word meaning poison. Virii is therefore the correct plural forms, although using a variety of forms is sometimes considered amusing among certain groups.
Heh. PCs would run on G4s & AMD Athlons, and Macs on Pentium 4s.
I think PC would run on 68090's or something like that, if they never had the guts to change their cpu architecture when using Intel CPUs, why should they have done it in case they chose the 68k line.
MCA wasn't the 'let's make things proprietary' grab everyone treats it as these days.
Let's face it, ISA was the standard, and it sucked. Here's IBM, with this comparably great, well tested, well documented bus they've been using for years, that the vendors are comfortable with, and PCI and VLB are dragging ass.. They said 'We need a better, faster bus'. So instead of fucking around, they went MCA.
How many chips does the average computer have now, about four? They are all documented but it's less interesting than the original PC since fewer chips means you won't be able to see how it works and how the different functionality connects together. Plus, publishing schematics would add cost to building the system, and frankly very few people want it.
Actually they could publish the schematics and a bunch of other technical info which they have to create anyway, and nowadays no doubt are doing on computers instead of drawing boards, and put it all on a CD and include one with each unit, and I for one would be glad to pay an extra buck or two for it.
"I remember being the coolest kid in the school 'cause my modem could be pushed to 450 baud instead of the usual 300!"
Man, at my high school I just got beat up by football players whenever I mentioned the words "modem", "cpu", or "code"... I did score a few dates tho (I guess they went in for the geeky type). heh heh heh.
Not related to old ads but I built my first computer in the mid 1980's from spare parts after reading an article in Microcornucpia Magazine. It was the Xerox 820 which was a z80 maching running CP/M (had turbo C and learned C on it at 4Mhz along with wordstar) but the cool part was the 8086 co-processor board that alowed me to run CPM/86 at the same time as the z80 CPM was running. I could switch back and forth with the keyboard.
I wish I had pictures because this was a funny looking machine that I built. It used a tall slim shipping case that was used to ship spare parts for Scientific Atlanta's sonar systems. I stood the case on it's side so the removable top was not the back and the floppy was installed internally and exposed to the front. It looked like todays tower case. The CRT was a bare 12v green screen from a ATM that I fed the RGB signals thru seperate coax cables.
If anybody remembers the Xerox 820, it was a IMAC predicessor since it was a all-in-one design with the connectors/Mobo and monitor in one case (maybe even the keyboard). I only had the manual and parts so mine looked borg'ish.
Ah, the good old days..... I still remember my roomate saying that 4Mhz would be too slow. He had a PC from LeadingEdge that had a TURBO switch and ran at 4 or 8Mhz. I said 4Mhz was plenty fast and it was for the first couple of weeks while I learned the CPM commands, wordstar, and C. Then it got really painfully slow as I moved faster then it (10 finger typist since the 70's;).
I really miss the days of Microcornucopia and the original Byte magazine too.:(
The PC only barely achieved parity with contemporary systems, and PC architecture systems lagged behind contemporaries for over a decade. It wasn't until he mid-ninties, with PCI and 32 bit processors that PC hardware caught up with where the like of the Macintosh and Amiga, never mind real workstations, had been years before.
First of all, when the IBM PC debuted it was the technologically the best personal computer available, if only because it was 16 bit and could address 640k, while the others (Apple II, TRS-80, Kaypro, Commodore 64, etc.) were only 8 bit and could only address 64k. This enabled much serious business applications to be written for the IBM PC than the other computers.
Workstations started to become available by around then, but were much more expensive. It wasn't until several years after it debuted, that it was surpassed in some aspects by Macintosh and Amiga.
Although it's true that PC's took a while to catch up (though I'd place the parity date closer to the early-90's than the mid-90's), for the past several years they have even outpaced the high-end workstations in terms of features and performance.
If you're going to post a story about how "...today is the twentieth aniversary of the IBM PC...", you might want to give a little thought to which day you actually post the story.
Without the PC there would be no linux or OOS revolution either. You would be at the mall with your friends (if you were lucky) or at home watching paint dry doing nothing because most people would not have computers in thier home because really they only played games or did business stuff that was unecsarry.
Whether we like it or not, MS took all sorts of nifty innovations that people made and turned them into something that everyone in the world wanted. We should thank them for that much.
How many people started with the IBM PC original? (Score:2, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Back in my day... (Score:5, Funny)
And we LIKED it! We LOVED IT!
We didn't have any stinking free operating systems. We had to pay $100 for shitty old DOS, and we loved it! We thought it was great!
We didn't have DOOM, or Quake, or Unreal. We didn't have texture-mapped anti-aliased vertex-shaded full-color video games! We had ZORK with its text-only interface! And we liked it! We loved it!
We didn't have any "internet" back in those days, not in our homes. There was no World Wide Web or DSL/cablemodem connections to your home. We didn't even have 56k modems! If you wanted to share things with your buddies you had to copy it onto a 300K floppy, and boy, we didn't know WHAT we'd do with all that disk space! And if you wanted to connect to other computers you had to use a THREE HUNDRED BAUD MODEM!
And we liked it! We loved it!
I'm a grumpy old man, and I don't like the way things are today...things were a lot better with disk-swapping 80-column text wait an eternity to download forty K of files that would take up a large share of a floppy disk that would go bad in three months, with games that would take three or four minutes to load that were rarely worth the cost of the disks they were printed on and a stinking 640KB limit! And we loved those days!
Bah! Stupid digital punk kids! (Score:2)
Re:Bah! Stupid digital punk kids! (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Back in my day... (Score:2)
Re:Back in my day... (Score:2)
If you are into progressive, like I am, then you *are* an old timer.
(also note the ancient form of emphasis I used up there, from the BBS/USENET days)
Re:Back in my day... (Score:2)
Back in MY day all we had were big rocks. And we sat around and watched the rocks because you just never knew what those rocks might do. Them rocks are tricky like that.
You kids have it too easy these day... Bah!
OS/2 (Score:2)
Reminds me of a Dilbert... (Score:3, Funny)
Someone says that their first computer was an XT.
Dilbert then says that his computer was so old that he needed to use 1's and 0's to use it.
Wally finally says that he needed to use magnets, and he didn't even have 0's.
Re:Reminds me of a Dilbert... (Score:3, Funny)
Of course my frame rate in Quake is a bit slow, but it scales almost infinately.
KFG
Taiwan, ROC responsible for the PC's success (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Even More History. (Score:2)
Also, IBM desperately wanted to use CP/M as the OS, but Gary Kildall (of Digital Research) shunned their reps, so IBM ended up using MS/DOS, which was purchased from Seattle Computer Systems by Bill Gates for $50,000.00 (it was called QDOS, "Quick and Dirty OS"
Corrections, please, if any of this is wrong...
Re:Even More History. (Score:2)
Why don't people remember this? Because CP/M cost $240 and PC-DOS only cost $40.
Ok, big business might have popped for the CP/M because it was standard at the time, and a few did, but most didn't because it just so happened that right at that same time Digital was introducing the next generation of CP/M that * wasn't backward compatible* with CP/M.
Ok, so if you were going to have to scrap all of your software *anyway* it made sense to buy the cheaper OS as long as it did what you wanted it to.
If the PC had been introduced either one year earlier, or one year LATER Digital would still rule and only a few of us old timers would even remember that MicroSoft had even existed.
On such twists of fate does history turn.
KFG
Actually... (Score:2, Informative)
Butterfly keyboard? (Score:2)
with butterfly keyboard. I never owen one but I think
it is very smart idea. What happened to them? If
there are any modern laptops with butterfly keyboard?
Comment removed (Score:3, Flamebait)
Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers. ? (Score:2)
But you miss the point a little - IBM created the PC market in the corporate sector. The innovators (and there were legion) built great computers but corporates wouldnt buy off a company that might go broke (many of them did, MITS, IMSAI, Commodore etc) but they knew IBM and they knew their systems - they had their Mainframes in the data centers and machine rooms and their minis in accounting etc, so they trusted the name and bought the PC's for their staff based on the fact that IBM had been there for many years and they were a corporate company like them and knew their business.
Apple made a better product but they played on the touchy feely, hippy ethos too much for the corporate market (and they didnt want that market, didnt care about it till after IBM entered the marketplace really)
I would say that i started my career on thos 'retarded' mainframes and they were the best on the market (name me one competitor at that time with superior mainframe systems)
I wont comment on the keyboard etc as it is a matter of opinion - and with the keyboard its true as is the expandability (IBM knew nothing about expandability as they were used to telling customers what they were getting not the other way around) And i would like to know what written and real basis you have for the IBM paying off DR comment - as it is a matter of record that MS paid $50k for the DOS - they didnt write it thus if it was stolen its not their issue (not to mention that most DOS'es were copies of CP/M at that stage anyway just as most BASIC was a copy of Bill Gate's original Altair one.
But remember this - no IBM PC means NO pc as we know it - the rise of the PC on the corporate desktop led to the modern market place we have and enjoy - a market needs volume and real volume in those days could only come from business and big business had the most momey and staff - IBM didnt persue the cloners as they thought hardware wasnt worth it - thank god.
I would be interested in asking your age (i just like to see how many of the 30+ guys are still out there in this industry) as it has an impact on the mainframe computing opinion but im not flaming you as you have a right to say what you think - after all linux is all about freedom of choice and right to think different!
Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers. ? (Score:2)
DR's Gary Kildall sat down at an IBM PC supplied by IBM and, using a secret code, got it to pop up a Digital Research copyright notice.
I've never seen any confirmation of this story, but it does line up with vauge Usenet ramblings and so on. Apparently the guy that Paul Allen bought MS-DOS from was building it as a part-time project. He didn't have time to rewrite all of the utility software, so he just transcoded some CP/M utils from 8080 to 8086 asm. The 'secret code' was probably a DEBUG statement or an easter egg.
Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers. ? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:The start of mediocrity in microcomputers. (Score:2)
Technically speaking? you damn right...
But do u know WHY they chose it? it's simple..
Back then IBM asked TI, Motorola, Intel and others if they can supply to them in big quantities their processor..
Motorola couldn't (they didn't finish back then their 68000 processor if I'm not mistaken), same for TI.
Intel had promised to supply IBM their processor, and signed AMD as their 2nd tier contractor to supply processors to IBM (boy, I'm sure some Intel execs are feeling really sorry for this now)..
Happy Birthday (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Happy Birthday (Score:2, Funny)
Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy (Score:2, Funny)
It was pretty funny... especially the look on Bill's face.
Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy (Score:2, Funny)
Then he said "When you used it for NT logon. That's what I meant."
Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Re:I wonder if CNN will do special on PC Jr's B-da (Score:2)
I remember the Jr very well. It was my second computer and was a work horse through high school and college. I still used it until about 92 or 93 when my office was flooded. I had replaced the 8088 with the faster NEC chip, it had 736K of memory, two floppies (a 360K and a 720K), and a 80M SCSI hard drive. It had the good keyboard though, not the chiclet one.
I can agree with you about the affordable part. The IBMs were expensive. A college friend had one of the original PCs. His dad originally paid $5000 for it. I originally wanted a Mac, but they were too expensive, so I had to opt out for a //c. I later traded the //c for the Jr.
Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:3, Flamebait)
To Celebrate MS has changed their slogan to:
Microsoft: Inferior for twenty years and counting!
Seriously though, in Twenty Years, Microsoft STILL hasn't made an original Operating System:
MS-DOS: Bought QDOS for $50,000, which was in turn was a ripoff of CP/M
Windows 1, 2 and 3: Too crappy for comment.
Windows NT : Innovated directly from OS/2.
Windows 95 : MS innovated huge hunks of it from Apple and even bigger hunks from NeXTstep.
Windows 98: Win95 with the Finder ripoff replaced by a Web Browser innovated from Netscape.
Windows XP: Windows NT with just about everyone's (AOL, Real, etc.) product innovated into the Operating System.
What I find scary is that Windows ME still is based off of a Twenty Year old OS originaly called 'Quick and Dirty Operating System'.
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
Windows 1, 2 and 3: Too crappy for comment.
Windows NT
Windows 95
Now didn't Windows 95 get its user interface from HP's NewWave? For customers I couldn't get onto OS/2, I would install NewWave over Windows and introduct them to the idea of OBJECT. Not just desktop icon objects but DATA OBJECTs. The way the got the long object names was via an index file which mapped into the real names. I had heard that Microsoft hired the NewWave people from HP to help with Chicago. It was really funny to hear how badly the OS could use threads. There still isn't anything on the PC that does threads as well as OS/2. IMO
Windows 98: Win95 with the Finder ripoff replaced by a Web Browser innovated from Netscape.
Windows XP: Windows NT with just about everyone's (AOL, Real, etc.) product innovated into the Operating System.
Lob
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
Of course that was back when I owned an Amiga.
Apple has never really created anything innovative, they just stole it from less well known people like Xerox so it looked original.
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, what would qualify as an "original operating system"? Can you name one? Can you tell me what features it has that can't be traced back to some prior development?
The Real infor on MS (Score:2)
MS have never innovated. Hmm Bill Gates wrote the first BASIC for Altair Computers - considered the first of all 'PC''s - he did in on a legal pad in machine code, at 13 this was a guy who was hacking DEC OS code to find bugs in it for a place called C Cubed Computer Centre and at 14 he got caught hacking into a Control Data computer then linked into their network (called Cybernet) - he was known by his peers for those skills.
He wrote MSBASIC himself and he had written a DOS for pc'a however when IBM came calling they need a quick solution (BTW there are 2 very different storis on the QDOS thing - what is known is MS bought the OS in full so what they did with it is IBM's stupid fault for licensing it)
Now onto reality
Windows 1,2 - First and Second generation products but groundbreaking as they were the FIRST real saleable GUI's on the market (for the story behind the supposed theft from Aple/Xerox do a bit of reading - it was no such thing (Pirates of Silicon valley gets it very wrong)
Windows 3 - well may not be original (which i dispute) but it sure as hell worked and put the simple to use desktop on low cost PC's for all (note at this stage and even know the Mac is NOT low cost)
Windows NT - innovated from OS2 ?? what are you smoking - it owes more to X windows than that (hint - what happens when NT crashed - i dumps core) the back end is similar in many ways to Unix - OS2 is an IBM attempt to use the money they blue in a black hole called Taligent/Pink and it took them until Warp to even make it work - at which time the market didn't trust it anymore
Windows 95 - The similarity to apple is true - and covered under a license - but Next Step - well it has a kernel i guess - as for not original it was the only non unix (and considering the state of X at the time Unix isnt's a competitor here) GUI that worked as advertised (see comment on OS2) and it revolutionised the computer market place.
Windows 98 - I'll give you that one but it is much more than that - it was next generation tech that continued stability and useablity enhancements. And as for the web browser well yeah sure - just like everything is innovated off something else - Sorta like Linux is innovated from BSD
Windows XP - too soon to comment fully - yeah it has a lot of stuff - but it's a choice these days whether you want it or not.
Now im not saying MS is an innovative or good company (although read a bit about them and you might find some things out you didn't know) or that they are not a monopoly - only that you can criticise them for many things but if you do check the facts and learn about the history.
And my final point - how many of the people on here who use BSD/Linux Started off on a windows machine (win 3.11, win95 etc)??
Your choices in life change and so do your choices in software.
PS For more inforation on this and the very early days of MS and other companies read Fire in the Valley by Paul Frieberger and Micheal Swaine - ISBN 0071358927 - actually anyone who is into computers should read this and find out how all this got started.
Re:The Real infor on MS (Score:2)
Clarification: Win1 & 2 were Word/Excel fishtanks; they only really existed to support those apps and not much else used them. This was very similar to a few different GUIs on the PC at the time, except that MS made Windows.
Re:The Real infor on MS (Score:2)
There was a product called DesQView (and a bit later - DesQView/X) that offered what MS tried to offer back then - a windows enviroment. DesQView did it with console (no graphics, or simple graphics), and DesQView/X - which was using back then a port of X11R4 X windows)...
Re:The Real infor on MS (Score:2)
Re:The Real infor on MS (Score:2)
You call Windows 98 "next generation"? umm, how exactly is it next generation? because with Windows 98 they stuck you with MSIE 4 if u wanted or not, plus small modification - thats a next generation??
Sorry, not on my (and tons of people) book
Re:The Real infor on MS (Score:2)
NT is also heavily VMS based. Microsoft hired away most of the VMS development team to do NT. The thing is, NT3.x really doesn't suck. Unlike later versions of the OS, it actually ran the GUI in userspace, among other things.
Re:The Real infor on MS (Score:2)
Name 1 general easy to use marketed alternative to Win98 that offered the feature set and stability - NOTE most people dont care it was bundled with IE4 - (Please dont mention Linux - i know it was there and i was using Slackware at the time (still am) but Linux was not at that stage, and not really now, an OS that the unskilled home user could run on his PC - it was next generation - Windows 95 was Generation 1 and MS Considered (8 (any many of us who have to support it as well) 2nd Generation - it still uses DOS as its underpinnings and thats a problem but from a stability front (having supported Win95 in large numbers) the product was an innovation (NOTE by stability i dont mean uptime - i mean general day to day write a document etc for which Win98 is very stable)
I really dislike the fact that anyone who puts forward the view that MS are not the evil satan of the world and produce pus ridden products must be a microsoft apologist - i resent the implication that im either a sheep of the MS camp or a sheep of the Linux Camp.
So heres my story - i have almost 12 years WORKING in MIS and IT (not studying thats after school) durting that time i have worked as an IBM RS operator, supported and admined VAX's, MDIS pegasus, been an AT&T sys admin, have a novell CNA in 3.11 and 4.11, supported OS2 desktops and servers (In a banking environment) and run desktop support in govt and corporate in both Win95, NT 3.51, Win 98 and NT4 and NOW win2000.
I have 4 PC's in this home office, A notebook on Win2k, this machine - dual boot Debian and Winb98, a gateway server on Slackware 6 and an Apple PowerMac 9600 (i also have a 386 notebook somewhere on Win3.11) I believe in choice and different horses for course - Linux offers me a lot and i love working with it and learning about t - im teaching myself to write perl and java at the moment. But i still use Win2k and win98 ?? why.
I have 500 users under support who use Win2k desktops (and its a damn good product) - this is a corporate decision and one i wont argue with until linux can be made foolproof enough for the average user (dont bother ive looked and none are yet - some are getting close but) Our Server backend is split - Win2k Active Dir for our global wan with BSD firewall and web services - SQL and ORACLE DB on Solaris for ERP and Financials and Some NT4 hold ons - mainly terminal server running citrix.
SO i have to support and use a wide range of products - SAP, COGNOS, SQL, INGRES etc, and i work 60 hours + a week.
When i come home i like to surf the web with no fuss and play games - thats it and i use Win98 for that cause its easy - no pissing around - i use IE5 cause it does everything i want with minimal fuss - i have broadband so i dont want to mess around with plug ins although i use Opera for some things and Lynx as well (PC and LINUX)
I dont need to be written off as some sort of MS marketing drone by the likes of you - i respect your opinion and your right to express it - thats what
OHH and PS i work for a Global Real Estate management and Banking services firm - not MS (although i wil say i wouldnt say no to a job with them, nor with Red Hat for that matter)
(Note im not trolling or flaming just defending my honor here and if you want to post a comment that is intelligent feel free, i will reply - if you want to flame me - well hell i can't stop you acting like a child can i ?)
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
and if it wasn't for MS the IBM PC (and its open standards) probably wouldn't be around today if it wasn't for them.
That's partially true since Gates insisted on being able to license it to other parties. However, I seem to remember a story that the only reason they did choose MS was because they couldn't get in contact with their original choice (Digital Research??). It also didn't hurt that Bill's mom was a friend of some IBM bigshot.
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
Is anyone else sick and tired of this simplistic way of writing off 20 years of revolution?
C'mon - we've got to give Bill Gates/Microsoft credit for one thing: they established *standards* where there were none (or only poorly followed ones) before. And I'm not talking about standards for huge mainframes or academic numbercrunchers, but for small (remember the term "microcomputer"?) computing devices used by "ordinary men and women". Before M$ and PC's, you might have a nifty C64 and your buddy a cool Apple II, but you couldn't swap software or documents. Twenty years down the line, everyone is using the same basic set-up, a pc, Windows, Office, Outlook Express and Internet Explorer and can do just that: play games together, swap documents (and viruses!), share pictures over the internet, things "ordinary men and women" like to do. From an "ordinary men and women" point of view, that is a good thing.
Let's please all remember that as we sit, smug-like, typing on our linux box (not me, thank you, the computer I'm typing this on is for doing ordinary men and women things, not for serving webpages or what have you, activities for which, I'll happily concede, linux is far more suitable), sending messages to
Microsoft and Bill Gates truly believe they're doing the world a favor by (forcibly) pushing their de-facto standards and by ripping of others' good ideas and repackaging them in such a way that "ordinary men and women" can use them. This is what the "pc-revolution" is all about.
Of course, as always, absolute power corrupts etc., and, right now, M$ is far too powerful for their own good.
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
There was CP/M-86 and the UCSD p-System. Both of which were substantially better than PC-DOS. The problem was that PC-DOS was cheaper than the competing operating systems, so people bought it. PC-DOS 1.X was a warmed over port of CP/M-80, and the Microsoft development tools (Hey Bill!) were complete pieces of shit. I quickly gave up on PC-DOS and switched to the UCSD p-System, which had a Pascal compiler and operating system that actually worked. The UCSD p-System later died of self-inflicted wounds.
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:3, Informative)
MS did not have a monopoly at the time as most people seem to believe. I think the real issue was the MS was a one trick pony. DOS was their one ticket to real profiability and they rode the pony hard.
Their competitors all viewed PCs as a side market that might not go anywhere and conservatively, and right so givent he knowledge at the time, continued to concentrate on those products and markets that made them they industrial giants they already were.
However, the point still is that the PC was available with CP/M from the day of release and had there been no MicroSoft there still would have been a PC based on an open architechture, a clone market, and multiple choices of operating systems, such as DR-DOS to run on them.
Just as if Daimler and Benz hadn't built cars we'd still be pretty much where we are today in the motor industry.
KFG
Re:wrong! (Score:2)
Actually, they licensed all of the original code from Spyglass (who got it from NCSA). Part of the deal was that Spyglass would get a cut from each copy of IE sold. Unfortunately for them, Billy gave it away for free and now they have been aquired by OpenTV.
Re:wrong! (Score:2)
A cut from $0
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
1. Said that windows was the first PC market ready GUI - read the post
2.It worked compared to the PC based competition (umm OS2 V1 Anyone)(and commenting on OS2 comes in my case from having supported it - by the time they got to warp it was a great product - but too little too late)
3.Maybe, maybe not - i see similarities in it to both so i'll concede that one may be a matter of opinion - i didnt say it was UNIX i said based on - and thats the thing about OS2 as well - maybe im wrong, hell i may be - so im human
4. I said commerically uasable - even the nicest linux and UNIX advocate wouldnt admit that X win was ready for realease to the world then - it was in Universities sure but not in general use - i agree on the client server side sure - but i dont agree with the click here stuff - windows is what you make of it and use it for - i use Linux and Win at work and home and they each have uses - i love Linux servers but am frankly scared of what my corporate desktop users would do to linux desktops and the support costs involved.
5. I never said Linus stole or in any way violated the BSD copyright - just as MS paid for its purchase of QDOS (and the legalities of what is a more than 15 year old sale are not for us to comment on - it was legal then and would be today - and as for the ripped off mac argument - well ask steve wozniak woz@woz.org about it - MS did no such thing in win 1 and had a license to use the features after all.
6. I dont consider software and OS's to be a religious crusade but i respect people who do - YOU will ALWAYS have a choice. And im not defending MS as you put it - I work in this industry - have done for more than 10 years and i dont FEAR anything that MS may do or otherwise - the PC industry grows and changes yearly - 10 years ago i was s sytems operator on IBM RS mainframes, then a Sys Admin on UNIX, now i'm an MIS manager - the one thing i know about this industry is Change is constant - Novell once were king in the Network OS area and now their money comes from other fields - why, they lost some ground to MS yes but the fact is they STOPPED INNOVATING ! new changes to the OS came too slow and people grew tired of the same old thing, saw a company that was interested more in Border Manager and other things and went to other solutions. Unix was proclaimed Dead and now its not again, Thats the thing about Linux i love -the constant innovation and change - but its also the reason why Linux isnt winning the hearts and minds and the corporate desktop - no stability in their eyes means large support costs.
7. True true and you are like me - my first PC was a BBC Micro then a Trash 80, C64, Amiga, Epson PC, IBM and thus on - i have run things including GEM, Deskworxs and many other OS'es - i meant this point as a question to the young guys.
And thats it - i love a good post and i wish your replied to mine and given a user name as yours is intersting - I dont agree with some of the comments but damn it thats what lifes about - I wont be using XP either BTW - my company wont be buying it for Min 2 years and we have some major concerns about it - as do a lot of corporates - it will as always end up winning in the home market - which pains me as i would love to see a usable and stable and 100% foolproof alernative from the Linux, hell any camp !
Re:Microsoft's New Slogan (Score:2)
Dave Cutler and other guys wrote the so called "micro-kernel" (800K micro-kernel, oy), but there are tons of other parts which have been took from OS/2 - like the file system....
Remember - Until version NT 3.51 (including) - the GUI wasn't part of the NT itself, as it was a "plugin" (although more tied then X for example), and I imagine that if Dave would have known that the stuff he's writing is going to be glued mandatory to a GUI - I don't think he would have work there (well, he does hate GUI's if I read some articles about him correctly).
Wow, am I THAT old now? (Score:3, Interesting)
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:Wow, am I THAT old now? (Score:2)
Without an SDK, Geoworks was destined to me nothing more than a fancy launcher with an office suite.
What would those be worth today? (Score:2, Interesting)
Could I make anything by selling what I have?
Aww (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe Malda can set up a "3 years of CmdrTaco - A Tribute To Myself" page on Slashdot to honor the anniversary of Slashdot and everything great that has became of it.
Other "advantages" (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Other "advantages" (Score:2)
By 1912 we had the four valve per cylinder double overhead cam engine that is now ubiquitous and the Model T Ford that sold for no more in real dollars than a Ford Taurus does now, and only a couple of years later the French were able to commandeer enough public taxi cabs from the streets of Paris to move an army.
The fact of the mater is that the automobile DID out perform the computer during the same period of its development.
Let's see how much the computer develops between 2060 and 2100. THAT will be a fairer comparison.
KFG
Re:Other "advantages" (Score:2)
Re:Other "advantages" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Other "advantages" (Score:2)
With the passage of the Clean Air act, the auto makers have tried to thwart the sale of aftermarket parts and have dragged their feet on giving other people details. All the while that if they did, people could use the information to bypass or disable the emission control systems. It hasn't worked out for them, though. I'm sure they would love to have a DMCA type law to apply to cars.
I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:3, Interesting)
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!!!
Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:5, Insightful)
The existence of Microsoft as we know it is due to the accident of IBM not being able to strike a deal with Digital right off the bat, ( they DID reach a deal with Digital and by the time the PC hit the market you COULD by it off the shelf with Digital's CP/M, nobody did though).
The NEXT accident was IBM figuring that the open architechture was safe because the *BIOS* was propriatary. Little did they think that it would not only be reverse engineered but that the *courts* would find this legal.
The NEXT accident was the UNIX guys looking at the whole affair as "toy" computers and operating systems. Everyone at the time WANTED to run UNIX. Everyone knew it was the REAL operating system.
It cost $2500 minimum, CP/M was one tenth that and PC-DOS was one tenth THAT. Had the UNIX guys taken the PC seriously and realized the potential market and priced accordingly, about $50, we'd all be using UNIX today and not having to dual boot. *MS itself would have used UNIX had it been financially feasable.* Indeed, "Quick and Dirty OS" was a quick and dirty ripoff of UNIX needing a few years more development.
( As an aside have you noticed that depending on the circumstances MS attacks Linux either for being "Old" tech OR "Too new and undeveloped"? Cute, huh?)
And thus was the Intel/MS/IBM unholy trinity born.
Pure accident.
THEN came the marketing, and it was good. Good enough for a few years to invoke the third factor that has brought us the pile of cruft and kludge we all know and love today.
The leverage of installed base.
IBM/Intel/MS all realized the value of installed base and maintained backward compatability. All of their competitors relied on developing higher quality, more advanced systems. The consumer didn't want that. They wanted cheap, and they wanted to continue to run the programs they already had.
I was a Tandy guy. Why did I buy my first PC? Because none of my friends had TRS-80s. They all had IBM compatables.
This is the power of installed base.
What do we do about it? Damned if *I* know.
The fact of the matter is that the average high school geek could, at this point, pull an "Apple" and develop a new home computer and operating system combo that blows everything on the market right now clean away with an investment of about two years time.
But who would BUY it? THAT is the question. And the answer is clearly noone. Why not? Because we don't do it that way. The leverage of installed base again, although this time on a largely psychological factor.
Think about this. The most commonly voiced complaint about *NIX is that the CLI is too opaque. Why dosn't someone rewrite the CLI?
Well, the fact of the matter is that literally dozens HAVE. Linux allows anyone who wants to take the time to set up a directory structure, named however they wish, and a CL shell with any command structure they want. Many of those that have already written are in many ways superior to what we all use and available for download if you take a little time to search them out.
Nobody cares. Why not? We don't do it that way.
The power of installed base.
Gnome and KDE are most criticized for reproducing the Windows GUI interface. Just about everyone old enough to remember its introduction hates it. Remember seeing the "START" button for the first time and thinking "What the fsck is THAT and what goofball thought it up?"?
Other superior GUI's are available. We don't use them. Why not? Well, we just don't, that's all.
The power of installed base.
When will the PC as we know it die and finally be replaced with superior technology, most of it availble for years already? The instant no one cares about the installed base anymore.
And not one instant before.
KFG
Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:2)
I like your rant, but this part is not true.
Hardware costs were the main issue; DOS+apps ran (poorly) in 640K. Unix+apps required a minimum of 2x that amount and a fair more power. As for a cheap *nix, there was Coherent for $100...though it required a 286+ to run it. Once again, we're back to hardware costs.
Only reciently, in the past 4~ years, has hardware become insanely cheap and the cost of the OS and other software is becoming a major factor.
For reference, I'm about to buy a video card with 512 times the amount of RAM on it then I had on my first computer. The 64mb card costs ~$110 new while the 128k PC originally cost ~$3,000 used.
Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:2)
I think you underestimate the reticence of people to spend money on software at the time, *particularly* on an OS. As I've pointed out several times the real reason DOS won over CP/M was cost. DOS cost $40, CP/M cost $249. Even though CP/M was, at the time, the de facto standard people simply wouldn't pay $200 extra for an OS, even AFTER spending several thousand on hardware.
Remember, this is the same time era in which the FSF was born. People expected a computer to simply COME with both an OS and full development enviroment of some sort. The aforementioned IBM 360 had much of APL *hardcoded* into the cpu, not only was it free with the machine but it was literally impossible to uninstall.
I remember a company not batting an eye at popping $13,000 for a 386 server, and then putting up a fight for months over a few hundred dollars worth of software to make it actually useful.
Hardware is REAL. It sits on your desk or in your rack. You OWN it.
Software is invisible. It isn't REAL. More importantly you know, because the company that wrote it makes damn SURE you know, that you don't own it. You buy it and it isn't even yours. If you want to spend a bit of money and take a bit of time you know that you can hire a programer or ten to write a workalike that you DO own, whereas you arn't going to build a chip fab.
The cost of software has always been treated differently than the cost of hardware because software IS different. No one expects hardware to be free but there are now literally millions of people around the world wondering why software costs *anything.*
Particulaly an OS which, in practical terms, is really PART of the computer.
As for the fact that hardware for UNIX cost a premium over DOS that was *by design of the UNIX companies.* They wanted it to cost a lot, it wasn't inherent in the software. The more it cost the more "valuable" and "high tech" it was, at least in the marketing mind. They liked it that way. They made a mistake. Now they can't go back because, once again, UNIX has become free before they could retrench and make it cheap.
I stand by my point and suggest that if UNIX had been available for the 386 at the same price, or lower, than Windows Linux wouldn't even exist. The UNIX vendors blew it.
KFG
Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:2)
MS and IBM were dinking around with OS/2 and Win 3.1. Later on Novell bought UNIX and essentially buried it. There was plenty of opportunity for Unix in the market, but SCO wanted premium dollar. It shouldn't have taken a college student to find a way to create a PC Unix that could be obtained on a MS-DOS budget.
Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:2)
Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:2)
Anyway, the lack of RAM pretty much killed the market for OS/2, NT, and Unix, and allowed Windows 3.1 and later 95 to walk away with the prize. The comprimises involved in that are still buring users to this day.
Re:I dunno, it's kinda disturbing actually. (Score:2)
Anyone remember the day when a TCP/IP Stack license for a SINGLE use was costing $500?
Coherenet was nice thing, but both Coherenet and SCO were crushed by *BSD and Linux (Linux have more of this "blame")
house built upon the sand (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally, while the PC is significant, I believe it was the ... and please forgive the bad joke, the attack of the clones in the 80's, that finally put the brain-damaged 80n86 PCs over the top of superior personal computer architectures.
Re:house built upon the sand (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Reverse engineering the PC (Score:2)
Re:Reverse engineering the PC (Score:2)
No source code for BIOS - I can tell you that for sure.
On MainFrame it was another story - you got some source code, but of course - not to your entire system
Re:Reverse engineering the PC (Score:2)
Incidentally, in said country, pc's were the first "personal computers" that gained any popularity
Re:house built upon the sand (Score:2)
I respectfully disagree. They KEY event, the KEY enabler of the development of the "modern" PC as we know it today was Micros~1's success in convincing IBM to allow Micros~1 to license PC-DOS (renamed to MS-DOS) to other computer manufacturers...i.e., to allow Micros~1 to give IBM a more or less non-exclusive license.
Without that event, Rod Canion and the boys at Compaq would *never* have even bothered reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS. PC-DOS was not sold separately at that time. You had to buy an IBM PC to get PC-DOS, and making a product that revolved around pirating PC-DOS wouldn't have been a very viable business model for Compaq.
MicroSoft, Microsoft, and change. (Score:2)
In the early period of the microcomputer industry, it was all about hardware. Computer companies were hardware companies. Software packages (applications as well as operating systems) were almost comodities - they were offerings that facilitated the selling of hardware. And while the operating system, or the killer app, might have been key to selling hardware - software companies weren't power houses.
MicoSoft played that game. Most accounts show MicoSoft as being a small company doggedly nipping at the heels of giants, digging up business. They provided software to everyone from the makers of the Altair, to IBM, to Tandy. And when IBM fumbled control of the IBM PC platform and clones sprung up like mushrooms? More business for MicroSoft. And their business exploded as the industry took off.
Suddenly, computer hardware became a commodity. Microsoft was now the gatekeeper to this commodity hardware. What they did... what they decided... was suddenly very important to even the giant hardware manufactorers.
Microsoft helped legitimize the software industry. Software companies could stand on their own with legitimate products. Even the most conservative consumer didn't blink at paying a large sum of money for a shrinkwrapped box that contained just a manual and some media (even paving the way today where its legitimate to pay for a download - no physical product at all).
Sure - software companies existed before and during Microsoft. Microsoft didn't introduce killer apps like VisiCalc and Wordstar. But Microsoft was an important part of that transition.
Or were they simply riding the wave?
One final thought. This week's news is full of debate over WindowsXP. Consumer advocates want to delay release of Microsoft's new flagship product. Industry pundits warn that this delay will cause millions of lost revenue in the computer industry. Only a small portion of that lost revenue would be Microsoft's.
Think about that.
Software, and Microsoft itself, is now so important that an entire industry of hardware manufactorers are depending on the actions of a completely unrelated software company.
It has been a profound change, indeed.
Re:Microsoft played a role too (Score:2)
Well, I've never heard that particular tidbit in all my days of tidbit collecting, so I question if it's true or not.
On the otherhand, the first Mac port of MS Flight Simulator looked suspiciously identical to the DOS version, down to the fonts, so maybe there's something to it.
Re:Microsoft played a role too (Score:2)
Should we mourn for the Home Computers them? (Score:2, Insightful)
The only "Personal Computer" of the time that was, ground up, designed for "serious businness", and thus could display 80 characters of green text in a row, and wow, it could even beep. Who would want pretty toys like the Apple II's, ZX Spectruns, Atari ST's, Amigas? SO much color capacity, sound, speed...it could not be possible fopr one to want to work with stuff like this.
You may be all happy and well with this crap, being refurbished over and over. Were it not for the other only alternative [apple.com] in the market, I doubt if today's almighty 80x86 PC's would ever had got advanced peripheralls like USB connection, 3'1/2 floppies, firewire --how? no firewire yet? sorry - and maybe even the mouse. After all...who would ever want such a toy on a Serious Machine like those sold by International Business Machines?
Be happy and party on. I am wearing black for this "Anniversary"!
Re:Should we mourn for the Home Computers them? (Score:2)
Transcript of 20th anniversary meeting (Score:2, Informative)
first IBM pc (Score:4, Informative)
25th anniversary then?
Personal Computer Origins (Score:2)
I had thought of the Altair... but dismissed it.
I see the label "personal computer" as denoting a consumer device. The Altair was a microcomputer for the home enthusiast. But it required an electronics hobbiest, and perhapse a mathmatics enthusiast, to put togeather and enjoy.
Apple was the first to realize the personal computer - not only a pre-constructed motherboard, but one that included a keyboard, a video driver (and a slick hack, at that) all in a custom plastic case. Granted - it may have taken a computer geek to appreciate it at first. But it paved the way for a killer app (the spreadsheet - VisiCalc, if I remember right) to make the personal computer a standard fixture in offices. And once it was in the office, the personal computer began showing up in households that otherwise wouldn't have had a computer.
I make it sound like the industry WAS Apple. I don't believe that. IBM had an important role. But that role was not origionating the "personal computer".
Re:first IBM pc (Score:4, Informative)
That said, 'PC' as understood today means 'IBM PC compatible' (as opposed to Apples or workstations), and today's PC's are direct descendants of the original IBM PC 5150. The PC is by far the most widely used and most important architecture in use today. The 5150 was not the first personal computer, but was the first PC.
Re:Where we were. Where we will be... (Score:5, Funny)
Let's take a look...
1. Operating systems will ship with virii to save us the trouble of getting ourselves.
2. You will need 20 Ghz just to create a text document, and people will think nothing is abnormal about this.
3. You will need at least a gigabit ethernet line just to get a receipe from the internet. People will think nothing is abnormal about this.
4. You'll need to sign your soul to your OS vender just to swap your graphics card.
5. You'll pay a tax that goes directly to Music/Movie companies to pay for the pirating. The pirating will still be illegal. (yes I know this is true now, to an extent)
6. Despite the faster lines world wide, downloading a text document will still take a few seconds.
7. Your OS vender will disable your OS when you don't make your monthly payment. After 2 months your account will be canceled and your files deleted.
Re:Where we were. Where we will be... (Score:2)
Virii
Virusen
Virusim
...
Re:Where we were. Where we will be... (Score:2, Informative)
There's an excellent page [perl.com] on why the plural really isn't virii which should explain it for you..
Re:Where we were. Where we will be... (Score:2)
Just enough to be dangerous... or so the saying goes. Thanks for the link.
Re:Where we were. Where we will be... (Score:2)
Re:Where we were. Where we will be... (Score:1)
Re:68000 IBM PC (Score:1)
I think PC would run on 68090's or something like that, if they never had the guts to change their cpu architecture when using Intel CPUs, why should they have done it in case they chose the 68k line.
PPC's would'nt have come to existence either.
Re:Ahhhh 20 years (Score:2)
Let's face it, ISA was the standard, and it sucked. Here's IBM, with this comparably great, well tested, well documented bus they've been using for years, that the vendors are comfortable with, and PCI and VLB are dragging ass.. They said 'We need a better, faster bus'. So instead of fucking around, they went MCA.
Whaddya gonna do?
Re:Ahhhh 20 years (Score:2)
Re:By Coincidence... (Score:2)
Re:By Coincidence... (Score:2)
Re:Perspective (Score:2, Funny)
"I remember being the coolest kid in the school 'cause my modem could be pushed to 450 baud instead of the usual 300!"
Man, at my high school I just got beat up by football players whenever I mentioned the words "modem", "cpu", or "code"... I did score a few dates tho (I guess they went in for the geeky type). heh heh heh.
Re:The "good" old days? (Score:2)
That's what you get for abandoning tried and true technology for some upstart that wasn't going anywhere.
KFG
Re:Old ADS ( Xerox 820 and Microcornucopia ) (Score:2)
I wish I had pictures because this was a funny looking machine that I built. It used a tall slim shipping case that was used to ship spare parts for Scientific Atlanta's sonar systems. I stood the case on it's side so the removable top was not the back and the floppy was installed internally and exposed to the front. It looked like todays tower case. The CRT was a bare 12v green screen from a ATM that I fed the RGB signals thru seperate coax cables.
If anybody remembers the Xerox 820, it was a IMAC predicessor since it was a all-in-one design with the connectors/Mobo and monitor in one case (maybe even the keyboard). I only had the manual and parts so mine looked borg'ish.
Ah, the good old days..... I still remember my roomate saying that 4Mhz would be too slow. He had a PC from LeadingEdge that had a TURBO switch and ran at 4 or 8Mhz. I said 4Mhz was plenty fast and it was for the first couple of weeks while I learned the CPM commands, wordstar, and C. Then it got really painfully slow as I moved faster then it (10 finger typist since the 70's;).
I really miss the days of Microcornucopia and the original Byte magazine too.
Re:Old ADS ( Xerox 820 II and Microcornucopia ) (Score:2)
Re:And what a crufty piece of crap it was, too. (Score:2)
Re:Slow news day again? (Score:2)
Re:November 1, 1983 (Score:2)
I stopped using it when I got a 386 in 1992(!) How many of you have used a machine full time for that long? :)
I have and it too was a PCjr. See my previous comment [slashdot.org] about it. I wish I still had it.
Re:Is this really something to 'celebrate'? (Score:2)
Whether we like it or not, MS took all sorts of nifty innovations that people made and turned them into something that everyone in the world wanted. We should thank them for that much.