How the IBM PC Changed the World 232
Sabah Arif writes "On August 12, 1981, IBM released the IBM PC 5150. In less than two years, IBM had created a computer that would not only change IBM, but the entire world, mostly because it did not follow IBM tradition. It used an outside microprocessor (instead of the nascent IBM 801), operating system and software. Low End Mac recounts the birth of the IBM PC 5150."
First personal PC (Score:3, Informative)
It inspired most of the techno-nerds from Gates to Jobs.
It was Compaq that opened up the clone market (Score:4, Informative)
Imagine you were Chinese and had laid bare before you the innards of some cool technology that until now was locked up tight. You'd be the first one to put down your eggroll and cat-kabob and get right to the task of extracting its secrets. That's when you'd open up the clone market. It wouldn't be the prerogative of the original company whether you created the clone or not, it's out of their hands once they decided to use an open architecture.
Compaq blazed the clone trail, not IBM.
Re:CPM (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Next Big Thing (Score:5, Informative)
for thoes that don't know.. so many games and programs were made for the 8086/8088 that when they started upping the clockspeed many games ran too fast so they implimented the turbo button so that you could slow down the cpu to make old games and such useable
would be nice now to beable to push a button and have games from around 1995~ or so that I have lieing around playable again.. but alas that would be an interesting trick sence you'd have to impliment 3dfx voodoo 1, soundblaster and true dos in software/hardware
Re:CPM (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The Next Big Thing (Score:5, Informative)
Thank Phoenix Technologies (Score:5, Informative)
1. The IBM PC was initially sold for about $1295. That was much cheaper than any other IBM computer. Apple and Commodore had cheaper computers, but small-business owners want the IBM name on their computers. Business people tended to view Apple computers and Commodore computers as toys.
2. The computer had the IBM label on it. These days, the IBM label does not carry the same cachet that the IBM name carried in the 1980s. At that time, IBM dominated the mindshare in the computer industry. People often said, "No one was ever fired for buying an IBM computer."
3. IBM encouraged other companies to build hardware and software for the IBM PC. It literally came with a full set of manuals documenting the entire BIOS and the internal wiring among the chips of the motherboard. Compare that open approach to, say, the typical Sony laptop. The plethora of software and hardware peripherals for the IBM PC enabled it to be adapted to a wide-range of useful applications: music synthesis, video games, desktop publishing, real-time intruder monitoring, etc.
4. Phoenix Technologies cloned the BIOS, enabling an army of companies to legally build functioning clones of the IBM PC. This army of cloners then spawned an entire universe of component suppliers. This intense competition among so many cloners and suppliers drastically lowered the price of the IBM PC and its clones. In turn, the lowered prices dramatically increased sales of the personal computers. Today, you can buy a Dell laptop for $500.
As prices dropped, more people bought computers; with more people owning computers, more companies building software and hardware for the computers appeared. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
Among the four factors, item #4 is probably the most important factor in amplifying the impact of the IBM PC on the entire computer industry.
You can easily see the impact of #4 by comparing (1) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for IBM PCs (now known as Lenovo PCs) and their clones and (2) the size of the ecosystem of companies building hardware and software for 68000 Macintoshes or PowerPC Macintoshes. Still more interesting, the enormous size and supercompetitive nature of the 1st ecosystem has swallowed even Apple: the new x86 Macintoshes are essentially (in a very general sense) an IBM clone. The x86 Macintoshes use the x86 (the central component of an IBM clone) and take advantage of the super-cheap VLSI chips from which IBM clones are built.
Re:CPM (Score:5, Informative)
Windows killed OS/2.[1]
Microsoft & IBM had a partnership underway. When it came to renewal & examination of what stood where, Microsoft gracefully bowed out. That left Windows and OS/2 on the market [as separate products]. I don't have dates for other releases, but I know Windows 3.1 was in the March<->May '92 timeframe and remember working on an OS/2 book (power users) in the late '92 or '93 timeframe. For some time, software packages which ran on one ran on the other. This was still a DOS environment as you couldn't boot Windows and there were several flavors of DOS.
Several Microsoft documents detailing meeting minutes indicated a discussion about making it such Windows wouldn't run upon anything but MS-DOS. The resolution was, "Only if it will absolutely, positively runs on MS-DOS [no matter what, no question whatsoever]; if it runs on something else, that's fine...it's better to err by running on too much than too little." The goal was to make it WOM[2]people would call and the response would be, "I'm sorry, Windows only runs on MS-DOS. I can put you in touch with the Sales[3] department so you can purchase a copy."
There are a few packages which are still OS/2-only, although they might be migrating if not having done so recently. The missus works at a large hospital and Pyxis (automated med dispenser, it tracks userid, password, station, date|time, medication, doseage, etc. Basically, it a data collection system where you enter the necessary info and a drawer with the meds opens up for you to remove the meds. If the hospital has moved from OS/2, it's been less than a year and was extremely painful. They've had plenty of problems anyway, so I don't remember which one of the agonizing pains brought home would have been the migration. (fortunately, they're better than SMS on the mainframe (from days of yore). I so hated trying to protect the machines the systems programmers|technical support were responsible for and SMS demanded God privileges in order to do their work, walking in like stormtroopers. That's when we found out they were all OJT.[4]
Someone mentioned CP/M and the turbo button. With the commercials today, one would expect an [Easy] button instead - slow things down & make them intolerably slow. I'm guessing any version of Windows would be like pushing the [Easy] button. Perhaps, push the [Easy] button and a list of Windows partitions (in order of slowness) would pop up and ask you which one you want to run.
________________________________
[1] The saying about OS/2 was DB/2, OS/2, PS/2: Half of a database running on half an operating system running on half of a PC.
[2] WOM = Write-Only Memory. Infinite storage capacity, but if you try to read...out comes the smoke and they call support. "Smoke came out of the cabinet? Are you certain? Did you try to read from it? Oh, I'm sorry. It's read-only. You can store as much as you want, but you cannot retrieve it. During a trip to an ACM conference in college '84, several of us who had a few too many glasses of gin (I hate vermouth) and bloody maries were working out the details to create a glossy brochure to send to the profs.
[3] Remember, Microsoft's strengths are Marketing, PR, and Sales; aka Huey, Dewey and Louie. I don't think people calling would understand if someone said, "I'll put you in touch with Donald Duck's nephew, Louie Duck."
[4] On the Job Training. "We'll hire you dirt-cheap but won't send you to any classes. That costs money. The best thing to do is send you out into the mean, harsh world and you'll figure things out with time. Providing you don't booger up the clients' systems first. This isn't a case of being hired and learn things fast. This is being hired today and sent to a client site tomorrow without a parachute or docs.
At IBM WebSite say that it born at September 1981 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The Next Big Thing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:CPM (Score:2, Informative)
CP/M: $240
IBM PC DOS: $40
Identical, except for a leading digit.
BBC Article (Score:2, Informative)
Re:They Don't Make 'Em Like That Anymore (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I was always amused by this... (Score:4, Informative)
Intel used a special chip that was dedicated to interrupt vectoring, the 8259. It had 8 inputs of fixed priority, int 0 being the highest and int 7 being lowest.
The 5150 had one of these, and the ints 0 to 7 were partly hardwired and partly on the ISA bus.
A stupid design mistake was made: interrupts were edge-triggered on the 0->1 edge of the input. This was a programmable option in the 8259, which could also operate in a level-sensitive mode. This mistake meant that interrupt lines could not be shared between cards.
(other manufacturers of the time used active-low level-sensitive mode, which meant it was possible to share interrupt lines)
When the AT appeared, and the number of available lines was felt too limited, a second 8259 was connected to int 2 of the first, and its input were designated 8..15.
Input 9 was connected to the bus pin that originally was number 2. Hence the 2/9.
The priorities of inputs 8..15 became relative to int 2, thus the complete priority sequence becomes:
0,1,[8,2/9,10,11,12,13,14,15],3,4,5,6,7
Some of those (0,1,8,13,14) are used on the motherboard. The remainder is on the ISA bus.
Later, when MCA and PCI were developed, engineers corrected their mistake and used level-sensitive interrupts that could be shared.
But in the name of backward compatability, the strange interrupt numbering and handling has always remained there.
(current systems have 24 levels and more freedom in programming the whole thing to the OS developer's liking)
Re:the x86, the 68000 (Score:3, Informative)
to design the PC. In fact, they were going to use an 8085 cpu, which
they were using in their DataMaster series of machines. The PC ended
up with the same bus already used in the DataMaster. IBM switched to
the newly released 8088 at the suggestion of Bill Gates.
The very first deliveries of 68000 cpus were locked up in advance sales
to General Motors for use in auto electronics (smog control computers).
Until Motorola could ramp up production very limited numbers of 68k chips
were sold to anybody else.
The 68000 IS a 32 bit machine in the sense that it has 32 bit registers,
and a 32 bit instruction set. It is constructed with 16 bit data paths
and a 16 bit alu however. The 68020 is a true 32 bit machine with 32 bit
data paths and a 32 bit alu. The 68020 can run the same software as the
68000 (it is actually binary compatible with the 68000). Motorola intended
from the start to produce a 32 bit microprocessor but could not get the
needed number of transistors on board till later on.
The 68K series were not really a dead end. For a few years Motorola matched
Intel with new processors. The 68030 matching the 486 and the 68040 the Pentium.
Apple's sales were only a small precent of the PC world and Motorola was loosing
interest in the 68K. They started promoting the PowerPC processors with IBM and
for a while it looked like IBM would start shipping machines based on this part.
Apple thought it would be a good idea to jump ship, but the PowerPC processors
never really caught on outside of IBM's mini mainframe business. (Deep Blue of
chess fame was a PowerPC cluster). Now Apple is jumping ship AGAIN, this time
to Intel.
Re:The Next Big Thing (Score:3, Informative)
Clockspeed also affected hardware - I remember that in order to format early hard drives on an 8088 (XT) you had to drop back down to 4.7 MHz.
Why did you post that??
Re:Altair & the Apple I (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Thank Phoenix Technologies (Score:3, Informative)
There were a LOT of companies stealing the IBM BIOS code by typing in the source in the Technical Reference Manual. That was ruled illegal.
What the later cloners (including Compaq) did was take the programming reference manual, hire people who would sign a legally binding statement that they had never seen the BIOS code and do a black box reverse engineering job on the functions. The best jobs were done by Compaq (who didn't resell their clean BIOS) and Phoenix who just did a much better job than everybody else. (Including things like making sure there was a "NOT (C) IBM" where IBM had their copyright statement since IBM software looked for the letters "IBM" to only run on their own machines)
Re:Thank Phoenix Technologies (Score:3, Informative)
Phoenix desired 100% penetration and was willing to give their product away to get it since they were nearly backrupt at one time. Dell used the Phoenix name because they were offered a buyout on the license, but they continued to adapt BIOS'es themselves for their important lines. Dell contracted Phoenix to do BIOSes for Dimension machines for a period of time and those systems were the worst products Dell offered.
I would agree that the existence of a cloned BIOS was an important matter but Phoenix was simply one of several that did it and I totally disagree that Phoenix was responsible for any marketshare differences in the platform. Phoenix was a player in the PC market but it is my opinion that the market would be little different today without them.