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Hardware

Top 10 Personal Computers 387

Posted by michael from the fighting-words dept.
BWJones writes "The Houston Chronicle has posted a story by Dwight Silverman on the ten most popular PC's of all time. His inclusions are for the most part accurate, but his rankings confuse me. For instance, he includes 'hobby' computers such as the Altair, but excludes the Apple I and his ranking of the Compaq portable PC at number one ahead of the Altair, Apple I and II, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Interestingly, the author also skips other significant platforms entirely, such as the Amiga and Atari computers as well as skipping over the much more significant Tandy products, the TRS-80 line of computers which like the Apple I and II had built in BASIC which helped introduce many people to programming."
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Top 10 Personal Computers

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  • My first and worst: Trash-80 Model III. 48k, 2 floppies and a built in monochrome screen.

    • TRS-80 Z-80 chip far superior to the Apple 6502 (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The Z80 chip could run rings around the Apple 6502 cpu. It's a shame Tandy didn't add basic features like high resolution color graphics and lower case letters. Despite that, the TRS-80 was a great machine and far superior to others from that era for everything except graphics.

      • Re:TRS-80 Z-80 chip far superior to the Apple 6502 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Spruitje ( 15331 ) <ansonr&spruitje,org> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @04:09PM (#7537979) Homepage

        The Z80 chip could run rings around the Apple 6502 cpu

        Erm, it was the other way round.
        A 6502 at 1 Mhz could at least control a floppydrive.
        When they tried the same trick with a Z80 they needed a 8 Mhz version.
        The reason is very simple.
        Look at the instructionset.
        The shortest instruction on the 6502 was 1 clockpulse,
        On the Z80 it was 4 clockpulses.
        The longest instruction of the 6502 was 6 clockpulses.
        The longest instruction of the Z80 was 24 clockpulses.
        • He was probably thinking of a different chip. The Z80, in it's day, was a very good processor, and the Z8000 was just as good. Zilog just suffered from bad marketing. But they still managed to sue their way to the mid to late 90's when companies started using the Z80 again (Texas Instruments calculators and Sega Genesis, just to name two).

        • Re:TRS-80 Z-80 chip far superior to the Apple 6502 (Score:5, Interesting)

          by tgibbs ( 83782 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:14PM (#7538722)
          A 6502 at 1 Mhz could at least control a floppydrive

          And this was the feature that made it possible for the Apple II to have a low-cost floppy drive. Steve Wozniak designed a "dumb" floppy controller, using only a handful of chips, that worked by using the Apple II's cpu as the controller. The fact that the cpu directly read individual bits off the floppy and controlled the floppy hardware at a low level made possible some truly baroque copy-protection schemes.

          The Apple II was also the only PC of its time to offer a true bit mapped "color" display--another of Wozniak's innovations. Every other PC of the time had only character-mapped graphics. This feature made the Apple the game machine of its era, although as with the floppy drive, everything from sprite movement to the individual cycles of the speaker had to be controlled directly by the cpu.

    • Ouch, commodore-128, featuring CP/M right after DOS won the battle.It still hurts thinking about the money I spent while all I used was the commodore 64 capabilities. At least it had a floppy drive, that was so cool!
      • I had a C= 16, and later a C= Plus/4. Got the 16 in 1987 for $20, and the Plus/4 in 1988 for about $25. I loved them both. I didn't care about stuff like built-in word processors or spreadsheets or anything (the stuff that was on the +/4). I just wanted it to write BASIC, pure and simple.

        Unfortunately, i didn't have a floppy nor tape drive. I had to save stuff on Spiral-Bound Pulp Media(tm). I think that during that time (before i discovered electric guitars at age 13) i had filled up about 5 100pg n
    • My first and worst: Trash-80 Model III. 48k, 2 floppies and a built in monochrome screen.

      Just because it was your worst PC doesn't mean it was one of the worst machines. When it was made 48k was pretty good (16k used to be enough), monochrome and floppies was pretty much the standard issue for a buisness computer. There really weren't a lot of higher end options without taking a HUGE jump in price, and that mostly bought you speed, certainly not color and multimedia. Heck, the TRS-80 was one of "the" sta

  • Amiga. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eddy ( 18759 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:28PM (#7537748) Homepage Journal

    Definitely missing the Amiga on that list. Chuck the "APPLE NEWTON MESSAGE PAD".

    IMHO

    • Re:Amiga. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tambo ( 310170 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:34PM (#7537781)
      Definitely missing the Amiga on that list.



      Yeah, you get the distinct sense that this is the author's "computers I've owned that I thought were k-rad" list. It's a wee bit lacking in objectivity.



      - David Stein

      • And Osborne-I a personal computer? What a joke. That machine was only used my professionals.
        • Methinks you need to study up on the definition of "personal computer". Its got nothing to do with who uses it, just that its generally meant for one user at a time, unlike mainframes, minicomputers, etc.

    • Re:Amiga. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pizzaman100 ( 588500 )
      Definitely missing the Amiga on that list. Chuck the "APPLE NEWTON MESSAGE PAD".

      Agreed. And they make a big deal about how the 1992 "Tandy Sensation" came with both sound and SVGA graphics. Yet the Amiga had both of those at least 5 years earlier. Also - "Sim City" came out on the Amiga before it came out on the C64 as the article states.

      Missing from the list:

      Amiga

      Atari ST

      Vic20

      Radio Shack TRS80 and CoCo

      • Re:Amiga. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by iJed ( 594606 )
        I think the NeXTcube was probably more influential than all of these systems. It was the first computer to trash the floppy drive, it had high-resolution display, the first good object-oriented environment, the first desktop unix, built in networking and many other things.
    • I don't think they mean the Newton Message Pad as such, but more PDA's in general. I think computers will get smaller and smaller in the future and perhaps some day we don't need a "personal computer" in the old sense. Just a little portable device that we can connect to a monitor, hook up external gear like keyboard and mouse (or whatever input devices that'll be used in the future). So the Newton Message Pad might be the most importand PC of all time in the future.

      I voted for Macintosh though.

      Ciryon

    • Re:Amiga. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BWJones ( 18351 )
      These rankings were a choice for significance to the marketshare rather than significance to history or the contribution of that system to development of personal computings technical advance. True, the Compaq case is an example of revolution in the field of reverse engineering in some ways (legal and technical), but reverse engineering an already "invented" product or concept is not as impressive to me as developing an all new paradigm. For instance, the Altair was certainly the first accessible programm
    • Absolutely. Pre-emptive multitasking and probably the best palette based 2D architecture to this day in 1985! Along with the Atari ST, these machines were massively popular in Europe, but not as much in the US which might have caused the author to overlook it.

      Commodores failure to sell the Amiga to the US consumer was almost criminal. Apparently IBM and Apple were genuinely scared when they saw the Amiga back in the mid-eighties, and were greatly relieved when they saw C= selling it as little more than a t
  • he is a journalist, not a fact checker.

  • Dissapointed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by millette ( 56354 ) <robin.millette@info> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:32PM (#7537764) Homepage Journal

    I was sure to find references to my goold old Timex Sinclair 1000 [oldcomputers.net], or even my Adam computer [xbox-scene.com], but no! I had to read about Compaq...

    Not even a word on the TI 99/4A [99er.net]. Guess I'll have to publish my own list. Actually, I had planned a long time to do a timeline of my computers, see how it respected moore's law. Guess there's no better time then right now to get started.

  • My 486sx (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Eberlin ( 570874 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:32PM (#7537765) Homepage
    With 210MB HD, 4MB RAM, and a whopping 25MHz chip. It ran DOS 6.22 and Win 3.1

    It made computing a VERY VERY personal experience and taught me patience and anger-management...and the first real appropriate usage of colorful 4-letter words.

    I will attest to that statement on the old Apple II machines and its BASIC interpreter, though. It did introduce me to programming. My favorite book at the time was something called "Kids and The Apple" which featured lots of BASIC code samples. If it were a list of the top 10 life-changing PCs, the old Apple II would get my vote as #1.

    • Re:My 486sx (Score:4, Interesting)

      by JayBlalock ( 635935 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:39PM (#7538520)
      Hey, I loved my 486. I started with a /33 in something like '91 and effectively taught myself computers on it. By the time it finally died (in truly spectacular fashion) four or five years later, every piece of equipment in that thing (besides the mobo) had been upgraded at least once and it actually spent more time with the hood off than on. And I had it tweaked and customized out the wazoo. I had, for example, an intricate system of argument-driven batch files worked out that let me do virtually anything from anywhere on the computer, and I had its memory management down to a fine art. (I had something like 605k of low DOS memory free even with a CD-ROM and SB-16 (and later a Gravis Ultrasound))

      I still wax fondly over that computer. I've gone through three since, and I've never had one that felt remotely as *mine* as that one had been. Windows 95+, I think, in bringing computers to the masses, really took away a lot of the ability to have intimate, detailed knowledge and control of every aspect of the computer. And I miss that.

      One of these days I need to start really learning Linux...

  • What about the New G5? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Snoobs ( 43421 )
    and the Xbox, PS2, and Sega Dreamcast running Linux?

  • Top 10 lists suck... (Score:5, Funny)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:36PM (#7537793) Homepage Journal

    Top Ten Reasons 'Top 10 Lists' Suck

    10. They usually list items that are still avertised in the meadium of the list. Top ten list of cars for example will never list the Edsel, the Durants or REOs. They will list Honda, Toyota and Fords.

    9. Most lists are usually geard to non-enthusiests. They will mention items that most people know about, and won't go too far to explain new, yet important, items.

    8. They are filled with lame items so that the list is ten items long.

    7. They are filled with duplicates that make the same point.

    6. They are filled with duplicated that appempt to make the same point.

    5. Top ten lists should really start at Nine and count down to Zero. Especially if they deal with computing or mathmatics.

    4. Top ten lists usually forget about the distant past - and only mention items that the reasership is familliar with. Like the list of important historical events that fails to mention items before 1950.

    3. Top ten lists get tiring by the seventh item.

    2. Top ten lists usually play for novelty - Like a car list wherer the 'flying car' [216.239.41.104] will get mentioned, but the first diesel-engine car won't, even though in the grand scheme of things, the diesel engine is more important - it's considered boreing.

    1.5 Some top ten lists will include another item, in order to appear to be cute.

    1. Most top 10 lists are lame excuses to try to get attention. Like this one.

  • Top 10 lists (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nuggz ( 69912 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:36PM (#7537795) Homepage
    Yes the Amiga should be on that list, the others, I don't really agree with.

    But you might be forgetting is this is someones list. It isn't the end all and be all of lists, go ahead make your own, write an article about it.

    I find it funny that so many people will get all riled up over what a single person wrote.

    • Re:Top 10 lists (Score:4, Informative)

      by bhtooefr ( 649901 ) <bhtooefr@bhtoo[ ].org ['efr' in gap]> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @04:16PM (#7538031) Homepage Journal
      10. Altair 8800
      The first, as MS would have you think. OK, so it was the first popular, and here's where it fits in the list.
      9. Quadra/Centris 610 DOS Card model
      A PC AND a Mac in the same case? Sweet!
      8. PowerMac 6100
      RISC for the masses... what else can I say?
      7. Outbound Portable
      The first Mac laptop, and one of the first legal Mac clones - kinda important, wouldn't you say?
      6. Laser 128 series
      The first fully legal Apple II clone.
      5. Compaq Portable
      The first IBM PC clone, and one of the first luggable IBM PCs.
      4. Macintosh
      GUI for the masses.
      3. Commodore 64
      Cheep! Cheep! Computing for the masses, however, I didn't like the emulators, and there's a shitload of bias here, m'kay?
      2. IBM PC
      The... IBM... PC... umm... DUH!
      1. Apple II
      The first modern computer. It could boot without any addins (to BASIC, however), but it's expansion capabilities are AMAZING - after all, CF, IDE, and 10Mb/s Ethernet cards are being made for it today.

  • Compaq luggable (Score:4, Interesting)

    by swtaarrs ( 640506 ) <swtaarrs@NosPAm.comcast.net> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:38PM (#7537805)
    I have an early Compaq portable, which, as stated in the article, is more correctly described as luggable for its size. It has an orange plasma screen and still runs dos very happily whenever I decide to boot it up. I have a speech recognition card for it that actually works very well, although it can only recognize pretrained words. It may be old, but it still works great and would be good if someone wants a cheap computer to learn programming.

  • So you're saying.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by filledwithloathing ( 635304 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:40PM (#7537817) Homepage Journal
    but his rankings confuse me. For instance, he includes 'hobby' computers such as the Altair, but excludes the Apple I and his ranking of the Compaq portable PC at number one ahead of the Altair, Apple I and II, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Interestingly, the author also skips other significant platforms entirely, such as the Amiga and Atari computers as well as skipping over the much more significant Tandy products, the TRS-80
    So you're saying this article sucks and is essentially useless. What a great reason to post this for discussion! Please suggest some more!

  • Certainly the Amiga and the Atari ST. First 32-bit computers generally available to the masses.

    But how on earth can you not include the Sinclair spectrum (1982)... Or in fact the ZX80/81. Obviously not an author from the UK....

    Simon.
    • Certainly the Amiga and the Atari ST. First 32-bit computers generally available to the masses.

      Uhm. The Amiga A1200, A4000, A4000T and CD32 were 32 bit. The other Amigas and the Atari ST were 16 bit computers. Right?

      Disclaimer: Some of the "box" Amigas (2000, 2500, 3000) could take 24 bit graphics cards, but they were still 16 bit internally
      • This one really is an old chestnut.

        Short answer: "It depends on your view". They all used the 68k series chips. Every member of that chip family was internally a 32-bit processor, doing 32-bit arithmetic in a single operation. Some chips had external databusses with only 16 (or in some cases 8) bits. The "ST" stood for "Sixteen Thirtytwo", showing it's 16-bit bus and 32-bit architecture.

        As far as I'm concerned, if you can hold a 32-bit memory pointer in a single register, manipulate it, and use it as an
      • the motorola 680x0 were 32bit chips. they had an external 16bit interface, but were 32bit inside.

        think 386sx, but designed in 1979.

        • the motorola 680x0 were 32bit chips. they had an external 16bit interface, but were 32bit inside.

          The first 680*0 with external 32 bits databus would be the 68020.
          If you combine a 68020 and a 68851 you get a 68030.
          An 68040 is a 68030 combined with an 68882 (FPU).
          Intel did the same trick with the 8088.
          A 8088 has an 8 bits external databus but is 16 bits internal.
          The predecessor of the 8088 is the 8086 which has a 16 bits databus external.
          With other words, a 8088 is a low budget 8086.
      • He's also wrong in claiming they were the first 32 bit systems available. I hate articles like this because nobody ever mentions any computers from outside of the United States.

        The Amiga 1200 was launched in December 1992 [emugaming.com] but before that a British company called Acorn Computers [geocities.com] released the Archimedes range of computers, the next generation after their 8 bit systems (Atom, BBC A/B/B+, Master, Master Compact). Starting with the A305, A310, A410 & A440 [machine-room.org] in mid 1989 these machines had 32bit ARM2 processors
        • The Acorn ruled supreme, at least for a short while in the late 1980's/early 1990's. Jealous PC owners where stuck with a DOS box or, worse, Windows 3.1 and slow 286's and 386's.

          Such a shame Acorn couldn't market themselves out of a paper bag. The computer world would be a lot different (and a lot better) right now if they had only taken the time to market their products better.

  • TRS-80 Model 100 (Score:2, Informative)

    by ezavada ( 91752 )
    I may be misremembering, but I thought this portable came out even before the Osborne. It had a multi-line LCD display, ran off 4 "AA" batteries. They are so durable that many are still in use, and it weighed just a few pounds.

  • Something else he missed as well... (Score:5, Informative)

    by mikehunt ( 225807 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:48PM (#7537852)
    OK, so maybe the Sinclair ZX-80 and its brother the ZX-81 did not sell so well in the US, but the ZX-80 was an amazing machine at the time that was also supplied in kit form. This allowed a poor 13 year old like me to get a computer complete with BASIC for one penny less than 80 UKP which was a real breakthrough at the time.

    All the time I lusted after an Apple II, but at well over 300 UKP it was impossible. When the Sinclair machine arrived, I had to wait 10 weeks before it turned up, but after an evening's soldering I had a working machine. Sinclair's lovely quote that you could "Run a nuclear power station with the ZX-80" were well far-fetched with the 1K (!) of RAM, but thanks to tokenising the basic on input, you could actually squeeze a lot more program than you could imagine into it. Oh, did I say that your video RAM was also included in that 1K?

    The fact that you could not display output on your TV when the program was running, only at an input prompt or program stop was the best reason in the world to learn assembler for the Sinclair's Z80 processor and this limitation was soon removed by the large user community.

    There's still some really strange/dedicated (delete as applicable) Germans running a users club at the ZX-TEAM-Homepage [zx81.de]

    It was an influential machine and got a lot of young people interested in programming. It should really be somewhere there on the list.
    • 1K for your main AND VRAM? Damn, we Apple II users were lucky - 1K VRAM standard, 64K standard on the Apple IIe (as little as 4K on the Apple ][, 16 on the ][+, and up to 48K normal or 64K with the Language Card on both models), and with the 80 column card, it either had 1K additional VRAM or 64K additional RAM, 1 of which was VRAM...
      • "Run a nuclear power station with the ZX-80" were well far-fetched with the 1K (!) of RAM...

      I bet a lot of nuclear power stations were run with far more primitive computers.

  • Tandy CoCo!!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by J_Omega ( 709711 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:50PM (#7537868)
    I was fortunate enough to have gotten a Tandy Color Computer (CoCo) as a youngin'.
    It had a whopping 16k, we had it modded to 32k after a while! Eventually replaced with a CoCo 3

    I learned a ton on that little monster!

    • I had the CoCo 1 with its chicklet keyboard :) A Whopping 4K we exapanded to 16K then 64K. I had 2 coco 2's and a coco 3. Had added the color monitor circuit and added disk drives modem....god i miss those innocent days. Even had OS/9 for it and the damn machine would multi-task (true) when nothing basically would. Man oh man. I remeber getting it and typing in basic programs and having to leave the damn thing on for days or weeks cause i didnt have the cassette recorder option yet. Came with a great
    • You bought Rainbow on tape? OMG, I'm so jealous. I used to sit and type in all of those myself. What was worse, when the bulk of the code was in HEX. It was hours of data-entry, and you hoped you didn't put in typos (check-sums rocked!) 'Course, occasionally you needed to wait till the next month for any misprints.

      When I got the CoCo 3, I only had one diskdrive, but two cartridge controllers. If you could hold the cartridge in tightly, you could pull out the ribbon and switch it to the other machine!

  • Other Items for Consideration (Score:5, Interesting)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:50PM (#7537871) Homepage Journal


    TRS-80 Model I/III - these affordable computers were the first to have inexpensive networking. They had a multiplexer device avaiable (think hub) that workied through the casette port - one computer could 'save' to another 'loading' computer. Cheap, by clever, flie-level networking for the masses

    C-64/TI-99/VIC-20/ATARI 400(800) - The fist mas market computers that broght comuting to people who were more interested in the applications (word-processing and gams) then the computers themselves.

    TRS-80 PC-2/SHARP ??? - the first pocket computers, they had a BASIC interpreter and could do normal computing functions and yet fit in your pocket. Link here [obsoleteco...museum.org]. The precursors to PDA and 'smart phones'

    TRS-80 Model 100 (Kerocera ???) - the first popular laptops.

    ATARI ST/AMIGA 1000 - the first true 'multimedia' computers that broght music composition via computers to the masses.

    SETI&Home Project - the first virtual supercomputer.

    .

  • PDP-1, LINC, ALTO, Dartmouth BASIC etc. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dpbsmith ( 263124 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:51PM (#7537873) Homepage
    I don't know how you rate "most popular." Since computer use has been exploding exponentially, if you do it by user head count, no computer that's more that a couple of years old would count.

    So, if you rate computers by their influence or by the affection they inspired, these really ought to be on the list:

    The PDP-1. I mean, the MIT hacker community used it to play video games (Spacewar! and Flight Simulator), do word processing (Expensive Typewriter, TECO, and TJ-2), play music (Pete Samson's harmony compiler), etc.

    The LINC. The Computer Museum designated this as "the first personal computer." It was a tabletop unit, not floorstanding, and pioneered the first diskette-like storage (the LINCtape stored about 700 half-kilobyte blocks with random access and rewrite-in-place; effectively, a linear diskette with fractional-minute seek time). It was a 12-bit computer, probably the shortest word length ever used before microprocessors.

    The Xerox Alto. First WYSIWYG word processor. First compound-document (mixed words and graphics word processor). First "object-oriented" drawing program. First bitmap-editing painting program. Ethernet and local area networking. One user, one computer. I mean, every significant concept in modern-day personal computing was there.

    The Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system. If we ARE talking user head counts--adjusted for exponential growth--the Dartmouth BASIC time-sharing system has to be way up there. How many people used it? How many peole first got the idea that computers should be a working tool for ordinary people by using it? Where did people get the idea that they wanted their own computer, and why they wanted it--so that they could run their own BASIC programs. Hey, how would Bill Gates have known what to write in 1974 if Dartmouth BASIC hadn't been there first?
    • I never saw a PDP-1, but Heathkit used to sell PDP-11 clones, and the PDP-11 was one of the stars of Ted Nelson's book "Computer Lib."

      I learned how to program on a PDP-10, which was sometimes called a DecSystems 10. I started in basic, and then jumped to algol.

      From the old days a Kim-1 (? I think that's the name) single board computer taught a lot of people how to program in machine code, and I still remember flipping toggle switches on an IMSAI.

      The IMSAI was kind of cool -- we had one in school. You'd
    • Yeah, except your examples (save the LINC, which I am not familiar with), are hardly personal computers, which the article was about.

  • I don't see how... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by instantkarma1 ( 234104 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:51PM (#7537874)
    the original 128k Macintosh is not listed as #1. Don't get me wrong, it's high on the list, which is good. But this list is sort of like having a Top Ten Rock & Roll Bands List, with the Beatles beaten out by Bruce Springsteen . The original Mac was the 800lb Gorilla, who's presence is still felt today (at least in terms of every computer use by the masses). Love it or hate it, it basically defined the User Experience still in use today.

    And dammit, where is my TRS-80?

    • Re:I don't see how... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ConceptJunkie ( 24823 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @04:36PM (#7538141) Homepage Journal
      Agreed. What's the point of mentioning Dell's first computer. The article even admits no one's ever heard of it.

      Bzzzzzt! Not influential, regardless of who made it.

      I totally agree about the original Mac, as well as the TRS-80 and the Amiga.

      Hell, even the Lisa could be a candidate. I have fond memories of the fact that you had to dismantle the thing to retrieve the floppy when it froze up.

  • Thank you Microsoft! (Score:3, Funny)

    by alvi ( 95437 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:51PM (#7537875) Homepage
    From the article: 5. MITS ALTAIR 8800

    >...but it ultimately gave birth to Microsoft, which helped make PCs available to the masses.

    Ah, *that* was the missing link! Finally I am enlightened on how this all happened. My own memory of these things was far messier, until now. I'm glad that history isn't that complicated after all.

    Thank you Microsoft! Thank you Mr. Silverman for enlightening me!

  • IMSAI 8080 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by anubi ( 640541 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:51PM (#7537880) Journal
    That was my "first one". I kept looking at the Altair ( which the IMSAI was kinda a "clone" of ) but was quite unhappy with its design - especially around the power supply and mechanical details. The IMSAI, in my mind, had covered those bases. It had something like a 30 AMP 8-volt power supply which was regulated down to 5 volts on each S-100 card.. I think it would house something like 21 cards on the backplane. The console interface was an array of switches for its 16-bit address and 8-bit data busses, and corresponding rows of LED's to indicate which address and data were currently being executed. During "operation", the LED's were just a blur, but at any time you could drop down and single step the processor from a switch on the front panel.

    I loved this one as I made many of the cards for it... cards which would do really weird things like interface to gas turbines, as I had some projects back then which involved large heavy machinery, and it occured to me that I could program one of these machines to act like a gas turbine, and allow me to check out all the logic of a Gas Turbine Controller without having to power up an actual gas turbine, that is I could read the fuel injector signals, generate a corresponding RPM signal, mimic fuel failure signals, vibration signals, etc. I remember how weird it seemed sitting in the control room of the turbine control room, with the entire room aglow with all sorts of displays indicating the turbine running full power, yet the turbine just down the hall was dead quiet as it was undergoing replacement of its blades.

    It was my first taste of having my own programmable device that I understood intimately... and I still have it, albeit I have not used it in years... as I use several old ISA PC's to do this now... ( I like my old Borland 3 C++ compiler for DOS way too much.. it does exactly what I want it to do, and is much quicker for me to get something done than coding in 8080 assembler. And hell, I don't want GUI or its assorted bloatware just to do quickie process simulations. )

  • UK Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cybertect ( 85900 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:53PM (#7537888) Homepage
    In the UK, you'd have to at least consider the inclusion of the Sinclair ZX80/81 and the BBC computer [nvg.ntnu.no] from the early 80s. Both were affordable, came with BASIC built in and introduced people to the idea of having a computer in their homes - I was particularly fond of BBC basic which, like many others of my generation, gave me my first programming experience.

    • Re:UK Perspective (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Aardpig ( 622459 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @04:09PM (#7537975)

      ...and lets not forget that the successor to the BBC, the Acorn Archimedes [old-computers.com], was the first-ever RISC-based home computer, despite claims that Apple make to the contrary regarding their PPC machines. The Archimeded' innovative RiscOS operating system introduced the task bar, a design we now see ripped off in Microsoft Windows. Furthermore, it was BillG himself, when shown a demonstration of Acorn's low-cost networking setup (Econet), who commented that the idea of linking computers together "wouldn't catch on".

      • and of course, the Archimedes' RISC processor, the Archimedes RISC Machine, or ARM, is very much still in existence. It's one of the most widely used embedded processors.

  • They forgot one... (Score:4, Funny)

    by smoondog ( 85133 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @03:57PM (#7537909)
    What no PCjr? Brilliant marketing move all around...

    -Sean
  • First cheap IBM PC clone should get a look-in, surely?
  • It should really be renamed the "the top 10 personal computers of all time in the US".

  • Longevity (Score:5, Insightful)

    by singularity ( 2031 ) * <.nowalmart. .at. .gmail.com.> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @04:04PM (#7537952) Homepage Journal
    I emailed someone last night who had brought up some of the history of Apple Computer. They made the statement that the Apple //e lasted in Apple's catalog well into the late 80's.

    I had to correct him - I remembered seeing seeing an Apple catalog listing both the original Powerbook Duo 210 and the Apple //e (this would be early 90's).

    As it turns out, the Apple //e was originally released in January 1983 and was finally discontinued in March of 1995!

    The computer, with only a few minor revisions, was sold for over twelve years.

    In addition, I was sorry to see that the original iMac did not make the list.

    • Re:Longevity (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:12PM (#7538370) Homepage Journal
      I too think iMac should have gotten strong consideration. There were practically NO USB devices until it came out. Sure, every computer sold had USB ports but few used them. Once Jobs announced a simple machine with few ports and almost no other expandability, companies started pumping USB products out almost at the same time.

      And no, I don't own an Apple product of any kind, but I think credit should go where it is due.

  • Revisionist history (Score:5, Informative)

    by badasscat ( 563442 ) <basscadet75NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @04:28PM (#7538101)
    For instance, he includes 'hobby' computers such as the Altair, but excludes the Apple I and his ranking of the Compaq portable PC at number one ahead of the Altair, Apple I and II, Apple Lisa and Macintosh. Interestingly, the author also skips other significant platforms entirely, such as the Amiga and Atari computers

    I'm going to play devil's advocate to the prevailing sentiment here a little bit. I'm old enough to remember well the days of the C64, Vic-20, Apple I and II and later the Amiga and Atari XL and ST line (and the straight numbered PC's before them). I remember the industry well in those days, and hell, we had two Atari 520ST's and one Atari 1040ST in my house (I also owned an Apple II and had many friends who owned C64's as well as at least one that owned an Amiga 500).

    But the Atari line specifically were not particularly popular computers and they did not have a particularly profound effect on the industry as a whole. Worse, Atari's PC's dropped in popularity pretty linearly with each successive release - the Atari 400 and 800 were fairly major players at first, but as the XL/XE line and then the ST's took over, Atari's influence waned further and further. The ST's did have some nice sound hardware (and were popular with audio professionals) that may have influenced what would eventually become standard in some PC's but otherwise they were basically ignored by average consumers as well as businesses.

    The Amiga was ahead of its time - and probably should be on a list like this - but again, it all depends on your criteria. Commercially, the Amiga was a collossal failure that directly contributed to the downfall of Commodore Computers. There are arguments you could make in favor of having it on a top ten list like this, but you'd have to have a pretty loose criteria to include a computer family like the Amiga on the same list as the IBM 5150 - the 5150 being the direct grandfather of about 90% of the world's PC's today, almost 25 years after it was introduced. The Amiga, while still having a cult following, is not even in the same universe in terms of influence or popularity.

    As for the Apple I, I don't think even Wozniak and Jobs would really argue it belongs on this sort of list. Only several hundred were made and while it was an important PC to the Apple company just in terms of being their first released product, as a computer taken on its own merits it was not at all important. I mean it's about like arguing Orson Welles' first home movie in high school is as important as Citizen Kane - it frankly and simply is not. Same goes for the Apple Lisa (the largely experimental precursor to the Mac that shares less with the Mac platform than many people seem to believe).

    So I don't know; lists like these are pretty much intended to provoke debate through their commissions and omissions (in fact, the writer even says "Of course, there will be grousing with the choices here, and certainly with the order, but that's what makes lists fun"), and there may be different PC's that should or should not be here, but I can see his reasons for not including many of the PC's listed in the article submission.

    It seems to me like what this writer did was look at each loose "era" of personal computing - the hobbyist era, the "wild west" era when there were a large variety of low-cost and popular PC options, and the post-IBM PC era when most consumer PC's became largely based on the 5150 design. He then included 3 or 4 PC's from each era on his list, and these all happen to be basically the most popular or important PC's of each era (with one or two exceptions). That's really as good a criteria as any, I think.

    • Re:Revisionist history (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sunspot42 ( 455706 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:16PM (#7538733)
      >It seems to me like what this writer did was look at
      >each loose "era" of personal computing . . . He then
      >included 3 or 4 PC's from each era on his list . . .

      I don't think it's clear WHAT criteria the author used to compile his silly list, and I think that's the #1 problem with his list. Was it sales? Well, the average Dell Latitude model today probably outsells the original Mac, because the market for personal computers is so much larger today. So sales isn't the whole story.

      He says he's ranking the most "important" PCs, but I don't even remember some of those systems. The "Tandy Sensation" at #8? What the hell was *that*? A 1992 release, he claims it showed other PC makers, "how multimedia should be done", but the Mindset PC had already taken a stab at that in the PC market back around 1983. The Amiga and Atari ST were certainly showing how multimedia could work on the desktop, and had both been doing so for around 7 years at that point. And of course there were the Macs, which started shipping with CD-ROM drives as standard equipment long before PC's did. I don't think the clone market looked to Tandy's system at all as some kind of standard - I think they were all chasing the Mac. As usual. And I say this as someone who has never owned a Mac, but let's be real here - whatever Apple is doing today with their hardware and interface, you can almost bet the PC will be doing in a year. Or two. Or three . . .

      As for Compaq's portable being the "most important" PC ever - what a joke! It may have been the first copy of the IBM PC, but the PC would have been cloned by somebody (probably many somebodies) eventually, anyhow. It's not like nobody had heard of reverse engineering in 1983. If Compaq hadn't done it, Japan, Inc. would have. The Compaq portable is probably one of the "most important" developments in the *IBM* PC & compatible market, but from an end-user's perspective on the personal computer as a tool, it really doesn't matter anymore what brand of box you're running so long as it accomplishes the job you've set out to do. And today's personal computers pretty much all operate alike regardless of what brand is stamped on the front of the box or the chips inside. You can thank a personal computer company for that development alright, but it ain't Compaq.

      The user survey accompanying the article reflects that point of view perfectly. Currently, the Mac, Apple // and Commodore 64 are ranked 1, 2 and 3, with 35%, 24% and 21% of the vote, respectively. I think that's a very sensible ranking of the options the author gave in his top-10 list. Obviously, the Wintel PC that so dominates the market today is essentially a glorified, hopped up Mac-emulator. The interface bears zero relation to the way the PC originally worked, but any Mac user from 1984 could fire up one of today's PC's and be on their way in a matter of minutes. And yes, I know Apple stole the Mac interface from Xerox, but it's not like Xerox was going to do anything with it. They developed scads of tech they weren't able to successfully commercialize. Pity, that.

      As for the Apple // and the C-64, the // was the first computer to sell in significant numbers, proving there was some kind of market for these costly devices, while the C-64 proved there was truly a mass-market for the personal computer - including in the home - and that entertainment applications (particularly videogames) were just as appealing on PCs as they were on dedicated consoles. The C-64 also introduced a useable PC to tens of millions of people who would have never had the opportunity to lay their hands on a pricey Apple or IBM system. I think the C-64 was a very weak sister to Atari's 8-bit computers, which were far better designed and built, but it certainly won the price and marketshare battle. You can bet a lot of folks learned something from that lesson - dominate the market first or potentially not at all

  • Commodore 64's operating system (Score:5, Informative)

    by tachyonflow ( 539926 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @04:34PM (#7538132) Homepage
    Can't... resist... urge... to... nitpick... (as a total Commodore 64 geek...)

    You could either write your own software in the BASIC programming language, which was the C-64's operating system, or select from titles ranging from surprisingly powerful business software to games.
    The Commodore 64's operating system was not BASIC. The OS was a piece of code referred to simply as the Kernel. It was on ROM in the memory areas from $E000 to $FFFF. The BASIC interpreter (which was located in ROM at $A000 - $BFFF) used the Kernel for I/O and other operating system type stuff. In the later years, GEOS became popular, which was its own operating system and superceded the built-in ROM kernel.

    BASIC was essentially the UI you got when you powered on the machine, though, and that's probably what the article author was talking about.

    • Re:Commodore 64's operating system (Score:5, Informative)

      by WWWWolf ( 2428 ) <wwwwolf@iki.fi> on Saturday November 22, 2003 @05:54PM (#7538616) Homepage

      Nitpick on nitpick: The thing was actually called "kernal", not "kernel". That's how it's officially referred as, believe it or not. Kernal ROM. I am guessing that it originated as a typoed term, and they later explained that it actually was an acronym for "Keyboard Entry Read, Network And Link". (Source for this trivia here [funet.fi].) No idea why they put "network" there though =)

      And GEOS was not the only program that implemented its own I/O routines. Every turboloader did this...

      The article completely omits the fact that you could program in assembly right out of the box - most people seemed to start by writing BASIC "loaders" that read the program from data statements and poked it to memory - also, many magazines published machine language programs in this format. There were commercial and hobbyist-built assemblers, crossassemblers (for Amiga and PC), and even interpreters/compilers for other languages (notably Logo and Pascal - I forgot the package that I once futilely used).

  • I think we've establish that a top 10 list for computers won't satisfy anyone. I'd say its not because the list is wrong, merely because there are so many important steps in the developement of the computer. I think a more relevant way of ranking importance would be a top ten list with honorable mentions at each step. This way, other significant advances can be recognized.
  • Jeeze, how could he forget NeXT? Display PS so what you had on the screen was what really printed out, an application development environment that is still one of the best +10 years later, excellent speed thanks to the DSP chip and an user interface to die for. I think they were also the first to ship with ethernet as standard equipment. Yes, no FD, the optical HD and price were a problem but still IMO it belong's in the top five.

  • Huh? (Score:2)

    by march ( 215947 ) *
    His inclusions are for the most part accurate, but his rankings confuse me.

    And then, BWJones goes on the rip the article apart.

    If it's so bad, why did you think /. readers would want to read it?

  • He never says anything like that in the article. It's his "Top Ten Most Important" computers. Way different than most popular. I was going to guess the original iMac based on the article header, but it was completely misleading. Bah.
  • I was a Systems Engineer for Tandy in 1992, when the "Sensation!" came out. I had completely, thoroughly forgotten about it until reading this article. Main reason is that it sold for crap! The Tandy 1000 I could see making a list of "Most Important" in that it was one of the first PC's to be truly accessible to the average consumer. It had the DeskMate operating environment built into ROM, which made it a lot easier for the average Joe (or Jane) to deal with.

    By the time the Sensation! came out, custom

  • Submitter Blew It (Score:3, Insightful)

    by reallocate ( 142797 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:24PM (#7538784)
    The article lists the personal computers the writer believes are the most "important". I.e., it's his opinion.

    Our hapless submitter changed that to most "popular", which is an entirely different thing, of course. And, easily determined by looking at sales records.

    I know /. has sworn off using editors, but at least the staff might try using their brains.

  • Ridiculous list (Score:4, Interesting)

    by mabu ( 178417 ) * on Saturday November 22, 2003 @06:40PM (#7538877)
    The article does not indicate the guy really was involved in the early days of computing - it seems he filled in the blanks based on research more than being out there in the field.

    I'm not sure what he means by "most important" - that's the caveat. "Most important" based on him browsing through advertisements in old issues of Byte magazine probably.

    Clearly, the TRS-80 should be among the list. It was the first successfully-marketed and mass-produced PC.

    The Kaypro should also be listed - it was more "important" than the Compaq portable. Though I still have a Compaq portable III with the gas plasma display in a closet somewhere - that was an innovative computer for the time, but it was following in the footsteps of the Kaypro and earlier portables. NEC, from my memory came out with the first mass-produced computer that would be considered a "laptop" - I had one of those as well. I forget the name - but it's worthy of the list.

    The Compaq worthy of mention in the list would be the Compaq 386 - the first at the time to take advantage of the faster processor - ahead of IBM.

    I would also note that the TRS80 Model II was the first mass-produced PC that was geared for hard core business use, even though it didn't do well (and there were others like Cromemco that were popular - not sure if those were legiti microcomputers or minis - my memory isn't what is used to be).

    Other notable mentions: Timex/Sinclair - the first ultra-cheap, bare bones PC; the Texas Instruments TI99/4a, the Commodore Pet, Tandy Color Computer, and probably many more I'm forgetting.

  • Poor article - so many obvious omissions (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rklrkl ( 554527 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @08:02PM (#7539306) Homepage
    I can't believe how poor this article is - if we're talking about the long-lamented variety of home PCs that cropped up in the 80's, then these are obvious ones in no particular order (look, none of them have Intel processors or run DOS/Windows !):
    • Commodore Pet
    • Tandy TRS-80
    • Sinclair ZX80/ZX81/ZX Spectrum (shoddy, but incredibly popular and brought home computer to the UK masses)
    • Commodore Vic 20
    • BBC [Acorn] Model B (the world's finest 8-bit micro and dominated UK education in the 80's)
    • Commodore Amiga
    • Atari 520 ST
    • Acorn Archimedes (arguably the best home PC OS of the 80's anywhere in the world)

    Strangely, although RISC OS limped on to this millennium [along with a much-changed AmigaOS], home PC OS'es have commoditised down to Windows vs. UNIX (Linux/*BSD/Mac OS X) with no other OS'es even getting a look in. Ditto with the hardware, which is basically Intel/AMD vs. Power PC.

  • Count me as another "Amiga Missing"... (Score:3)

    by OneFix ( 18661 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @10:35PM (#7539986)
    I used to be a full-blown /\miga Fanatic... I was eventually forced to switch to a PeeCee after C= died and it wqaqs obvious that there would not be another Amiga (still have my Amiga 2000).

    But imagine my frustration when I switched from a 14MHz Amiga to a Pentium 166 MMX (best at the time)...

    Switching from a Realtime OS with a *NIX style CLI to a POS (M$ Win*) was a major problem for me. I had become used to the system responding at my command (something I enjoyed after having to deal with my first computer...a C= 64) and using the many advantages of the *NIX command line...

    Of course, Linux now has the new preempt patch in the 2.6 kernel which makes me extremely happy...

  • 1981... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lodragandraoidh ( 639696 ) on Saturday November 22, 2003 @10:49PM (#7540048) Journal
    I was running a TI-99a in 1981 - and I consider it a more common machine than the Osborne (which I never saw or heard about until the 1990s).

    Where is the Atari? The Atari 800XL was an awsome machine - on par with the Commodore 64. After learning basic on the TI-99, I later used the Atari to learn machine level programming, poking and peeking (or was it push and pop?)my way into the guts of the beast.

  • My own top 5 list (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Sunday November 23, 2003 @03:40AM (#7541009) Homepage Journal
    • At number 1 is the Apple II. This computer really allowed the US domestic home computer to exist. The IBM PC would never have taken off, except in industry, if the Apple II hadn't introduced home computing.
    • Number 2 is the Sinclair ZX-81. From a technical standpoint, it was junk. From a social standpoint, it did to the UK what the Apple II did to the US.
    • Number 3 is the BBC Microcomputer. Multiple on-screen resolutions, 4-channel sound system with envelope generator, memory bank-switching, affordable disk drives, computer-aided learning software, more ports than the California coast, and support for a second processor... And this was 1984! In Britain, it introduced REAL General Purpose computing.
    • At 4, is the Research Machines line of PCs. They'd built what were essentially Slot-1 systems with local busses going to the different systems, before the rest of the industry even knew what there were. Way ahead of their time, though their marketing was carp.
    • Number 5 - the Tandy TRS-80. Sure, it couldn't do much. Sure, it was, in many ways, junk. But just as sure is the fact that many people learned about computers on one of these.

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