The IBM PC Turns 40 (theregister.com) 117
The Register's Richard Speed commemorates the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM Model 5150: IBM was famously late to the game when the Model 5150 (or IBM PC) put in an appearance. The likes of Commodore and Apple pretty much dominated the microcomputer world as the 1970s came to a close and the 1980s began. Big Blue, on the other hand, was better known for its sober, business-orientated products and its eyewatering price tags. However, as its customers began eying Apple products, IBM lumbered toward the market, creating a working group that could dispense with the traditional epic lead-times of Big Blue and take a more agile approach. A choice made was to use off-the-shelf hardware and software and adopt an open architecture. A significant choice, as things turned out.
Intel's 8088 was selected over the competition (including IBM's own RISC processor) and famously, Microsoft was tapped to provide PC DOS as well as BASIC that was included in the ROM. So this marks the 40th anniversary of PC DOS, aka MS-DOS, too. You can find Microsoft's old MS-DOS source code here. The basic price for the 5150 was $1,565, with a fully loaded system rising to more than $3,000. Users could enjoy high resolution monochrome text via the MDA card or some low resolution graphics (and vaguely nauseating colors) through a CGA card (which could be installed simultaneously.) RAM landed in 16 or 64kB flavors and could be upgraded to 256kB while the Intel 8088 CPU chugged along at 4.77 MHz.
Storage came courtesy of up to two 5.25" floppy disks, and the ability to attach a cassette recorder -- an option swiftly stripped from later models. There was no hard disk, and adding one presented a problem for users with deep enough pockets: the motherboard and software didn't support it and the power supply was a bit weedy. IBM would resolve this as the PC evolved. Importantly, the motherboard also included slots for expansion, which eventually became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus as the IBM PC clone sector exploded. IBM's approach resulted in an immense market for expansion cards and third party software. While the Model 5150 "sold like hotcakes," Speed notes that it was eventually discontinued in 1987.
Intel's 8088 was selected over the competition (including IBM's own RISC processor) and famously, Microsoft was tapped to provide PC DOS as well as BASIC that was included in the ROM. So this marks the 40th anniversary of PC DOS, aka MS-DOS, too. You can find Microsoft's old MS-DOS source code here. The basic price for the 5150 was $1,565, with a fully loaded system rising to more than $3,000. Users could enjoy high resolution monochrome text via the MDA card or some low resolution graphics (and vaguely nauseating colors) through a CGA card (which could be installed simultaneously.) RAM landed in 16 or 64kB flavors and could be upgraded to 256kB while the Intel 8088 CPU chugged along at 4.77 MHz.
Storage came courtesy of up to two 5.25" floppy disks, and the ability to attach a cassette recorder -- an option swiftly stripped from later models. There was no hard disk, and adding one presented a problem for users with deep enough pockets: the motherboard and software didn't support it and the power supply was a bit weedy. IBM would resolve this as the PC evolved. Importantly, the motherboard also included slots for expansion, which eventually became known as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus as the IBM PC clone sector exploded. IBM's approach resulted in an immense market for expansion cards and third party software. While the Model 5150 "sold like hotcakes," Speed notes that it was eventually discontinued in 1987.
The personal computer revolution (Score:4, Insightful)
... started 50 years ago - gave people full control over their computing activities. ... died 15 years ago - control is now squarely back in the hands of gigantic corporations out to shaft the users.
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Re:The personal computer revolution (Score:4, Insightful)
>"control is now squarely back in the hands of gigantic corporations out to shaft the users."
That completely depends on what you CHOOSE to use. If you choose to use MS-Windows, MacOS, or ChromeOS, then yes. If you choose to use Linux and associated FOSS like Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, X, etc, then no.
Choosing the path of FOSS certainly isn't without its own set of challenges. But if you value your freedom and privacy, then you can weigh those just as high as any other factors. And before someone says it isn't viable- my 76-year-old mother has used FOSS systems for decades, and at work I have hundreds of people who do, too.
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It literally does not matter what operating system you use. There is literally a CPU inside of your CPU running all of the shit that you don't want in your primary OS. Worse yet, it is remotely accessible wirelessly through the cell towers. It is just sitting there waiting for a ping from the cell network to activate.
Yeah, on a superficial level, running Linux or *BSD is useful, but ...
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>"It literally does not matter what operating system you use. There is literally a CPU inside of your CPU running all of the shit that you don't want in your primary OS. "
That depends on which CPU and what OS and what settings.
>"Worse yet, it is remotely accessible wirelessly through the cell towers."
That is not true of a desktop or most laptops. Perhaps a phone. Yes, phones are far more problematic when it comes to having control.
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That is not true of a desktop or most laptops.
LOL. Someone wasn't paying attention over a decade ago when it was discovered that Intel was embedding 3g modems in all of their CPUs. Nobody has ever claimed AMD does it, but I would be shocked to find out they don't include modems in their chips. It is such an NSA thing to do.
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>"LOL. Someone wasn't paying attention over a decade ago when it was discovered that Intel was embedding 3g modems in all of their CPUs. Nobody has ever claimed AMD does it, but I would be shocked to find out they don't include modems in their chips. It is such an NSA thing to do."
Some Intel chipsets might have support for a cell modem, but that doesn't mean the motherboard has it connected to the necessary circuitry to actually use it. At a very minimum, it would at least require an antenna. I can't f
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And so another generation gets to relearn. *sigh* Your userid is low enough that you should have been awake and aware when the 3g modem bomb dropped. Such things are quickly forgotten.
A person (NSA?) can contact the IME (Intel Management Engine) running in your CPU unless you have built a Faraday cage around it. The IME can examine everything inside of your computer without disrupting (perceptibly) the OS that you are running. This was supposedly for "Lost item" tracking by corporations, but I have yet to s
Re:The personal computer revolution (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Then add total mobility in the form of multiple options of devices and any geographical point to achieve this access from... You cannot accomplish this without somebody knowing, needing to know who or where you are"
There certainly is some truth to this. But privacy/freedom isn't an on/off switch, it is more like a dimmer. You can still be "connected" and yet take lots of measures to protect your privacy and freedom. Encryption, running your own mail server or IM server (or using one you trust from a non-huge corporation), having control of the OS and apps you use, changing settings to not track, no location services, maybe using a VPN, etc.
It would be a fallacy to resign that just because some aspects are less under your control than others, that giving up all control has the same result. Yet I hear that all the time. Along with the oh-so-tiring "I have nothing to hide" statement.
Re:The personal computer revolution (Score:4, Insightful)
People have lost the ability to understand statistics and assess risk. That's why we get such alarmists posts. We have more control than we've ever had, and even in this mythical past of complete freedom there was always another party we didn't control. e.g. BBS, school/work mainframe, etc.
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People have lost the ability to understand statistics and assess risk. That's why we get such alarmists posts. We have more control than we've ever had, and even in this mythical past of complete freedom there was always another party we didn't control. e.g. BBS, school/work mainframe, etc.
All platforms with administrators, operators, moderators who all had access to the end user's data. Yet people accepted that "privacy" included that risk of presence. And all became a target of criticism as the "privacy" agreement applied to some users but not to others.
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We have both more and less control than we have ever had.
In early days of the modern computer (no rows of switches on the front panel, just load a program from media and go stuff) you either knew what was running on your hardware or you were infected with a virus, there was no in between. Today there's multitudes of processes running on our computers and few professionals even know what all is running on their machine.
The office is still dominated by Microsoft formats and applications. Graphics is still dom
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Controlled? Really? (Score:2)
'control is now squarely back in the hands of gigantic corporations out to shaft the users'
Only someone who wasn't the user of old style mainframe programs would make a comment as ignorant as that. The reality is that Windows offers minimal control, and the range and variety of things one can do from its desktop does not constitute 'controlled',
**
I've told you a billion times not to exaggerate...
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Clearly, you've not tried e.g. Linux with e.g. KDE.
On my system, modifying any program, even its code, or even a kernel patch, is a trivial thing. (Essentially: Prepare installing the (source) package, go to the location the files were unpacked to, duplicate the directory, modify the duplicate, create a patch file with `diff`, put the patch file into a special directory where the package manager will pick it up in the future too, delete the unmodified duplicate directory, continue installing the package, le
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On my system, modifying any program, even its code, or even a kernel patch, is a trivial thing.
It is only really a "trivial thing" if the average person can do it without help. Since you call it trivial I will assume you aren't the average person/user of a Linux system or a PC in general. I highly doubt there is more than maybe 10% of the Linux using community that can "modifying any program, even its code, or even a kernel patch".
Obviously (Score:1)
Boys like to play with their toys. I'm with you; why bother!
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Dogs can watch television without necessarily understanding what the pictures mean.
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... started 50 years ago - gave people full control over their computing activities. ... died 15 years ago - control is now squarely back in the hands of gigantic corporations out to shaft the users.
If you only want to do what you could do on your pre-Internet PC, you still have that choice, with exactly as much control as we had then. But connectivity is important enough to most of us that we are willing to make controversial tradeoffs.
Forty years ago, you were stuck with expensive cable TV and expensive landline phone service. You had to choose which newspaper you wanted to subscribe to, having your access to daily information subject to the sociopolitical whims of the most powerful family in town. W
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When you needed to look something up, you had to drive to the library.
What self respecting household in the 70's-80's didn't have a nice collection of encyclopedia books? No need to drive to the library.
8^)
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My Internet connection to my home cost me $85 every month. I forget what my speeds are, but if I wanted to pay $20 more, I could have gb speeds, but I already don't need my current speeds so why pay more?
I don't consider $85 all that cheap. I would love to pay half as much for half as much speed but of course my ISP has made sure the bottom tier is insufferably unusable for anything but email and web browsing.
I've been tempted to drop my ISP altogether and just go 100% wireless with my cell carrier. The spe
Re:The personal computer revolution (Score:5, Interesting)
No its not. You can still do what you want with your PC. Still install Linux. Still play with compiled from source code yourself. The power is yours.
The fact that users voluntarily choose to go to a few large companies for convenience in exchange for control doesn't mean anyone is being shafted.
You do you, and stop dictating how other people should use their PCs.
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> few large companies for convenience in exchange for control doesn't mean anyone is being shafted.
Tell that bullshit to this woman [wccftech.com], this guy [wccftech.com] or this [microsoft.com] person.
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I see your links to three idiots voluntarily selling themselves out to Microsoft. They have the option to install Linux just like you do.
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Microshaft forced upgrades onto people. They don't respect people's time.
Are you even fucking reading the articles?
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I am. Are you following the discussion? Microsoft could come along and eat people's babies and it still doesn't change that people are voluntarily using Microsoft. They are free to install Linux and own their computers like everyeone else. I'm not sure what it is you don't understand about this concept.
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control is now squarely back in the hands of gigantic corporations out to shaft the users.
That's not true at all. It's only in their hands if you give it to them. I have more control my own PC than ever before thanks to open source software. Many have handed over the reins with "cloud computing" and "web apps" but it's entirely optional.
If you feel powerless it's because you have buyer's remorse after having given away your control.
Re:The [IBM] personal computer revolution (Score:2)
Not a bad FP. True and all that, but not so much directed to the topic of the story. Maybe you really object to IBM getting too much credit? I agree with what you say (though not so much on the timing), and yet...
My take is different. I see it more as a tragic failure like the end of the dinosaurs. At least you'd see it as a failure if you were one of the dinosaurs. The 360 project was kind of magnificent. But technology moved on, and IBM failed to evolve. Not so much a giant meteor strike as an entire stor
The likes of Commodore and Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah and Atari. With the 2600 and the whole A8 line they were an important part of the early home computer revolution.
That's what I started on thanks to my parents and their friends who had an Atari setup, and also encouraged my parents to send young me to a "computer camp" (yes those were a thing) which had Ataris.
Although my parents got me a VIC-20 for Christmas because we weren't rich. Thanks Mom and Dad!
Enough nostalgia, but let's not forget large players like Atari as part of the revolution.
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Yeah and Atari. With the 2600 and the whole A8 line they were an important part of the early home computer revolution. That's what I started on thanks to my parents and their friends who had an Atari setup, and also encouraged my parents to send young me to a "computer camp" (yes those were a thing) which had Ataris. Although my parents got me a VIC-20 for Christmas because we weren't rich. Thanks Mom and Dad!
Enough nostalgia, but let's not forget large players like Atari as part of the revolution.
Small nitpick, 2600 was the game system. Atari 400 and 800 were the PCs.
Had one of those, and a VIC_20 ... typing in BASIC programs from Compute magazine was the best ...
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Re: The likes of Commodore and Apple (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember this (Score:3)
Microsoft's BASICA was years behind e.g. BBC BASIC, PC-DOS was primitive in comparison to UniFLEX or OS-9. The amount of software available for CP/M was huge.
I definitely underestimated the power of a premium brand and marketing.
Re: I remember this (Score:3)
Well the government also required its contractors to use PC DOS formats on federal projects
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Well the government also required its contractors to use PC DOS formats on federal projects
At launch time in August 1981? Anyway, lobbying to government is just another form of marketing.
Also: the only country with "federal projects" in my neighborhood was West Germany, I was not aware of any US regulations (with the exception of the excessive EM shielding in American computers).
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Lobbying is also a form of treason in the form of bribery and conflicts of interest.
Quite literally. AFAIK it's still 20 years in prison, isn't it? The only difference was that is was not done in the open, as back then, it will still actually seen as a crime.
But then again, you are probably right, that that just makes it another form of marketing because all marketing is crime.
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EM shielding?
Not on a TRS-80 model I those things used to make AM radio die. They were probably being used as an anti-RADAR jamming system.
Re: I remember this (Score:4, Interesting)
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It had literally nothing to do with marketing. It was the open nature.
The IBM PC was not *that* open until the BIOS was clean-room reverse engineered by Columbia Data Products, Compaq, Cardiff Electric(*) and Phoenix.
Elektuur (a.k.a. Elektor Magazine) used to publish complete systems with schematics, PCB layouts and ROM listings, so there were more open (and more powerful) microcomputers around in the early 1980s.
In the end, it was also the "open nature" and the clones which killed the PC for IBM.
(*) just kidding...
Re: I remember this (Score:2)
Thatâ(TM)s funnyâ¦one of the first manuals I bought was the IBM PC Technical Manual which contained a listing of the BIOS (or was it just the entry pointsâ¦too long ago). IBM did produce great manuals.
However, I had no problem leveraging the BIOS in my apps.
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IBM would licence the use of the IBM BIOS and PC-DOS to (almost) anyone who wanted to make clones. It just cost too much. The later alternate BIOSes were cheaper.
>the PC was originally conceived that it would run CP/M,
CP/M-86 was available for IBM-PC but it was $250 vs $70 for IBM PC-DOS.
>with the only modifications likely being those needed to support the extra memory.
PC-DOS 1.x only supported 8080 mode programs as
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The BIOS was far worse than you are describing. You actually had to do TWO calls per character, which is literally twice as bad as I could imagine the stupidest person designing.
There was one call to change the character under the cursor. There was another call to move the cursor.
A single call that took a whole buffer of characters and put them on the screen and interpreted Escape sequences in them and was written with even a tiny bit of optimization was easily within the capabilities of software engineers
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Cardiff Electric(*) just kidding...
I remember that one, the "Cardiff Giant", though the "Giant Pro" was only "not bad". What was it that Joe MacMillan said, "Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets us to the thing."
Another "Halt and Catch Fire" fan, I see.
Cheap of the shelf parts (Score:2)
It had literally nothing to do with marketing. It was the open nature. Every company that failed to support open standards eventually failed in the PC market.
Yes, absolutely that!
IBM was late in the game. And as the summary mentions they needed to quickly come up with something to not be left in the dust: and thus quickly released something on the market by bashing together cheap of-the-shelf parts.
Meaning that any cloner could make a PC compatible by simply picking the same part out of the same metaphorical shelf. Initially the BIOS might have be a slight difficulty (it would have been a copyright violation to clone the same ROM content) but even there compatib
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That leaves one open quesion: There are open late-to-the-game phone manufacturers too. There were open computer manufacturers back then.
Why did they not succeed?
it can't be openness alone, or everyone would make parts for the Fairphone today.
Everyone is still making their own locked-down shit.
I guess IBM PCs were a bigger market than the Fairphone.
Imagine if Fairphone would become the official government phone for some larger union like the US or EU. That might kickstart it...
Anyone wanna suggest that to th
Re: Cheap of the shelf parts (Score:2)
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Re: I remember this (Score:2)
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Brand and marketing are important but they only get you so far. They give you a boost out the gate and some extra momentum should the proprietary wheels feel off. Enough of a boost at the beginning could turn those proprietary wheels into a standard (iPhone) and they stay bolted on. The boost after a late start just gives you momentum.
Re: I remember this (Score:2)
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Much of which was easily translated to MS-DOS. The IBM-PC was launched with Wordstar, Visicalc, dBase II, PeachTree, and various languages available on day 1.
The likes of (Score:4, Informative)
>"The likes of Commodore and Apple pretty much dominated the microcomputer world as the 1970s came to a close"
And Tandy/TRS-80, which was just as important and major at the time.
Re: The likes of (Score:2)
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>"The likes of Commodore and Apple pretty much dominated the microcomputer world as the 1970s came to a close"
And Tandy/TRS-80, which was just as important and major at the time.
TRS-80 was king in the schools. We were all going to be ushered into the future by playing Oregon Trail.
I had a 5150 (Score:3)
I got it used and late of course, because I was poor, but my first PC was the first PC. When I got it, it had a text card and 448kB RAM (64kB maxed out onboard; 384kB on an AST expansion card which also had a RTC.) I was able to run UUPC in this, though I came to uucp too late to get in the maps (when they were only really doing maintenance.) Back then a lot of PC software was still capable of running in that little memory, so long as you weren't blowing a bunch of it on TSRs. I upgraded to a Herc graphics card, and even played some games on it. When I got it, it had DOS 3.0 and Lotus 1.0 on it...
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Sadly, I didn't get involved in programming until much later in my life. This is kind of ironic because I was in BBBS and my BB was a programmer at Parallel Computing, I think he worked on some kind of collaborative editor back in the glass terminal days. His initials were GM if anyone recognizes this stuff and wonders if it was someone they knew, but anyway I have tinkered with twiddling other people's code all along (at least, since I got into Linux and had a toolchain) but didn't ever take a class in pro
Yes, but do you really need that much power? (Score:2)
This will certainly date me, but I remember buying this machine and then shortly after fellow programmers talking about the AT. The AT clocked in at a scorching 6Mhz. A fatherly senior position guy was telling me assuredly that no one would need that kind of power. No, the AT would be better employed as a server (whatever that was).
My two most vivid memories of the time (Score:3)
I was working at IBM as a co-op student at the time in "DP-IS" ("Data Processing - Information Systems") and I asked a second line manager manager in a "function meeting" around June/July about the rumours of the IBM "Personal Computer" and he told me (and everybody in the meeting) that IBM had no plans for a small computer like the Apple ][ or the Commodore. A number of the people in the meeting pointed out that IBM already had individual computers in the 7500 (which was for industrial uses) and the Display Writer (a word processor) - the 2nd line manager said that those products fit in with IBM's product strategy; what was being reported did not and, if it was, it would be the death of IBM.
The second memory was showing off the PC within IBM a couple of weeks later. Two were brought into the office and appointment times were set up when people could see demos. When I got to see the first units, there was one with a word processor application running. This wasn't as unimpressive as you might think because with the monochrome display and the ability to have brighter/darker text along with underlining and reverse text it had better capabilities than the IBM mainframe monochrome terminals at the time - 3177, 525x.
The second PC had its case taken off and a plexiglas cover was put over the unit so people could see what was inside. People were amazed at the complexity but I remember being underwhelmed because of all the empty sockets for expansion cards, the coprocessor and memory.
The 2nd line manager who told us why IBM would never produce a "Personal Computer' refused to go to the PC demonstration. There was a lot of talk about it and people thinking he was a horse's ass for not acknowledging he was wrong.
Re: My two most vivid memories of the time (Score:2)
Or, he was pissed because he wasnâ(TM)t important enough to be âoein the loopâ.
Hot cakes (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe off-topic, but I still wanted to share.
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The breakfast line much have been busy back whenever that phrase was made. I think scrambles and skillets and burritos are what people mainly go for these days.
Doesn't McDonald's call them hot cakes too?
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Just remember - 640KB (Score:2)
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It was actually 1MB.
640kB were just the lower memory. In upper memory there were the BIOS, graphics card memory, etc. Mostly mapped into memory if I remember correctly.
You could, and I did, move stuff from lower memory into there, to get more free RAM. It was regularly done for games, back then.
The coolest trick was disabling I think some old graphics memory for a unused mode, that was right above 640k. That way, you could get 720kB of lower memory!
Suddenly, you could run all your TSRs and stuff, PLUS your
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Besides memory-mapped screen buffers the big use of high memory was gaps of unused space between the buffers and between the last one and the end. They did not think one bit before designing this, any sensible design would have crammed toghether and overlapped as much memory mapping as possible. The color and monochrome buffers were in different places in memory so in the vast majority of cases only one was used but software had to avoid both, and the gap between them which was much bigger than either buffe
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Slashdot is making me feel young? Inconceivable (Score:2)
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It was too expensive for my family or even my neighborhood. We were all still using TI-99 or VIC-20 back then
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Regarding your sig: A machine is just a canned human preserve. It's not like the machine is a person of its own. :)
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Modern computers broke the link (Score:2)
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You sure about that? I just pulled up typical gamer motherboard out of curiosity and I'm seeing serial and parallel headers.
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Have you looked at the device map to see how that stuff is connected, though? Serious question, not mocking yet. First let me look at mine, which is a FX-8350 on a G1 Gaming 1.0 board... Yep, there's mine sitting on the PCI to ISA bridge. And yes, I do have a port connected to the header, what kind of monster doesn't? ;) However, it doesn't have a parallel port, which is sad because they have a lot of hack value. In the past I've used higher end PC parallel ports with some fancy versions of PLIP to get vint
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So maybe the parallel port is 2nd to last thing to go... I only see serial used in point of sale devices because USB is flaky and can come and go, and of course big iron and telco devices still use serial for initial setup. Most people wouldn't use on a P.C.
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You might want to ask why your numeric keys have redundant arrows printed on them. This is all left over from awful decisions when the PC was made, and also when the AT was made (it got you dedicated arrow keys, but some goofball decided to make them the "new" keys with new codes, rather than keep the "numeric" keys for them since everybody used those for arrows. Since there was software still assuming the old setup they did not see these arrow keys at all, and acted like the numeric keys were arrows, requi
Business Acceptance (Score:3)
The introduction of the IBM PC by IBM meant legitimacy and itâ(TM)s acceptance by small business. Up until that point, the PC scene was for hobbyists and gaming.
RISC chips? Z80, 8080A, 8086/88, and 6800 ruled the dayâ¦PowerPC didnâ(TM)t come until later.
I learned on an Altair. But, my first PC was the IBM PC with 16 K RAM and a tape drive and color graphics card. . Eventually, it had 640K, 2 5.25 floppy drives, modem, Hercules graphics card and an 8087 math coprocessor. I developed software using C, Forth, Basic, and Turbo Pascal.
When I went to Drexel, they told me I had to buy a Mac 128. I was initially pissed off. But, that little machineâ¦once upgraded a few times and the addition of a hard drive served me many years and travelled the world with me in my stateroom aboard ship.
Reverse engineer the BIOS .. (Score:2)
IBM contracted Microsoft to provide the Operating System. That IBM paid for up-front. Microsoft then used the money to buy 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products and licensed it per-copy to IBM as PC DOS.
“After all, if one could reverse engineer the BIOS [theregister.com] then building one's own PC was simply a case of picking the right off-the-shelf parts. Just like IBM.”
A bit economical with the facts. IBM copy-righted the BIOS. The clone makers got ro
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The best business decision by Gates et.al was to get royalties from IBM on every copy of PC-DOS sold. And allow MS to sell MS-DOS to non-IBM manufactures. MS-DOS was supplied as a default on nearly all of the "clones".
Grumpy fucker (Score:2)
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So what's your funniest IBM joke? (Score:2)
Tragic topic needs some Funny? But I can't think of a good IBM-related joke? How about comparing dragons to dinosaurs? Then maybe this joke qualifies:
Two dragons walked into a bar. The first dragon complained it was too hot, so the second dragon says "Shut your mouth."
(Apologies to Jimmy Carr.)
Mainframe Mentality (Score:2)
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IBM sold more PC's in the first six months than the guys back in the office said they would sell in the first 5 years or so. Tandy did the same thing, they sold more TRS-80 Model I's in a month than they projected they would sell in the first year.
This is not the first time that IBM screwed the future pooch.
Old Man IBM said their was a need for about 5 mainframes in the WORLD in the early 50's.
Old Man IBM did not by all the intellectual property for what became Xerox for essentially the same reason. (He tho
IBM 5100 series and 5150. (Score:1)
The 5150 was not IBM's first PC, there were earlier models in the 5100 series, even onre that was a luggable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] in 1975. The 5110 and 5120 followed.
IBM were concerned that there were many Apple IIs with Z80 cards appearing in their mainframe sites so the IBM 5150 was designed to be just a bit more than an Apple II: 180Kb disks instead of 160Kb. 128Kb instead of 64Kb (on the Z80 card) and CP/M like PC-DOS.
Their first design was
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Sure, and IBM's first commercial RISC machine, the ROMP-powered IBM PC/RT — which flopped in the market due to the implication that it was just another PC, which didn't match the price of the immensely more powerful system. It did use the same bus, though. I had four or five of the most powerful models, the 16MB (!) RAM Model 135s IIRC. Hmm, look what I found with google, https://www.ibm.com/common/ssi... [ibm.com]
The PC for Small Business. (Score:2)
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Apple I was built in garages all over the world, because it was a kit that you put together. (for $666)
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They would've ruled the world instead.
Have you been living under a rock for the last dozen years?
Re:Many groundbreaking events.... (Score:4, Informative)
Apple doesn't rule the world at all. Google has more influence that I can see. I don't own any Apple products nor use any Apple services and yet I still have a full functional smart phone, PC and bluetooth earbuds. Who knew.
Apple doesn't really offer anything that is not offered by another vendor with nearly matching options. Some features are exclusive to Apple and others aren't.
Microsoft and Alphabet have much more control and are significantly harder to disentangle yourself from or otherwise go without.
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The Apple II series was open. You could buy off-brand boards for it and pop it open to gain access to the internals.
We blew up a daughter board on our lone Apple II back in the day. The plastic on a chip was totally missing. We passed the card around to students while describing why it is important to make sure you plugged the printer into the edge connector correctly.
Apple blew it when they closed the first Mac's. If you opened the first generation Mac's you violated your warrantee. The same with the TRS-8
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And one of those was the Microsoft Z80 board that ran CP/M on the Apple II before there was the IBM-PC or MS-DOS.
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Giving away your designs, as well as using mainly off-the-shelf components that anyone can source, is how IBM lost control of the PC market. IBM likely did not intend for clone manufacturers to pop up. Nor a clear vision on how the IBM PC would make them money.
In the end, IBM's downfall in the PC market was the court rulings on clean room implementations of their BIOS. Once it was legally possible to make a clone, IBM lost control and had to compete on price and features. Compaq was releasing newer models f