30 Years of Personal Computer Market Share 313
chiagoo writes "Ars Technica has a fantastic article that looks back at the most popular personal computers from the last 30 years. It covers everything from the Altair to the 8- and 16-bit eras to where we are today. A bit of a downer that they barely mentioned Linux and gave no mention to other significant OSes such as OpenBSD, but still a great read nonetheless."
Nothing like the old days.... (Score:1, Informative)
Ars Technica used to be good, but now that they're making almost a half-mil a year [readwriteweb.com] with their subscriptions and product sales, the article quality has gone waaaay downhill. Nothing like a few bucks and minor notoriety to make a blogger fat and lazy.
Also no mention of BBC Micro, etc. (Score:4, Informative)
For computer history buffs... (Score:5, Informative)
gah (Score:5, Informative)
Even on the first page, they act like all these companies were run by idiots, ignoring the possibility of a PC that was supposedly right under their noses.
It wasn't that the technology wasn't ready. Intel, at the time primarily a manufacturer of memory chips, had invented the first microprocessor (the 4-bit 4004) in 1971. This was followed up with the 8-bit 8008 in 1972 and the more-capable 8080 chip in 1974. However, Intel didn't see the potential of its own product, considering it to be useful mainly for calculators, traffic lights, and other embedded applications
That's because that's all it was good for. SMPS technology was in its infancy. Storage technology involved huge platters or huge tapes. RAM was damn expensive.
So what did they think Intel should have done? Released a "PC" in 1971 that weighed 200 pounds with a linear power supply, came with a mini-fridge sized persistant storage unit that held 100k, had 4k RAM and cost $20,000?
The technology indeed wasn't ready. The PC came when it did because technology allowed it to come, not because of lack of vision.
Re:Also no mention of BBC Micro, etc. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Fast... like turbo button! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Think how different it might have been today.. (Score:4, Informative)
Like, Microsoft Xenix?
Or, the AT&T Unix PC?
Or, AUX on a 680x0 Macintosh?
Or, NeXTStep?
Or, Sun Workstations?
Yeah... it would have been real different if any of the above had existed twenty years ago. But, I guess we can only imagine...
Another error... (Score:4, Informative)
Somebody's forgotten about (or more likely too young to know about) Dungeon Master which debuted on the Atari ST in 1988 - I remember an Amiga owning friend of mine coming over to play my copy. He later ended up writing a Sci-Fi clone of it called BSS Jane Seymour IIRC for the Amiga.
Those were the days...
Re:Microsoft sucks. (Score:3, Informative)
Thats because this article sucks. It totally ignores the fact that the HOME PC market was TOTALLY DIFFERENT back then from the business market.
Until Windows 95 came out (and 3.11 to a lesser extent)... NO ONE HAD PC's AT HOME.
The home market was dominated by Commodore, Apple, Atari, Tandy, TI, etc.
The problem with this article is the graphs lump the business market, which ONLY BOUGHT IBM PC's, and mixes it all in with the market data for the home pcs.
I still believe that this is a huge mistake and doing analysis of the home market would be much more interesting.
There is not much to learn about the business PC market. They bought IBM PC's, and they bought them in huge numbers and thats pretty much it. Nothing else there to tell.
It clouds the interesting historical part of the story greatly.
Re:Gates and Allen: Guru masters of Balck Magic? (Score:2, Informative)
No Mac Clones (Score:4, Informative)
There is a huge difference.
When IBM lost the clone battles Phoenix & everyone else were free to offer reverse-engineered work-alike PCs. Not just "mostly alike", just alike. Buy the same MS or whomever OS, install the same Lotus 123 or whathaveyou, it's all a commodity.
IBM later tried to recapture the market by redefining it with MicroChannel, their proprietary & well defended next-gen bus architecture. But the ISA market was too big and had enough momentum that IBM's efforts were doomed and look, 25 years later they're out of the PC market they helped create not having made a profit at it in years.
On the other hand Apple, after a few early skirmishes, never lost control of their products. Their architecture didn't lend itself to easy reengineering and there was rarely an eager alternative OS vender around to make non-MacOS boxes viable. Be, Yellow Dog, etc. never were more then novelties.
What Apple did do was, under contracted terms, sell their proprietary system ROMs & MacOS 7 to third parties for a licensing fee and per-unit compensation. The idea was that these nimbler & more aggressive partners would expand the Mac into markets Apple wasn't interested in or where it was unable to compete effectively (usually cost or distribution-wise).
However instead companies like Power Computing turned around and cannibalized Apple's domestic bread-&-butter Mac market by offering similar systems at price points slightly below Apples.
A few did expand the Mac into new markets - high-end multi-processor, etc. but by-and-large it was a financial disaster for Apple. They were already suffering from extremely poor supply chain management, a shrinking market, and high R&D costs; to then start supplying direct competitors with products that undercut their own was disastrous.
So when the opportunity arose with a new MacOS to change terms Apple did - they bought back their licenses and shut down the program. Most folks agree if they hadn't the company wouldn't have lasted another year.
*Yes, there were a few obscure attempts but it never amounted to a few hundred clone units total.
Re:Another error... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No Mac Clones (Score:5, Informative)
You know, there were Apples before the Mac, especially the famous Apple IIs (as the GP clearly stated). They indeed created a blooming market for third party add-ons and clones of mostly dubious legality, much facilitated by the fact that all Apple IIs (at least the big ones, don't know about the IIc, some kind of laptop-precursor) came with full schematics. The Mac was a rather late entry in the whole PC game, Apple was well known for more than half a decade before that. Likely that the bad experiences with Apple II-cloners led Apple to the very closed and proprietary course they took with the Mac (completely opposed as to Apple operated before).
Re:Anyone remember the RUN magazine (C=64) ? (Score:2, Informative)
Yeah, that sounds right!!! I know that was it. It was soo cool, all my friends would come over and do their papers on it too. All written in assembler too! I remember adding a spellchecker to it from COMPUTE! Gazette magazine.
Hey I found a version for the Atari documented here on the web, you might like to read it, its even got the codes to enter in with MLX to build it:
http://www.atariarchives.org/speedscript/ch2.php#
Someone else posting about speedscript on the C64 here too:
http://www.troyandjessica.com/article/12/ode-to-t
Found a manual here:
http://project64.c64.org/misc/SpeedScript%203.2.t
I used a Citizen 120D dot matrix printer, worked great.
When I went to college I used a 2400baud modem, with a vt100 emulator on a C64 (Which was only 40cols BTW), but you could hit a hot key and it would switch to this TINY FONT to show the whole 80x24 vt100 screen.
Man...I remember having to use a whole crapload of key combinations to get things like the GOLD-KEY to work for my EDT session.
But by god, my C=64 got me a pretty good ways through the first few years of engineering school including a serious amount of hacking an coding on VMS from home.
Damn, where did we go wrong? Think just don't seem as fun anymore.
UK market share (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Unix was tried and failed ... (Score:3, Informative)
it was a fiasco for several reasons. one of them was the 286 could switch from "real mode" (in this mode it was little more than a glorified 8086) to "protected mode" (with all the new features), but there was no way to switch back to real mode. the result was that to run MS-DOS (which required "real mode") they needed some ugly hacks, and the compatibility was far from perfect, specially for things like lotus 1-2-3.
when they added a GUI, things became even worse. if you tried to run a real-mode DOS app in full (text) screen, it was almost impossible to switch back and forth between graphical an text mode. the reason was the EGA graphics cards. those older cards (CGA, Hercules, EGA, etc.) had write-only registers. this meant that the OS had to keep a table in main memory with a copy of the registers, otherwise it was impossible to know the state of the graphics card. since DOS apps had direct access to card's registers, it was impossible for OS/2 to know in wich state DOS programs left the graphics card, making switching modes impossible.
the GUI was called "desktop manager" and looks pretty much like windows 3.0's. here's some screenshots [toastytech.com]
Growing up in the 90s (Score:5, Informative)
Even before the world standardized on Microsoft Office, and people were using Word Perfect and Lotus Office, saying that an Amiga 500 was a proper computer was the equivalent of saying that an XBox 360 is a 'real' computer now.
Thats the tragedy of the 90s, these great systems are gone, not because they weren't any good, but because people didn't know how to use them, and nothing has changed now. I shocked a developer that I work with yesterday by saying that you could run a lot of DirectX games on Linux. Everytime I pull my PowerBook out in a meeting with new clients they are shocked that a geek would use a Mac instead of a 'real' computer. But if anything its more ridiculous:
SCSI/Firewire/USB/SATA/PCI/Ethernet/TCP/IP
We have standardized on so much that even our games consoles are almost indistinguisable from an IBM clone, and yet if you walk into an computer shop you have at most two options: PC / Mac, and in a couple of months both of those systems will be identical in all but OS.
So as a world, why are we so obessed with the Wintel platform?
Its can't be performance. Ever since the PIII, the two biggest barriers to real office performance have been RAM and HDD speed, and with 256MB RAM costing £20 and fast enough HDDs for £40 that really isn't a barrier.
It can't be price. Apple, with their extrodinary mark-ups are capable of producing the Mac Mini for £350. Where are the other PPC / ARM / SPARC / POWER contenders?
It can't even be software. Linux, in particular Ubuntu, have matured to such an extent that for 'real' computer task it exceeds Windows in usability and functionality. I could sit my dad in front of Open Office, on an Ubuntu box and he'd be just as functional within hours.
I think its DRM.
The XBox 360 has a 20GB harddrive, 512MB RAM a full networking stack and an API sophisticated enough that it is possible to create applications with graphics comparable to Jurasic Park, in real time. It has the ability to connect to my iPod, my camera, a keyboard and mouse, and it even has an external SATA connection (albeit proprietary) for future expansion of the harddrive. At £270 its a good price, for a system that would be fascinating to play with because of its 6 hardware threads. And yet its competitor is the unreleased PS3, not the mac mini.
Millions of these units will be sold and will achieve a market penetration that Steve Jobs would kill for, many of them to lower income families (who value entertainment and keeping up with the Jones' over education) and yet, because of DRM, the number of children that will do their homework on one, or use it as a 'real' computer will be counted on one hand, and even fewer will ever use it to develop software for the console itself (unlike the Commodore 64).
Beacause of DRM, turning these systems into a home computer isn't as simple as inserting a Live DVD and attaching a £10 keyboard and mouse set. Because of DRM, an exciting and innovative hardware platform will never be anything more than a toy. Because of DRM, in 30 years time, the Ars Technica article won't even mention the PS3 or the XBox when they're talking about the development of the home computer. So much for protecting innovators and artists.
Re:Fast... like turbo button! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Do you know where Apple's logo comes from? (Score:4, Informative)
is EXACTLY what was on the original Apple computer logo, a drawing of Isacc Newton and the apple.
Apple bottomed out at 1.8%, 2005 jumped to 4.4% (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/b
"Apple has also recently made market share inroads in the United States, according to IDC. After years of hovering between a 2.5
and 3.7 percent share of the U.S. PC market, the company finally cracked 4 percent in the first half of 2005, Daoud said.
Apple's market share of PC shipments was 4.4 percent in the third quarter, an increase of 43 percent from the year ago period,
while the overall PC market expanded by only 2 percent, he said."
Kids is right - go back a little further.... (Score:3, Informative)
Now if you really want to go back, go back to the Atari 800 w/ cassette drive, for which you had to read a 40 page instruction book on how connect and initiate programs from a tape. Or the TRS-80 w/ 1 floppy drive. Start up the system, yank the disk, put in program disk, run the command for that paticular program, yank the disk, replace system disk, run edit program, yank system disk, replace with disk holding file to edit.... BTW, Apple had a similar system out at the time of the TRS-80. The pre-PC days. What a time....
These were truly pain in the ass systems. When dual floppy systems came out, there was much rejoicing.
Bunch of Ars (Score:2, Informative)
So Colossus being used to break the Axis' "Fish" cipher system not "real" enough then ?
Odd that this should fail to be mentioned, despite the author correctly identifying Eniac as the second electronic digital computer.
Bloody yanks
Re:Microsoft sucks. (Score:3, Informative)
Note true at all. There was a big home market for PC clones in the late 1980s. People wanted them to run word processors, mostly. Remember Word Perfect? WordStar? Q&A Write? And you could buy a lot of Atari, Apple, and C64 games that were ported over to the PC, though usually with horrific graphics.
Alternate Reality (Score:1, Informative)