30 Years of Personal Computer Market Share

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."

Seems to me...

[Chordonblue]

That this was more about hardware than software so I wouldn't expect to see a lot of mention of Linux. After all, most of us are running Linux on a platform they talk a lot about - the PC!

Think how different it might have been today..

[Nichotin]

.. if only some of the big unix vendors back then had thought: Gee, lets push our operating system as a general purpose desktop system. Instead, we had a whole range of proprietary unixes that ran on their own proprietary platforms.

Re:Nothing like the old days....

[quokkapox]

What a poorly-written article. It's like they just cruised through Wikipedia and copy-and-pasted a bunch of stuff. Ars Technica used to be good, but now that they're making almost a half-mil a year 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.

Sounds vaguely familiar [slashdot.org].

GOodbye, fair karma.

Re:Microsoft sucks.

[NanoGator]

"If only 20 of those 30 years didn't have to include Microsoft, computers would be pretty good today."

After reading the article, it's not all that clear that Apple would have the PC's penetration today. Apple's marketshare didn't go above 14%, even before Windows 95 came along. Like or hate Microsoft, Billyboy was right about the market power of clones.

Need more study of HOME vs BUSINESS

[furry_wookie]

What this article is totally lacking is a breakdown between the HOME and business computer markets.

There is a much more interesting story waiting to be told I think when you look at the eveolution of the home market. Things were very different than the simple story that these graphs tell.

The only REAL COMPETITION story is in the home computer market. That is where we had C=, Apple, Tandy, TI, Atari etc actually innovating and competing. The business market never even gave a single platform a chance other than IBM PC's, so I feel by including the business stuff in the story your just introducing a HUGE amount of BORING to the story.

Screw the business pc market, tell the story about the more dynamic home computer market where PC's didn't even start to make much of a splash until just before Windows311/Windows 95 came out.

Gates and Allen: Guru masters of Balck Magic?

[irritating environme]

Are you kidding me? Are you saying that Gates and Allen are lost warlock masters of Computer Science and programming languages.

You make it seem like Allen and Gates are Einstein and Newton, the ONLY people capable of writing a compiler/interpreter. PLEASE. As if they designed BASIC? Which is why it was on Apple ][s. This is not proof of "great men" theory of history. They just happened to be willing to write BASIC for it.

I mean, if MS hadn't been such bastards, we would have had a far better DOS from IBM or DR-DOS, and would have transitioned to OS/2 with true preemptive multitasking. Or we would have had NeXTs on the desktops, or a better clone of MacOS.

Back to the land of disingenous specious baseless arguments. No more of that here. What am I kidding? This is slashdot.

Wow...

[crumbz]

That article is poorly researched. No mention of hugely influential (and successful) machines such as the Sinclair ZX-81 or Spectrum? No TI 99/4A description? And if the article is about "market share", why the history of the MITS and Altair without mentioning other alternative such as Heathkits and the comparison in sales?

A classic example of an unfocused, poorly researched article.

Linux is too advanced for this story

[fm6]

Linux is a semi-modern OS, and has hardware requirements that reflect the fact. To run Linux, you need memory management. In the PC world, that means a 386 or better. By the time the 386 came along, the story TFA is telling was essentially over.

There were attempts to run more primitive Unix-like systems on PCs from the first 8088-based IBM boxes. Not notably successful. The best known is Xenix [wikipedia.org], which I have heard a lot of nasty things about.

Re:Poor Apple

[Jerry Coffin]

I thought Apple had something of a resurgence in the last couple years, but I don't see much indication of that.

It sounds like you pay a bit more attention to advertising than you really should. The reason you don't see it is that (despite Apple's ads) it's not real. Rather the contrary: the last time a Mac actually gained noticeable market share was the original iMac. Apple really topped out in the early 1990's, and has been on a long, (admittedly slow) downhill slide since then. They've managed to produce a couple of temporary upward bumps since then, but never anything very significant. Ultimately, it's just a bit of noise in a long, slow slide into oblivion.

Recently, Apple's doing a bit better financially, but that's due to sales of iPods (and associated music, accessories, etc.) not Macs.

This "change of venue" helps them considerably. On the computer front, they have a major problem: almost any change large enough to stand any chance of gaining significant market share would also very likely alienate a large portion of their existing user base. The iPod gives Apple a way out: instead of taking huge gambles in the OS, they just quietly de-emphasize the Mac, and put their real effort into iPods (which are more profitable anyway).

In fact, I'd personally guess that Apple's switch to Intel processors is driven far more by the iPod's success than by technical details like CPU clock speed or power consumption. The improvement in Macs will be an almost accidental side-effect. The fact that it lets them concentrate on iPods instead of things like bridge chips and motherboards for PowerPCs means far more. Of course, they do still make quite a bit of money on Macs, so they have to de-emphasize them slowly, carefully, and in a way that doesn't alienate their user base (after all, that's why they can't make significant improvements in the Mac either). Over time, however, the Mac will become much more like a generic PC clone, with just enough unique to Apple to prevent running OS/X on anything Apple didn't sell. Eventually, even those trivial differences may be eliminated in favor of using a "Trusted Computing Platform" to "manage your rights", so they can charge a 20% premium for what will otherwise be an utterly generic PC.

It's not hardware anymore, now it's all software..

[vistic]

In general though that's been the trend for home computers.

Earlier on, the competing standards were all about different hardware architectures.

But now, the shift in competition for home computers has moved from hardware to software. Right now most people use Windows, Linux, a BSD, or Mac OS X. And guess what? They ALL now run on x86 hardware.

The companies don't compete based on hardware anymore... now they compete for software.

Home micros, custom chips and the Amiga

[master_p]

The article missed a few important home micros of the 80s: the ZX Spectrum, the Amstrad CPC, the BCC, the Acorn Archimedes, the QL. Of course some of these machines were hugely popular outside of the US.

What is noteworthy is that the most successful computers were not the most technologically advanced. For example, at the time I was playing "Shadow of The Beast" on my Amiga with 18 levels of parallax scrolling and hundreds of colors at 50 FPS, the PC could do 16 colors at low resolution without parallax scrolling and barely reaching 15 FPS. The difference in visual quality was so great, that it made me believe that custom chips (what is now known as 'video accelerators') would be the first thing any IBM-compatible PC would have right away. But I was so wrong: It took 10 years for the first video accelerator for the PC to arrive.

Personally I think the Amiga was the most important home PC ever. It showed how a home computer should be like: easy to access, loads almost instantly, plays on TV and on computer monitor, with a wealthy of tools for the programmer and amateur electronics designer, and totally open in specs. In fact, the Amiga was so versatile as to (for example): a) display 16M colors where only 256 colors were actually allowed (on Amiga 1200), b) have CPU 68000, 68030 and PowerPC running at the same time, using the same memory.

What went wrong for Commodore? The Amiga had great prospect, but what killed it was the disability of Commodore to see the importance of 3D graphics. Back at 1991, Commodore had a great custom chip that could do 1 million textured polygons at 50 frames per second with hardware transformation, but they instead went on to produce CD32. The decision was a result of internal politics...then Doom appeared on the PC, making it the premier gaming choice, and the rest is history.

The history of Amiga reminds me of SEGA: SEGA were the masters of 3D graphics at the arcades, but they miserably failed to produce any decent 3D machine until the Dreamcast. SEGA underestimated the importance of 3D graphics for the home, and they were forced out of the console business. If we had arcade-quality Outrun, Space Harrier, Afterburner and Powerdrift at home during the Genesis/Megadrive era, and then Virtua Fighter / Virtua Striker, things would be different today for SEGA, just as it would be for Commodore if the Amiga had custom chips for 3D graphics 10 years before the PC.

Re:Also no mention of BBC Micro, etc.

[melonman]

More to the point, no mention I could see of the ZX81, which must have been easily the most popular PC in the world for a while (its sales dwarfed anything Acorn produced, and Britain at this time had far higher percentage domestic PC ownership, largely thanks to Sinclair). The main reason for mentioning Acorn is not market share in the PC market, but because it led to the creation of the ARM processor which has much of the embedded market pretty much sewn up. But of course ARM is a British company too. In other words, it's another one of those "if it wasn't made by an American it never existed" articles.

Do you know where Apple's logo comes from?

[kronocide]

I've had a theory for some time that it's the apple that Alan Turing poisoned and used to kill himself with. So the bite-mark is from Turing's suicide. Pretty grotesque, but I don't know of any other famous apples in computing history.

Re:So, where was CP/M?

[lpress]

For sure! Leaving out CP/M-based machines is a glaring ommission.

There were several floppy-based disk operating systems for the Altair and 8080 clones. In 1976 Digital Microsystems brought out a floppy disk subsystem bundled with CP/M, and that machine was capable of doing real work. Digital Microsystems folded, but CP/M went on to dominate the world of serious applications up till the IBM PC came out.

CP/M started life as a software product (you wrote your own keyboard and display drivers in assmbly language), but took off when Digital Microsystems, Compal, and many others began bundling it with their systems. It dominated "serious" computing until the IBM PC came out. IBM bundled DOS with the machine and charged $75 extra for CP/M. CP/M continued technical excellence -- multitasking and a LAN version followed -- but DOS swamped it in the marketplace.