Review of IBM's Original Personal Computer 154
illiteratehack was one of several readers to point out that today is the 30th anniversary of the introduction of IBM's first popular PC, writing,
"V3 managed to dig up the original review of IBM's Personal Computer Model 5150, the machine that popularized personal computing. There are some great comments; the article's author wasn't sure if IBM would sell the PC outside the US, and he mentions the inclusion of a 'very high quality 11.5-inch' display. The article also shows that while the PC may have changed a lot on the inside, the way it was reviewed hasn't changed much in 30 years."
Other readers sent in reflections on 30 years of the PC by various tech icons and a speculative look at what the computing industry would have looked like without IBM.
Scroll Lock! (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA:
"However, a mysterious key called Scroll Lock doesn't actually do anything."
30 years ago... as useless then as it is now.
Re:Scroll Lock! (Score:2, Insightful)
Useful in FreeBSD console. Hit scroll lock to scroll through terminal with arrow keys like xterm scrollbar.
Re:Personal Computing (Score:5, Insightful)
I tend to think that the Apple II had a hand in popularizing personal computing
You can think that, but the reality is that the personal computing revolution did not begin until the arrival of the commodore 64.
What Might Have Been... (Score:5, Insightful)
As a die-hard Apple II user (still have my original //e and a spiffy Ethernet-equipped, Compact-Flash-card-as-a-hard-drive, maxed out IIGS), I've often pondered what might have been but for a few twists of computing fate.
With just between 16KB to 256KB or RAM, a pair of 140KB floppy drives, an 80-column green-screen or RGB color display, 5 card slots, and an 8-bit CPU bus with a CPU running at far less than 10 MHz, the IBM 5150 isn't that different than a contemporary Apple //e (typically with 128KB of RAM, a pair of 140KB floppies, a green screen or RGB display, 7 card slots, and a more efficient 1MHz CPU), and it wasn't obviously superior at the time. Both had similar expansion abilities (serial, parallel, game, modems, primitive hard drives in time), yet industry chose the PC to build upon because it was legally simpler.
What might have been if Apple allowed industry to clone and build upon the Apple II architecture, I wonder? Would we have had Compaq building luggable Apple II's with 16-bit CPUs and expanded memory early on? Might we have eventually had Apple IIs with 16-bit ISA slots, then VLB slots, then PCI slots, then AGP slots, and now PCI Express? Might we today have thoroughly modern computers with slick Windows-like GUIs, but if you did a Control-Reset or booted off of a USB-connected legacy Disk ][ you could still enter an AppleSoft BASIC program equivalent to booting off of an MSDOS boot floppy and doing a "dir?" Might our keyboards still have Open-Apple and Solid-Apple keys instead of Alt and Windows?
Now don't get me wrong, I love my PCs today and earn my livelihood with them, but as a former Beagle Bros employee, I sometimes can't help but wonder what might have been...
Re:Personal Computing (Score:3, Insightful)
Agreed. I think back to 'the day', and while I had an Atari 400 and worked with both PETs and IBMs, the Apple ][+ was probably the watershed machine.
Half a decade in the future, the Commodore 64 sold more units but that's because computers were popular by that point. People WANTED them! Lots of people had been buying computers (usually horrible things - the Vic-20 or the TI-99/4A) because they were exposed to the Apple at work or at school, and when the C64 came along it pretty much wiped the floor with the others (even though it had its own issues), but as far as I'm concerned, it was the Apple ][ series that created the revolution.
The IBM was a business computer. Much better text, better computing power, pathetic sound, and nonexistent graphics. Oh, and an insane price tag--let's not forget that.
It was the shakeout, mediocrity won (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can find an old computer magazine from the late 70s (BYTE, Dr Dobbs, Creative Computing, etc) you'll see ads for all kinds of different systems. It was like the early days of the automobile industry when there were many manufacturers that are all but forgotten now. Too many for it to last; there had to be what marketing people call a 'shakeout'. When IBM announced the PC, it legitimized these home computers in the minds of a lot of people who liked the idea of having a computer in their home with the 3 letters IBM on it.
But they were expensive and soon people were buying the cheaper clones. As I understand it, IBM was still mostly interested in their Mainframe business. They left the PC's architecture 'open', which allowed the cheap clones to be made. This was a decision that had important consequences I think. If IBM had suppressed the clones, what would have happened? Perhaps Apple would have become top dog in the home PC market, or perhaps some other company. Would there have ever been any 'open' architecture at all? The openness was spoiled by Microsoft cutting deals with the hardware manufacturers of those clones so that no other software had much of a chance. My feelings about Microsoft should be clear from my sig.
My big disappointment was that IBM chose to use the Intel 8086 chip. The Zilog Z8000 and Motorola 68000 were much more advanced, and I thought it was a pity that they became niche architectures by comparison. I realize IBM wasn't interested in creating something 'insanely great'. Mediocrity, or even downright inferiority prevailed. There were sound business reasons for IBM's decision at the time, but that doesn't mean I have to like the result.