A history of personal computing in 20 objects part 2
Personal computing may have originally been more ‘computing’ than ‘personal, but that changed in the late 1970s in the US and, in the UK, during the early 1980s. In the first part of ‘A History of Personal Computing on 20 Objects’, we saw how computing went from maths gadgets to first mechanical, then electromechanical and …
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"the then vogue for Reduced Instruction Set Computing (Risc)"
It was not just a vogue. It was necessary to push computing performance forward. If there had not been RISC architectures at the time, then I believe that computing history would have been different, and would probably not be nearly so advanced as it is now. Not that this is all to do with the ARM. MIPS, SPARC, Precision Architecture and POWER all had their parts to play in frightening the CISC manufactures into pushing performance up.
The transistor budget for the ARM 1 was, I believe, 25,000 transistors. At the same time, the 80386 had a transistor budget of 275,000. In these days of billions of transistors per die, it is easy to forget the fabrication limitations of the day.
If the ARM had been a CISC architecture, it would either not have competed with other processors in the market, or would have been too complex for a small organisation like Acorn to have been able to develop and produce. It's very existence was conditioned on it being a RISC processor.
The fact that it was a 32 bit architecture, used ridiculously low amounts of power, and still beat the pants off a 80386 processor in performance were the reason why it's descendants are still around now.
Re: "the then vogue for Reduced Instruction Set Computing (Risc)"
"If the ARM had been a CISC architecture..."
...then it would have been called an ACM. Not as catchy, really! ;)
(yours aye, Fred, Jim and Sheila!)
Re: "the then vogue for Reduced Instruction Set Computing (Risc)"
Yes. I did think that while I was writing it. Maybe I should have said "If the processor now known as ARM had been a CISC architecture...".
Regards to Fred, Jim and Sheila from the 6522, 6845 and the rest of the chips especially the Ferranti ULA.
How have I not seen an EPSON HX-20 before? That's incredible for 1981.
tablet evolution
The idea of tablet devices goes way back, some of us have been waiting for viable technology since the 90s. The problem has been no more complex that the power/performance/weight characteristics and the solution has been time and hard work by lots of people, its not just about headline grabbers.
I recall a long conversation in 2006 on the topic and the consensus seemed to be feasibility for mass market tablets would be around the Intel 22nm node so somewhere between 2011-2013 when the devices would start to take off. The assumption was a continuation of Intel dominance over CPU. Where we got it wrong was not expecting the early use of ARM in the 2010 iPad which was certainly an early game changer. Thats an interesting thing about history, some fairly inconsequential causes can make for big effects. The what ifs - would Apple have waited a year instead of launching the underpowered but fun iPad 1 if Jobs was not so conscious of his own health and mortality? IMO iPad is mainly interesting because it jumped the gun, and most significant by raising the game in the Intel/ARM wars.
After 30 years in the business, I've found crystal ball gazing is usually pretty obvious, just look at what drives the hardware parameters and consider what is pleasant to use. Look beyond this years gadget and the flavour of the month.
Fun to see the retrospectives. How about some future looking topics?
Reg can't count
I know El Reg has it's own unique measures, but surely they're not trying to redefine the natural number sequence as 16, 18, 17, 19 and 20?
That old IBM keyboard...
Ah, the nostalgia - just looking at a picture of it I can hear it now. I would love to buy one of the modern versions, but somehow I doubt my colleagues would appreciate the racket...
Re: That old IBM keyboard...
It could be worse. Ever typed on a teletype? It's an experience!
Re: That old IBM keyboard...
@AC Oh my GOSH those were loud!
Re: That old IBM keyboard...
The old IBM PC keyboards were fun to fix/clean, after removing all the keys and sliding the keyboard "sandwich" apart all the springs and components that made the clacking noise went all over my workbench....
So - talking of CP/M as some are, no mention of the Sirius S1, that ran CPM? No Mention of Commodore PET's either.. :0(
Re: That old IBM keyboard...
It could be worse.
What do you mean worse? Lots of us won't compromise - regardless of the noise. The model M is still made by Unicomp and the old ones are much used. I'm typing on a 1984 model M right now. I actually have a number of them stashed away in case this one wears out - but it's still as good as new. I thought I was prudent, but I'm probably just a hoarder.
I suppose the teletype could be worse, never tried one, but the manual typewriters we all learnt on were definitely unmanageable by modern standards. After all these years I recently thought I'd give my 1940's Underwood a try and was seriously considering using my elbows. I'm glad Underwood didn't make a mouse - you'd probably need an assistant.
What no CBM?
The C64, PET and Amiga were all big game changers, arguably more so than some of the machines mentioned. Any particular reason that you've just ignored a massive chunk of history? See no Beeb or Atari either.
Handheld computer
The Sharp PC-1210 predated the Psion Organiser by ~4 years. The TRS-80 PC-1 (relabeled PC-1211) was released shortly after the PC-1210 and was most likely the first widely available handlheld (the Sharp models were hard to find in stores, at least in the US).
The TRS-80 PC-2, PC-3, and PC-4 were also released before the Organiser.
What? no minis?
Why isn't the IBM 360, Vax or Wang VS or 2200 mentioned?
These are the machines that made a lot of ordinary people aware they could type on a television.
Re: What? no minis?
No minis, because it's a history of personal computing. I don't know about the others you mention, but you'd have had to be a power-hungry millionaire with good air conditioning and plenty of space* to use an early VAX as a PC.
* now I think about it, is there any other kind of millionaire?
Re: What? no minis?
No no, the point is that they went from Zuse, Colossus, Eniac, Leo & Dec: hardware that could only be afforded by nations and the biggest companies to the desktop. But there was a decade where the average Joe couldn't afford a computer, but the medium company where he worked would have a Wang 2200.
In my first job as engineer I had a Wang 2200 with just 1 terminal. So it really was a personal computer.
When I started to work in IT, we were still replacing Wang 2200 with 4-8 terminals with a PC network and that was frequently used by small to midsized engineering firms with 4 to 20 employees. That was about 25 years ago.
Ah, the niakwa fingerprint. And the horror when the floppy got lost ! ! !
A decent Compaq with 386 processor and 640k would set you back around € 5.000. An extra € 1.000 for the full 1MB. An extra € 1.000 for a 287 coprocessor. Remember when you weren't supposed to want a coprocessor because you already had a 386 so what more could you want?
And if you want a 13" screen, that would cost an extra € 1.000.
And the margin on this hardware was 40-50%.
Looking back, developing software was just an excuse to sell the hardware. And most of these smaller software companies got stung when the PC became widely available and cheap.
I remember IT fairs where the visitors were packed shoulder to shoulder and they could only move forward when they guy in front of them would. And he wouldn't because he was staring in awe at your mouse and 16" color monitor.
And back at the office he would be working on a monochrome mini terminal. Probably shared by 4 colleagues.
Re: What? no minis?
"In my first job as engineer I had a Wang 2200 with just 1 terminal."
Ah, I had a big ol' Wang at one point, but it wasn't good for much any more and I never would have used it anyway.
Atari ST for its contribution to music
I'd like to have seen the Atari ST in here for no other reason that it was the first reasonably priced computer to have a MIDI port and a way to do something useful with it. There were a *lot* of STs floating around recording studios in the late 80s and I'm sure that the pop music of the time would have sounded very different without people being able to noodle around a sequencer and drum machine on their 'tari.
Osborne
"Luggable" is the title of the genre omitted, and the one the Osborne falls into.
What no Atari
The Atari Portfolio should be here, between the Psion Organiser and Simon, the first ms-dos compatible handheld computer, ran dos 2.0 IIRC. Used in Terminator2
proof read please
"NASA" not Nasa
"RISC" not Risc
C-64 should be in there for sure .. great game machine at the time as well
Re: proof read please
It is curious that US newspapers often put in full stops in initialisms, whereas British newspapers make them into new words. I prefer the middle ground you espouse.
Phoar, them were the days...
Accoustic modem, Radio Shack TRS80, trying to watch pr0n on't command line. Luxury!
No iPaq?
I remember when they came out they really had some buzz behind them.
Folks were buying cheap flight tickets cos the only place you could buy them still in stock was Dixons at Heathrow or Gatwick.
Okay so 8 months later I had a dozen dead ones sitting in my work drawer...but......
Re: No iPaq?
My wife still uses a 2004-vintage hx4700 iPAQ to check her incoming e-mail and calendar entries. It sits in a dock cradle, permanently powered, running a program that displays upcoming appointments on the home screen. She can walk past, tap the screen with a fingernail to wake it, glance at what's coming up and walk on. Much quicker than powering up a laptop, even from sleep, or using one of many iDevices.
It syncs with Google Calendar over WiFi, but to make that work securely I had to install a custom firmware so it could talk WPA2 with my router. HP's own firmware was never happy with WPA2. Heaven knows what I'm going to replace it with if it ever gives up the ghost, or WPA2 is rendered obsolete by a more secure protocol.
Now I come to think of it, at 8 years it's currently tied in second place for the longest continuously used computer I've owned. Joint second is a ZX Spectrum I got in 1983 and sold in 1991.
First place goes to a BBC Master, bought by a friend in 1986, given to me in the early 1990s and used to put title cards on VHS videos right up to 2000. 14 years.
I just got a 4th gen iPad. It's lovely, but I can't imagine I'll be doing anything useful with it in 14 years.
Psion
Nice to see an Organiser in this list, but a little dismissive to suggest that Psion "shifted away from organiser functionality" with the Series 3 / 5 / 7.
While it's true that the general purpose programming environment was a boon to those of a creative inclination, the Psions' real strength lay in the Data and Agenda applications built into SIBO and EPOC. To this day Agenda remains the most useful and efficient Personal Information Manager I've used on any platform. And I've used many.
All of the basic functions were right there and blindingly efficient in their implementation. And for those features not baked in, a third-party macro program to simulate key presses and a bit of OPL code and you could have new functionality programmed in within minutes. Try doing that on an iPhone.
Psion's downfall was in treating their devices as accessories to the computing experience rather than alternatives. Even on the later models with basic internet features like e-mail and web browsers, it was all about syncing data with desktop machines. And using mobile phones and modems with legacy serial and IR connections while everyone else's technology was evolving, although they may not have realised it, towards the integrated smartphone. The Nokia Communicators were a hint of the way things were going, but nobody really picked up the ball and ran with it.
If Psion had read the market better we could have had a colour EPOC machine in a Series 5 form factor with WiFi and cellular connectivity and Bluetooth for voice calls, beating the iPhone by several years. But alas it was not meant to be.
Even a recent attempt to resurrect the form factor misses the point by having it run on Windows XP :(
Only a tiny subset, including some complete junk
I've used the Commodore PET (at school), VIC-20, C64, Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200, but saw none of these then amazing machines listed, WTF!
The VIC-20 and C64 stomped all over Sinclair's Z80 rubbish; none of his amateurish stuff ever interested me.
The Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200 made the Atari ST look stupid, and kept me going into the age of cheap PCs.
If Commodore had not been so blinkered, they could have taken the Amiga much further, rather than getting side tracked onto consoles.
The Archimedes like the BBC B was WAY too expensive for what you got, so I never even considered them.
It is a crying shame that the nasty instruction sets and system buses of the Z80 and 'x86' CPUs were chosen instead of the 6502 and 680x0 family, fortunately the descendant ARM CPU now owns the mobile sector, and will hopefully soon be nipping at the heals of the x86 family, for the server sector.
In my opinion Microsoft and others are still catching up with ideas in the Amiga OS and software, and still haven't caught up in some areas! I have used GP Software Directory Opus since the Amiga and now on Windows machines, because it still blows away all other Directory tools, especially the pathetic Windows Explorer.
I have no plans to own any Apple hardware, the only Apple machine which ever impressed me was the Apple 1, the Macintosh was horrible, the rest is quite frankly over priced junk.
Alternate reality?
It's too bad Jack Tramiel of Commodore was such a greedy, megalomaniac scumbag, or it's arguable that we'd be using Commodore hardware specs and 68000 architecture instead of x86. Commodore almost had the whole deal back in the 80s, and it was mostly the divisive work environment and opposing viewpoints of what the "mission" should be that killed them. I think a history of Commodore should be required reading for any CIO that's considering making major changes. I see echoes of it in Microsoft, and ripples of it emerging at Apple these days without Steve Jobs to hold Apple on course. (not that Mr. Jobs would win any humanitarian awards in the grand scheme of things)
But it would be interesting to see what the computing environment and the world at large would have evolved into after a few decades if Commodore had made some better decisions. Forget going back in time and stopping the Kennedy assassination---go back in time and prevent Jack Tramiel from being such a dick.
The Lack of Commodore kit...
... in this article is appalling.
Re: The Lack of Commodore kit...
Indeed. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the Amiga was the best computer ever, when you compare it with what went before. It had a proper four channel sound synthesiser, could stick a good few colours on screen at a decent resolution (not counting the static 4096 colour HAM mode), and had hardware sprites and a 'blitter' to boot. I suspect younger readers will think the former is a fizzy drink and will have no idea what the latter is.
This was the only time I used a machine and was in awe of, I wanted one, but couldn't afford the £1000 odd the first Amiga 1000 cost. Even the Micro Live reviewer couldn't contain himself saying how stunning it was when reviewing it. The Atari ST I had shared the same sound-chip as the ZX Spectrum 128K (an 8-bit oldie, i.e. not very good) and no dedicated graphics hardware, the PC's as far as I can remember were still in the beeper (Soundblaster etc. came much later) and 16 colour EGA era.
Has there been such a big jump since? I doubt it.
Re: The Lack of Commodore kit...
The Amiga was one of the few that were genuinely ahead of their time. A history of personal computing without mentioning at least one of the Commodore machines is flawed!
Workbench was so much better than the Macs gui in term of flexibility and speed even though both were developed around the same time.
Not to mention how many music genres came about simply due to the progression from Soundtracker/Octomed on the Amiga. Also the cheap CGI that it enabled thanks to the genlock stuff, which was used in films, overlays for weather forecasts and all sorts. The newtek video toaster and HAM never failed to impress anyone who saw it in action. Nasa used Amigas for space shuttle launch stuff too.
The Pet or Amiga (or both) should defo be on the list.
Re: The Lack of Commodore kit...
"...hardware sprites and a 'blitter' to boot. I suspect younger readers will think the former is a fizzy drink and will have no idea what the latter is."
Pah. Too easy. Tell me what coppers and bobs are, and I'll give you credit for obscure graphics terminology knowledge!
I agree with Furbian - the Amiga 1000 should be in here prominently. Owning a 32K 8bit BBC B in 1985, and going to a demonstration of the Amiga in Sydney, I was completely blown away by its capabilities. One part of the demonstration by Neriki (who made genlocks in Australia) had a photo of the Sydney city skyline in Deluxe Paint. Amazing enough to have a clear, detailed digitized image on a computer screen in 1985, but the demonstrator then erased a building from the skyline.
With amazing graphical capabilities, 4 channel stereo sound that the demonstrator compared favourably with a 1980s era Fairlight synthesizer, and a multi-tasking operating system, the Amiga 1000 was without doubt the first true epoch-making Multimedia computer. I'm at a loss as to why the Amiga is forgotten so much these days by computer historians and museums in general.
I have an original Amiga 1000, along with a bunch of 1980s-1980s computers (I also love Acorn computers, especially the BBC), and you can clearly see the purity of design of the whole machine. It made the Macintosh look primitive by comparison.
Amiga A500 and Atari ST together
Since together they were the next step on the road to where we are now.
Both using the same processor and appealing to the same Market. One had the edge in graphics the other in music creation (out of the box).
Usable as was but still tweak-able/adaptable to spawn a thousand peripherals. I can confess to throwing money away at the video camera add on with it's filters to do colour image capture. The back up to VCR was more practical though.
One aspect fortunately not touched on is price. Although Amigas and the like were cheap compared to an IBM pc what the same money would buy today is beyond compare.
They Live!
I had an Acorn Electron, and used BBC's in school, then Archimedes' in high school. I remember seeing my first PC and wondering where the mouse was! I think the Raspberry Pi is a direct descendent of the BBC - didn't Acorn sort of become ARM, which is what the Pi is based on? And the Pi's creator cited inspiration from the BBC machines he used as a kid. Superior Software (who made Repton) still lives - you can buy Repton games for iPad now...
Also, really nice to see the C64 has been reborn as C64x - a 64-bit Linux (Mint?) PC in the shape of a keyboard, just like the original C64. Even has the option to boot to a classic C64.
AmigaOS last updated? Two months ago.
I think I was really lucky to have been growing up at a time when computers were just simple enough that a 10-year-old could write machine code, while being just complex enough for that to be a worthwhile endeavour :)
Wot no... Z88
I suppose the typical home computers have been left out as we've just had the 30-year anniversary articles, but I would have expected to see a Z88 there, which was more than a Psion Organiser, smaller than a tank (laptop of the times), and turned out to be successful enough to be considered mass-market.
I'm surprised that the Apple ][ /][+ is not listed.
While the earlier machines were hobbyist things, the Apple ][ had VisiCalc back in 1979.
I even remember IBM making what was effectively an Apple ][ on a board so that you could use
the peripherals that you had purchased for the Apple. Many of the games and business programs
existed on the Apple long before their equivalents came out on the IBM PC. IBM made the market
big, but Apple created the market via the spread sheet and the ability to do custom printing by
yourself at a fraction of the cost. One decent size print job paid for the printer + software, a few also
paid the cost of the computer.
I actually worked for a small company in the 90's that were using Apple ][ gs's with built in hard drives
and "accelerators" which could be hooked up via a special interface set up with a PC to transfer data
back and forth.
The other one you forgot.
Nascom. The one you had to build from a kit. I started with a Nascom 1, put it in a big rack frame, and extended, and extended. Upgraded to a Nascom 2, extended some more. I'd go on, but nobody these days knows why a Pluto card was amazing...
Come on now
What about the Research Machines 380Z? It was the precursor to the BBC Micro in most UK schools.
Compaq
Sad to see that Compaq was not included. It is Compaq's 30th birthday this week.
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