The 25 Most Important PCs in History

[bloodline]

How lame the Apple III and a couple of nondescript IBM-PC clones make it... Yet there is no ZX80 or Amiga... How very very lame

[bloodline]

I don't think forever, but I do wonder how long it's going to take before the industry finally gets it through their heads that you can't keep updating a 32-year-old architecture by extending the register width and lumping in coprocessor functionality indefinitely. That's why I'm cautiously hopeful for the recent attempts at ARM-based netbooks - I don't even think it's the best architecture on the market, but it would be nice to see some competition.

Odd statement, because AMD and Intel have proved you can keep updating a 32year old architecture and it does just fine.

Though I have to say I am also keen on the ARM (much newer architecture at 27 years old!), as my hobby board has an nice little M3 on it and my main computing device is now my iPhone :-/

[bloodline]

RISC was neat. x86 won out simply because it had better marketing, better production yields at the right times, and an early start. Hell, it's even more obvious today that RISC was better, because x86 today is really just a horrifying convoluted CISC instruction set laid over a RISC core.

Not really, like most things in computer science, pure philosophies don't work as well in the real world as Hybrid designs do! That's why all modern CPUs are Hybrid CISC/RISC and all modern operating systems use hybrid monolithic/microkernel designs.

Hybrid designs almost always win out in real world situations