Just another useless list. Every forum out there has a link to it and everyone is hammering it.
The number of DOS/Windows machines was absurd.
The Apple II was a hack (see the video display hardware if you doubt it) and survived on marketing and being one of the first color machines for the "hobbyist". It was also one of the first to push disk drives. Does it deserve a #1? It wouldn't have even existed if it weren't for the Altair WOZ saw at a users group meeting and personal computers might not have arrived for several years.
Missing computers?
Missing the C64 was pretty stupid. Lets face it. The C64 drove the price war that devestated the home PC video game market from '83 to '85 and killed the growing number of 8 bit vendors.
The Tandy Color Computer was the first home PC with a real pre-emptive multi-tasking OS... OS-9. Not to be confused with Mac OS9. It was a Unix like OS for an 8 bit when CP/M was thought of as powerful. Yes, it beat the Amiga by a few years.
The Spectrum which was a big hit in the UK/Europe and almost created the low cost market. The ZX80/ZX81 were first but didn't last long.
Commodore actually created the C116/264/Plus 4 just to compete with the low cost Spectrum... at least until management raised the price from $49 for the 116 to $79 for the 264 and finally to $299 for the "business" Plus 4 which turned a likely hit into a flop.
The Acorn RISC systems brought RISC to the desktop for the first time and the CPU created for it is the grand parent of the most popular embedded CPU out there.
The Oric and BBC Micro at least deserve an honerable mention. I though BBC Micro was the school computer in the UK.
Um... pocket PC's? Anyone remember those? The author didn't. They were the predicessor of the palm computers and the Newton didn't even get a mention either.
And as for giving credit where credit is due, the one thing that made the home computer market possible more than any other... the introduction of the 6502 CPU. Prior to it other CPU's were hundreds of dollars. By the end of the computer show it was introduced at every other CPU manufacturer had dropped their prices and a home computer cheaper than a car was possible.
