The 25 Most Important PCs in History

[commodorejohn]

Yeah. It's nice to see more love for the Kenbak-1, but how the hell many PC clones do you need on a list?

[commodorejohn]

It blows my mind how many computers existed in the 8 bit era, each with significant software libraries of their own. Spectrum, The commodore and atari machines, msx, amstrad cpc, bbc micro, undoubtedly more stuff I am forgetting about

This. If I could bring back one thing about the '80s, it would be the absolutely enormous variety of significantly different computers available to the public.

[commodorejohn]

Yeah bring back "Incompatible", lets revel in the lack of standards.

That's when you didn't choose to be different, it was forced upon you.

Right, right. It was quite the hassle tracking down the appropriate version of a piece of software for your hardware, admittedly. It's much better today, where it just refuses to run on anything older than three years.

[commodorejohn]

It may be somewhat defeatist, but my stance is that the processor architecture war was lost with Apple switching from PPC, and now x86 is so ingrained into everything that it will continue to remain the dominant platform forever. It's sad, too, seeing how x86 is a crappy architecture from a programmer's perspective.

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.

[commodorejohn]

That's also what Intel and HP thought when they developed their Itanium 64 bit processors. Then came AMD with their 64 bit extensions to the year-old 32 bit architecture. And the rest is history...

Yeah, except that the companies behind other architectures have had the good sense not to make their designs baffling and hideous to program for, which was one of the key factors that sank the Itanic.

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

They've kept it up thus far, but it got so crufty that they had to offload it to an entire separate RISC machine all the way back in 1995. It's impressive that they've kept it competitive, but I don't think they can do that indefinitely.