The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time (long)

Yahoo News/PC World ^ | Fri Aug 11, 4:00 AM ET | The Editors of PC World

[martin_fierro]

NOT one of the top 25 PCs of all time, but my first (1986).

[Christian4Bush]

Like many PC model designations, AT stood for something--and no, it had nothing to do with the Imperial AT-AT walkers featured in The Empire Strikes Back. The term was short for Advanced Technology.

"That armor's too strong for blasters! Rogue Group, use your harpoons and tow cables! It's our only chance of stopping them!"

[jdm]

Is the phone included?

[martin_fierro]

Hell no.

The *1200 bps external modem* wasn't even included.

[Christian4Bush]

My first computer was the IBM XT 8088 in 1986. One floppy drive, had to insert the DOS disk, wait for the computer to boot, then take that out, put in the program disk, take THAT out, and put in the data disk to save.

Now we have "terabyte" hard drives.

[somemoreequalthanothers]

That actually looks pretty sleek for back in the day.
I was around then, but I didn't get into pc's until about 95.

[jdm]

Where's the mouse? Seriously? Was it "sold separately"?

You have to forgive me -- I was 11 in 1986.

[martin_fierro]

LOL

WHAT mouse??

Only Macs had 'em.

I remember being amazed by the "spraypaint" feature + mouse in the Mac paint program of the time.

[Publius6961]

BUMP!

[somemoreequalthanothers]

.....work began to be fun. i used it to cut thru hours of tedious work out producing the combined efforts of 2 other employees with caseloads half the size of mine.

I'm sure the state has realized their error, and the workload has now caught up to and/or surpassed the technology. :)

[Dont Mention the War]

The first-generation iMac of 1997 may have been the machine that told the world that Apple, and its recently returned cofounder Steve Jobs, were back. But its second-generation successor was a vastly different, far more inventive computer. And even though it didn't turn out to be an influential one, it remains a high point in PC design history.

And it is without question at the very top, numero uno, of the list of Most Annoying Computers To Repair Or Upgrade Ever. You have to take the entire machine apart just to swap in a new hard drive. Then you have to actually get it all back together again, which is damn near impossible and actually requires you to apply thermal paste.

[ThePythonicCow]

My first personal computer:

The IBM 1130 Computing System

[ShadowAce]

[Richard Kimball]

I was considered quite the radical in 1988 or so for getting a mouse with my PC. I also ran Windows 1.0, Word 1.0 and Excel 1.0. That was about the time that the mouse was being degraded as an "upside down track ball." I remember the t-shirts that were big sellers at PC conventions that said "Real men don't use mice."

[ezsmoke]

I have in the basement:
Commodore 64
Apple IIc
Intel 8088

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Memories being discussed over here too:

Dell reflects on 25 years of PCs ~ PC arrived in 1981

[tje]

It's cool that I was an engineer that worked on creating several of these items...

[TechJunkYard]

.. the IBM XT 8088 in 1986. One floppy drive..

The XT shipped with a 10MB hard disk.

My first was the first model of the IBM-PC in 1983. Two floppy drives, came with 16MB of RAM installed, and 3 more 16MB kits (user-installable) for a whopping total of 64MB! I also got the color-graphics display. IBM employee price was a grand total of $2795.

The hackers at IBM went over the circuitry with a fine tooth comb, and the unofficial mods started appearing on the company conference boards... a reset button so when you hung up the PC you didn't have to recycle the power and wait for the power-on-self-test (momentarily grounded the "power good" line from the system board to the power supply)... a mod to the system board to support the "new" 64MB RAM chips (which was incorporated into the XT boards by Boca)... and I added a modulator and exciter to put the display on a TV set along with the monitor.

Then I got my XT, and some of my buddies got hold of a bunch of old RT 44MB hard drives which we re-partitioned and re-formatted and stuck 'em in our XTs.

Then I got my AT, and played with the RT drives on that one too. We later thought it might be fun to stuff it with RAM and see if we could get OS/2 1.1 EE to come up on it. Took about 15 minutes to boot, but it worked.

Those were the days.... ;-)

[ezsmoke]

16MB of RAM in 1983? Wow.
My Pentium 75 in 1994 only had 8MB that I upgraded to 16MB initially and then later to the maximum 96MB. It is now in the basement next to the others. I last used it in 2002 and had it overclocked to 100MHz. It had debian linux with a 2.2 kernel, command line only, running dnetc. It also had a whopping 850MB hard drive, 4X CDROM, 14.4K Modem/Soundcard and a 1MB Cirrus Logic Video on the motherboard. I had it temporarily upgraded to a 333MHz K6-2 upgrade S7/S5 conversion kit with a Voodoo 3 2000 PCI, 4x CDR, 10GB HDD and 56k USRobotics modem. All those parts are broken now or long gone. The original still boots last I checked.