[johnny7]

RadioShack PCs

LOL... a war-game chum of mine had one of those. Remember him inviting me over to play 'Midway' on it. God almighty... how far we've come!

[Jeffrey_D.]

Thanks for posting.........good read!

[Hazcat]

DELL PCs suck!

[GATOR NAVY]

They had cassette drives instead of hard-disk drives.

I remember we had a celestial navigation mini-computer that used cassettes in the mid '80s. What a nightmare it was to use that. The whole thing was so temperamental most of us could punch the numbers on paper faster than using the computer.

[IronJack]

I remember the old TRS-80 -- that's what he's talking about. You had to load the OS from tape; all it had aboard it was a boot ROM. And it had something like 4k of RAM, upgradable (later) to 8K. No hard drive; no floppy.

But I seriously think it was the Apple II that launched the personal computing revolution. There were so many of those things in schools and libraries that when kids thought "computer," they thought "Apple."

I still admire Jobs and Wozniak for their vision, which put computers on desks years before Michael Dell or IBM.

[Moonman62]

I am using a Dell Precision 690, which is our high-end workstation. It's a two-socket system and it's got two dual-core Woodcrest (Xeon 5100 processors) in there. It's got a port with 64 (gigabytes) of memory, but I have only got 32 (gigabytes) in there.

I guess we don't have to ask him how he heats his home.

[Gabz]

There was an editorial about this milestone in one of the daily rags I read. The final sentence of it pretty much says it all:

---

Today the universe celebrates the 25th anniversary of the personal computer, a technological milestone that is as easy to ignore as it is necessary to commemorate. An estimated 1 billion PCs are in use today.

When IBM unveiled its first 5150 model in 1981, the techies responsible for its renegade development within the staid corporate world had no idea what they unleashed.

In the intervening years the PC has become one of the biggest influences in modern times on business habits and lifestyle convenience.

File-sharing, word-processing spreadsheet and e-mail are now everyday terms because of their affiliation with the PC.

Chiefly, the PC's glory is its dependency on a democratic and free-market atmosphere of hardware and software invention. In the workplace, the PC revolutionized data collection and processing to the point that now the U.S. Department of Labor predicts that some secretarial jobs face extinction because the PC has made bosses comfortable with word-processing duties like phone list management and data storage and retrieval.

It is so common that many of its once-exotic features are commonplace -- interchangeable rather than dealer-specific hardware parts and public-design specs that enabled garage geeks to tweak into entirely new software packages.

Our Blackberrys and cell phones, text messaging and ever growing Internet service providers are a testament to the progress launched by the PC.

Twenty-five years ago today it was all new and no one knew what habits it would eventually change.

[ops33]

I thought the first home computer was the Coleco Adam?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Related Item:

Fixed the bottom Link for followon Pages....

The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time -- PC World

***************************AN EXCERPT **********************

The IBM PC is 25. And here are the top PCs ever, from machines you owned and loved to systems you've never heard of.

The Editors of PC World

Friday, August 11, 2006 01:00 PM PDT

****************************

IBM's first PC, announced on August 12, 1981, was far from the first personal computer--but when it arrived, there was near-universal agreement that it was likely to be a landmark machine. It was. And 25 years later, it still ranks among the most significant computers ever.

Like the IBM Personal Computer, Model 5150, the greatest systems have always had ambitions to boldly go where no computer has gone before. Without these innovative machines, the PC revolution would have been a lot less...well, revolutionary. So we decided to celebrate the IBM PC's 25th birthday by identifying the 25 PCs that have mattered most--from any manufacturer, and from any era.

No single characteristic makes a computer great. But we managed to boil down an array of winning qualities into four factors, all of which happen to begin with the letter I.

• Innovation: Did the PC do anything that was genuinely new? Did it incorporate the latest technology?
• Impact: Was it widely imitated? Did it become part of the cultural zeitgeist?
• Industrial design: Was it a looker? Did it have clever features that made using it a pleasure?
• Intangibles: Was there anything else about it that set it apart from the same ol' same ol'?

Armed with this scale, we considered dozens of PCs--which meant that we also had to consider the question "What is a PC, exactly?" Ultimately we decided that a PC is anything that's recognizably a desktop or portable computer in design--or, alternatively, anything that runs an operating system originally created for desktops and laptops. After a lot of nostalgic debate, we selected our winners. Which systems we picked--and didn't pick--for our Top 25 may be controversial. If one of your favorites didn't make our roster, check out our list of 25 near-great PCs.

Just to drum up a little suspense, we'll reveal the Top 25 starting with number 25, and then work our way backward to the single greatest PC of all time. (Spoilsports can skip ahead to number 1; we won't be any the wiser. You can also jump to the complete list of our Top 25 picks.)

Ready?

Next page: Greatest PCs: 25-23

[TaxRelief]

My first personal computer, in 1981, was a TI-99-4A, from Texas Instruments. It hooked up to the TV, and stored programs and data on cassette tapes.

[Physicist]

I have a rackmounted Dell PowerEdge 6350 with four Xeon processors, 2GB RAM, and three 9 GB SCSI hard drives set up as a RAID-5 unit. I bought it on Ebay for $112 last month. I set it up with RedHat Enterprise Linux 4.

It's 7 years old, and still a screamer.

[FlJoePa]

I'm not a big Dell guy. PC's are PC's imo. But I love to read about guys like this. People that bash him or his company are simply jealous - that they weren't there first.

Zillionaires usually have better ideas than the rest of us. We need to accept that fact.

[silent_jonny]

I nominate this Gateway model as the worst pc ever made.

I don't know the proper name for it, but I always called it the "POS".

There was no fan inside and the only ventilation came through those small holes on the back. The heat inside had no where to go. You could fry an egg on this thing.

It was also weak, slow and overpriced.

[Grut]

The thing is, IBM PCs were hideously expensive: $8000 or so, IIRC. So I think credit for the early boom in PCs (read, "home computers") belongs to the clone makers and the brands like Atari, Commodore, Radio Shack and so on that made affordable computers.

[GoShow]

Dell Completely Sucks,

Mickey’s cloned computers and gadgets are nothing but cheap knock off’s, The DJ ditty ever heard of it? Dell makes nothing.

- The Stock and Laptops are blowing up.

- Bait and switch sales tactics: Try calling and buying
Any computer from them for 299?

- Mail in rebates, Still waiting…

- Worst Service.

- Worst outsourcers: The Indians don’t even want their call center jobs.

- They sell TV’s now, and who makes their TV’s again?


Dell can’t even be the Walmart of computers - HP beat them to it.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Another Memory thread:

The 25 Greatest PCs of All Time (long)

[gorush]

We had a PC's Limited 286...two speeds, 8 or 12 MHz as I recall. I have purchased many Dell drafting stations over the years (at prices that bring tears to my eyes), recent experiences with support have left me unwilling to purchase another Dell product.

[dakine]

I reminisce to my old Burroughs 2500/3500 days...

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Burroughs/Burroughs.B2500B3500.1966.102646229.pdf

[InterceptPoint]

Bought my first PC in 1984. We were pioneers for sure.