If you have a few hours to kill, the Youtube Channel "Another Boring Topic" has a multi part series on the "rise and fall of the IBM PC". The comparatively short Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er8wcWsG7sE
The Channel has similar video series on OS/2, VisiCalc, Microsoft Excel and early Windows (far from completion). The videos are generally very detailed and well researched, often contrasting accounts from different source or even reaching out to people involved.
The already slow pace of the channel has slowed down a lot. In an update video a while back, the author has announced that the background research for the IBM PC led down an unexpectedly deep rabbit hole and his script eventually spiraled into an unfinished book that will now probably turn into a two-parter itself.
In 10th grade (1985/86), I had a friend who worked in a small computer store. I was into computers so I dropped in one time to check it out. He introduced me to his boss and after a brief conversation he asked if I was interested in programming. I was. He loaned me a PC clone
, let me borrow his car to get it home, and I was off.
I had exaggerated my knowledge (and my boss clearly knew that) so I skipped school the next few days and dug into the amazing manuals and got up to speed on DOS, on Clipper (a DBASE III compiler), and edlin and finished the task in a couple of weeks.
I took the pay and bought the computer and wrote Clipper programs for the next few years. Those nights spent staring at amber text were so satisfying. I’m very grateful to have been given that opportunity.
This was such a common experience for devs in these days! Even very experienced devs like Andy Hertzfeld talk about building software in exchange for hardware. We would have just spent the money on sw/hw, so it was just simpler :)
When you think of it, Apple (and so Jobs) have really missed the mark with the Apple III. The Apple II (1977) was really good with its expandability capacities, its keyboard, its monitor, its floppies drive and its good installed base. It was a very advanced machine. The PC is a kind of copy. So the Apple III (1980) should have been the one which became the market standard. It miserably flopped.
Commodore with the PET (1977) was a pioneer too with a good installed base but the CBM-II (1982) was a poor upgrade which had no internal cards connectors. Not very appealing. And the C64 was not quickly upgraded in the way it could have be.
And those three machines were stuck with the brilliant 6502 (1975) but which did not appeared into a 16 bits version until 1985 thanks to Commodore which did not really invested to develop MOS Technology.
So the choice of the 8088 8/16 bits CPU (1979) by IBM was really a game changer. It made the machine open to the future and viable. Another reason to choose it.
What happened to the little tramp with the walking stick? I had one of those sticks (as a biro) off an IBM salesperson, early to mid 80s, and IBM must have paid an ungodly amount to Chaplin for the IP.
But I really did love the IBM PC. And very sad about Don Estridge and his wife - if he had joined Apple they might still be alive today.
In retrospect, I think IBM would have been much better off if it had done two things differently... Made the deal with MS such that any external sales had a minimal price with a kickback to IBM, and that IBM would license its BIOS directly to third party MFGs.
If they'd have done that, much like MS, they'd have a piece of every PC sale, not just their own hardware.
That said, I don't think IBM culture could ever have that level of foresight or for that matter hold back the greed to try to own the whole pie. Just watching what became of OS/2. By the time NT4 came out, it was pretty much over... NT4 was leaps and bounds nicer to work with than OS/2 had been, and the software much more plentiful.
Not that MS was much better in terms of monopolistic tendencies, they managed to leverage their position both better, and in many ways have better overall offerings. Then again, MS today is a poor shadow itself of what it could have been had they not tried to start leveraging their own desktop customers for pennies on the dollar. Linux will erode their market share over time, and frankly, I'm surprised that MS doesn't have an AppImage/Flatpak version of MS Office for Linux that they license. They still have relatively nice tools, and though their online versions mostly work, it's not nearly as good and a lot of the integrations are still clunky.
One point I was not aware of is that Gates offered to put IBM in touch with SCP for SCP-DOS, but IBM turned down the offer because it preferred a single source!
(It's understandable. Microsoft, even if tiny compared to IBM, was a real company with a real business model. SCP was just a couple of guys in one office.)
TL;DR: I believe the Datamaster should be considered part of the lineage of the ATX standard today.
The interesting thing I recently noticed about the Datamaster is that I believe this system's motherboard inadvertently (or deliberately) became the very first informal motherboard layout standard, a predecessor to the original IBM PC format. The Datamaster and PC are different architectures so it's not an architectural link, but it's clear that the same engineering group that designed the Datamaster's motherboard also had some amount of influence in the PC's motherboard layout. There's nothing magic about the Datamaster's layout, it's just very sensible: power in one corner, I/O slots near the rear edge, BIOS and RAM at the other end, CPU roughly in the middle of everything it has to talk to. But before the Datamaster, systems like the 5100 and System 36 used discrete boards that just plugged into a backplane with minimal logic on it. For the era of those systems that made sense, but those dense card connectors add cost and they add electrical noise to the system. A unified motherboard design was a true improvement in design that matched manufacturing improvements arriving in the late 1970's.
Similarly, there were loose standards like LPX in the 1990's which were never a formal design standard, but clearly every PC maker of that era was using the same logical riser-card design. Perhaps it was the same Taiwanese engineering firm doing the actual design work on the back end for everyone that generated LPX, or perhaps it was just working knowledge moving as individual engineers had success with various designs.
«
the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that
»
I really did not like...
«
he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants)
»
That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.
It's a very American viewpoint. I only discovered in recent years that in the rest of the world, the Amiga and ST did much better than at home.
I was a kid when this happened. The Mac launched when I was... 15 I think?
To a rounding error, nobody owned PCs in the UK. They were extremely expensive business machines. Nobody owned Apple II either, and Macs were for the seriously rich.
We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about. We aspired to Camputers and Elan and Memotech.
Nobody _wanted_ office equipment. Would you offer a child a stapler to play with? That's how fun the PC was.
Amigas were huge and very desirable and seen as a gift from the future -- see this article from 2 days ago:
I was horrified by the IBM PC. It was clearly a POS cut-down design being sold at an insanely inflated price, hidden behind an entirely fake base price invented for marketing only. The keyboard was good, but the rest of the spec was insulting, and a clear step back from the state of the art S-100 systems and the Apple II which were already handling colour and (for S-100) networking and limited multitasking.
The Amiga came later, and always looked like something from ten years in the future. It genuinely had a mid-90s aesthetic and promise in the late 80s.
The PC and Windows were both triumphs of worse-is-better corporate mediocrity and mass marketing over creative engineering.
It wasn't until the 486 multimedia clones arrived that prices became more reasonable and the hardware started to look competitive. But DOS and Windows always remained poor-to-mediocre - buggy, unreliable, messy, not secure, bizarrely user hostile - apart from a brief period downwind of NT when Windows was tolerable.
> « he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »
> That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.
It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari. Their relevance hung on in a couple of niche areas (like Atari with musicians), but outside of hobbyists, neither company mattered much and by 1995 they were both essentially dead from a commercial perspective. The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.
> It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari.
I got the same impression from the German trade press in 1991, which emphasized the openness, adaptability and standardization of the whole PC platform. I've learned a long time ago that the way to the truth is the way "through the archives"... anecdotes only go so far, and many markets differed wildly, even locally. In my personal circle in big city East Germany, the PC reigned supreme; Amigas were virtually nonexistant, albeit the machines being a huge hit in Germany, especially in the West. For us Easterners most of that can be traced back to accumulated pre-Wende experience with two main general-purpose computing platforms: Z80- as well as x86-machines (clones).
And I've yet to read a thorough, balanced, and clear-eyed comparative analysis of the Amiga and PC (as well as other) platforms, i. e. one that includes some serious market analysis.
> The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.
Bit harsh, lol. And you invited agriculture poetry! Albeit I've heard that many an old school Amiga lifer rejects those "Neomigas" (e. g. the Apollos) for one reason or another. Me, I liken these classics to music instruments, with their own specific capabilities and mythos, etc.
I often pondered about getting one of them, but I've just too much x86 poison in my veins. And putting a Vortex86 board or somesuch into an A600 case is just sacrilege. What would I give for a classy 32- bit x86 keyboard case computer...
> the corpses are kept upright as open source projects
I think you are looking at this not merely wrongly, but in reverse.
Gradually the PC compatible has paved over the entirety of desktop/laptop computing. It's like a farm: ripping out hedgerows, blasting with fertiliser and weedkillers and pesticides, trying to kill those pesky things stealing the land.
Those chemicals have turned the innocent IBM PC, a half-8-bit half-16-bit low-end box, into this vasty computing colossus, a mile across, chewing through kilotons of work and emitting heat and work.
And yet, all over that farm, in the wheel-ruts and in the cracks beside the farm buildings, a few of the weeds just keep on growing.
The men in suits have tried SO very hard to exterminate them and they just will not die.
And yet, if you raise your head and look outside the mega-farm, they are everywhere. Outside the farmland, where it's too steep to farm: vast forests of weird twisty weeds turned into trees.
In people's pockets (phones). By the sofa (tablets). In their cars and cookers and hearing aids and pacemakers. Tiny Archimedes, everywhere: Arm chips, outselling all x86 by hundreds to one.
Weird little CPU architectures, weird RTOSes and router OSes.
They cannot kill those weeds, however hard they try, and despite all their efforts, there will always be more weeds than crops.
It doesn’t match my experience either and I’m in the USA. The father of a friend of mine in high school had one of the early IBM PC with 5 1/4 disk drive at home - the father worked at IBM - this was a luxury at the time. I think only one classmate I knew had an Apple II at home. Our high school computer club had to go the community college to get access to DEC minicomputers for our first exposure to computers only a few years prior to that. Things changed quickly as competitors out, I bought a Commodore 64 as soon as I could, the cost difference between a C64 and IBM PC or even the Apple II was quite large. Later I got an Atari which was competing with the first Macintosh and Amiga.
If you have a few hours to kill, the Youtube Channel "Another Boring Topic" has a multi part series on the "rise and fall of the IBM PC". The comparatively short Part 1 is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er8wcWsG7sE
The Channel has similar video series on OS/2, VisiCalc, Microsoft Excel and early Windows (far from completion). The videos are generally very detailed and well researched, often contrasting accounts from different source or even reaching out to people involved.
The already slow pace of the channel has slowed down a lot. In an update video a while back, the author has announced that the background research for the IBM PC led down an unexpectedly deep rabbit hole and his script eventually spiraled into an unfinished book that will now probably turn into a two-parter itself.
Having lived through that time I find this article extremely accurate and focused on the important stuff.
I didn’t pay much attention to the PC at that point (I was programming Lispms, Dorados and KL-20s) but it was impossible to ignore.
In 10th grade (1985/86), I had a friend who worked in a small computer store. I was into computers so I dropped in one time to check it out. He introduced me to his boss and after a brief conversation he asked if I was interested in programming. I was. He loaned me a PC clone , let me borrow his car to get it home, and I was off.
I had exaggerated my knowledge (and my boss clearly knew that) so I skipped school the next few days and dug into the amazing manuals and got up to speed on DOS, on Clipper (a DBASE III compiler), and edlin and finished the task in a couple of weeks.
I took the pay and bought the computer and wrote Clipper programs for the next few years. Those nights spent staring at amber text were so satisfying. I’m very grateful to have been given that opportunity.
>> I took the pay and bought the computer
This was such a common experience for devs in these days! Even very experienced devs like Andy Hertzfeld talk about building software in exchange for hardware. We would have just spent the money on sw/hw, so it was just simpler :)
When you think of it, Apple (and so Jobs) have really missed the mark with the Apple III. The Apple II (1977) was really good with its expandability capacities, its keyboard, its monitor, its floppies drive and its good installed base. It was a very advanced machine. The PC is a kind of copy. So the Apple III (1980) should have been the one which became the market standard. It miserably flopped.
Commodore with the PET (1977) was a pioneer too with a good installed base but the CBM-II (1982) was a poor upgrade which had no internal cards connectors. Not very appealing. And the C64 was not quickly upgraded in the way it could have be.
And those three machines were stuck with the brilliant 6502 (1975) but which did not appeared into a 16 bits version until 1985 thanks to Commodore which did not really invested to develop MOS Technology.
So the choice of the 8088 8/16 bits CPU (1979) by IBM was really a game changer. It made the machine open to the future and viable. Another reason to choose it.
What happened to the little tramp with the walking stick? I had one of those sticks (as a biro) off an IBM salesperson, early to mid 80s, and IBM must have paid an ungodly amount to Chaplin for the IP.
But I really did love the IBM PC. And very sad about Don Estridge and his wife - if he had joined Apple they might still be alive today.
I quite clearly remember this magazine issue from the time.
A giant, god-like hand reaching out from the clouds. Tagline "THE JOLLY GIANT DELIVERS THE GOODS".
https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1706/Personal-Comput...
Not bad, but I like this one better: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/06/ibm-pc-history-part-...
And specifically for the IBM choosing Microsoft: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/why-ibm-turned-to-m...
In retrospect, I think IBM would have been much better off if it had done two things differently... Made the deal with MS such that any external sales had a minimal price with a kickback to IBM, and that IBM would license its BIOS directly to third party MFGs.
If they'd have done that, much like MS, they'd have a piece of every PC sale, not just their own hardware.
That said, I don't think IBM culture could ever have that level of foresight or for that matter hold back the greed to try to own the whole pie. Just watching what became of OS/2. By the time NT4 came out, it was pretty much over... NT4 was leaps and bounds nicer to work with than OS/2 had been, and the software much more plentiful.
Not that MS was much better in terms of monopolistic tendencies, they managed to leverage their position both better, and in many ways have better overall offerings. Then again, MS today is a poor shadow itself of what it could have been had they not tried to start leveraging their own desktop customers for pennies on the dollar. Linux will erode their market share over time, and frankly, I'm surprised that MS doesn't have an AppImage/Flatpak version of MS Office for Linux that they license. They still have relatively nice tools, and though their online versions mostly work, it's not nearly as good and a lot of the integrations are still clunky.
I wish somebody sold a remake of the original PC case for modern hardware. It’s such a great design.
One point I was not aware of is that Gates offered to put IBM in touch with SCP for SCP-DOS, but IBM turned down the offer because it preferred a single source!
(It's understandable. Microsoft, even if tiny compared to IBM, was a real company with a real business model. SCP was just a couple of guys in one office.)
I like the design, I like the content too. I wonder when I'll be able to make a homepage like this
Now? It's just a plain wordpress theme.
TL;DR: I believe the Datamaster should be considered part of the lineage of the ATX standard today.
The interesting thing I recently noticed about the Datamaster is that I believe this system's motherboard inadvertently (or deliberately) became the very first informal motherboard layout standard, a predecessor to the original IBM PC format. The Datamaster and PC are different architectures so it's not an architectural link, but it's clear that the same engineering group that designed the Datamaster's motherboard also had some amount of influence in the PC's motherboard layout. There's nothing magic about the Datamaster's layout, it's just very sensible: power in one corner, I/O slots near the rear edge, BIOS and RAM at the other end, CPU roughly in the middle of everything it has to talk to. But before the Datamaster, systems like the 5100 and System 36 used discrete boards that just plugged into a backplane with minimal logic on it. For the era of those systems that made sense, but those dense card connectors add cost and they add electrical noise to the system. A unified motherboard design was a true improvement in design that matched manufacturing improvements arriving in the late 1970's.
Datamaster motherboard (those are not ISA or "PC bus" slots): https://www.nf6x.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/IMG_3121....
Similarly, there were loose standards like LPX in the 1990's which were never a formal design standard, but clearly every PC maker of that era was using the same logical riser-card design. Perhaps it was the same Taiwanese engineering firm doing the actual design work on the back end for everyone that generated LPX, or perhaps it was just working knowledge moving as individual engineers had success with various designs.
Not bad. I don't like its tone of approval, TBH.
I much preferred the
« raucous bazaar, teeming with variety. »
I hate the way the PC
« the IBM PC and its successors paved over all of that »
I really did not like...
« he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »
That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.
It's a very American viewpoint. I only discovered in recent years that in the rest of the world, the Amiga and ST did much better than at home.
I was a kid when this happened. The Mac launched when I was... 15 I think?
To a rounding error, nobody owned PCs in the UK. They were extremely expensive business machines. Nobody owned Apple II either, and Macs were for the seriously rich.
We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about. We aspired to Camputers and Elan and Memotech.
Nobody _wanted_ office equipment. Would you offer a child a stapler to play with? That's how fun the PC was.
Amigas were huge and very desirable and seen as a gift from the future -- see this article from 2 days ago:
https://dfarq.homeip.net/amiga-1000-ten-years-ahead-of-its-t...
If you couldn't afford an Amiga, then the ST was a worthy competitor.
They were not some flop, some footnote of history. You can still buy new Amiga compatibles today from loads of vendors...
https://www.apollo-computer.com/v4standalone.php
https://www.a1200.com/index.php/the-a1200-ng/
The ST OS became FOSS and there are multiple modern versions:
https://emutos.sourceforge.io/
https://gitlab.com/AndreasK/Atari-Mac-MagiC-Sources
And don't neglect the Acorn Archimedes which stomped on both.
Its OS is FOSS now.
https://www.riscosopen.org/content/
Runs natively on Raspberry Pi. Other compatible new machines are being made and sold:
https://shop.elesar.co.uk/index.php?route=product/product&pr...
Sinclair's QL hardware still has compatible machines made today:
https://www.specnext.com/sinclair_ql-qs/
https://sinclairql.net/djw/q68/index.html
This stuff was nothing to be banished to a footnote, dusty unsold boxes with weird names or whatever.
I was horrified by the IBM PC. It was clearly a POS cut-down design being sold at an insanely inflated price, hidden behind an entirely fake base price invented for marketing only. The keyboard was good, but the rest of the spec was insulting, and a clear step back from the state of the art S-100 systems and the Apple II which were already handling colour and (for S-100) networking and limited multitasking.
The Amiga came later, and always looked like something from ten years in the future. It genuinely had a mid-90s aesthetic and promise in the late 80s.
The PC and Windows were both triumphs of worse-is-better corporate mediocrity and mass marketing over creative engineering.
It wasn't until the 486 multimedia clones arrived that prices became more reasonable and the hardware started to look competitive. But DOS and Windows always remained poor-to-mediocre - buggy, unreliable, messy, not secure, bizarrely user hostile - apart from a brief period downwind of NT when Windows was tolerable.
If you really want to compare it to something from the future, in the (very) late 1980s we already had NeXTSTEP.
> « he strange boxes at the electronics store labeled “Amiga” and “Atari ST” (the last gasps of dying giants) »
> That is not merely unfair, it's wrong.
It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari. Their relevance hung on in a couple of niche areas (like Atari with musicians), but outside of hobbyists, neither company mattered much and by 1995 they were both essentially dead from a commercial perspective. The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.
> It’s close enough. 1990 was pretty much the start of the end of Commodore and Atari.
I got the same impression from the German trade press in 1991, which emphasized the openness, adaptability and standardization of the whole PC platform. I've learned a long time ago that the way to the truth is the way "through the archives"... anecdotes only go so far, and many markets differed wildly, even locally. In my personal circle in big city East Germany, the PC reigned supreme; Amigas were virtually nonexistant, albeit the machines being a huge hit in Germany, especially in the West. For us Easterners most of that can be traced back to accumulated pre-Wende experience with two main general-purpose computing platforms: Z80- as well as x86-machines (clones).
And I've yet to read a thorough, balanced, and clear-eyed comparative analysis of the Amiga and PC (as well as other) platforms, i. e. one that includes some serious market analysis.
> The fact that the corpses are kept upright as open source projects doesn’t really change anything.
Bit harsh, lol. And you invited agriculture poetry! Albeit I've heard that many an old school Amiga lifer rejects those "Neomigas" (e. g. the Apollos) for one reason or another. Me, I liken these classics to music instruments, with their own specific capabilities and mythos, etc.
I often pondered about getting one of them, but I've just too much x86 poison in my veins. And putting a Vortex86 board or somesuch into an A600 case is just sacrilege. What would I give for a classy 32- bit x86 keyboard case computer...
> the corpses are kept upright as open source projects
I think you are looking at this not merely wrongly, but in reverse.
Gradually the PC compatible has paved over the entirety of desktop/laptop computing. It's like a farm: ripping out hedgerows, blasting with fertiliser and weedkillers and pesticides, trying to kill those pesky things stealing the land.
Those chemicals have turned the innocent IBM PC, a half-8-bit half-16-bit low-end box, into this vasty computing colossus, a mile across, chewing through kilotons of work and emitting heat and work.
And yet, all over that farm, in the wheel-ruts and in the cracks beside the farm buildings, a few of the weeds just keep on growing.
The men in suits have tried SO very hard to exterminate them and they just will not die.
And yet, if you raise your head and look outside the mega-farm, they are everywhere. Outside the farmland, where it's too steep to farm: vast forests of weird twisty weeds turned into trees.
In people's pockets (phones). By the sofa (tablets). In their cars and cookers and hearing aids and pacemakers. Tiny Archimedes, everywhere: Arm chips, outselling all x86 by hundreds to one.
Weird little CPU architectures, weird RTOSes and router OSes.
They cannot kill those weeds, however hard they try, and despite all their efforts, there will always be more weeds than crops.
It doesn’t match my experience either and I’m in the USA. The father of a friend of mine in high school had one of the early IBM PC with 5 1/4 disk drive at home - the father worked at IBM - this was a luxury at the time. I think only one classmate I knew had an Apple II at home. Our high school computer club had to go the community college to get access to DEC minicomputers for our first exposure to computers only a few years prior to that. Things changed quickly as competitors out, I bought a Commodore 64 as soon as I could, the cost difference between a C64 and IBM PC or even the Apple II was quite large. Later I got an Atari which was competing with the first Macintosh and Amiga.
> We used Sinclair and Oric and Acorn and other brands American writers have never even heard about.
And now every mobile phone has a little Acorn DNA in it...
And of course, in the UK, every school had at least one BBC Micro (about the only good thing Thatcher ever did).