You have to pay eternal attention to developments that could become a 10X factor in your business - Andy Grove - Only the Paranoid Survive
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A review of the first IBM PC tips up
From 30 years ago
Mon Aug 15 2011, 10:21
IF YOU WEREN'T a computer hobbyist 30 years ago, you probably haven't seen this before.
Our sister IT news web site V3.co.uk has dug up an exclusive review of the original IBM PC that was published in our sibling print magazine Personal Computer World in 1981. You can read it at the link. µ
Tags: Hardware
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and was obviously the package destined to take over, despite costing a fortune -- in those days, a loaded system easily ran to the luxury car range. Wasn't just IBM's enormous power in the market, but the PC was the first REAL computer, alongside which Apples, Commodore, and Tandys looked like the toys they were. For instance, the keyboard had its own microprocessor so that the main CPU wasn't bogged down scanning for a keypress. And its 8/16 bit CPU with ability to address a megabyte was exactly the increment advance needed back when 64K of memory was a couple hundred bucks, And because truly adequate, its basic design stood the test of time, scarcely revised except to be all put on one glue chip.
(And then for two decades M$ managed to slow progress to a near stop, and gets rewarded with hundreds of billions for doing so. Capitalism is all about money, isn't it?)
... what terms like “system unit”, “tractor feed” and “asynchronous communications adaptor” mean.
Also, what was the point of all the peripherals being interrupt-driven, when PC/MS-DOS did nothing but spin in a loop waiting for I/O to complete anyway? What OS that ran on a 5150 ever made use of async I/O?