25 Apr
2008
25 Apr
'08
6:42 a.m.
Fred Cisin wrote:
Which is odd - other machines of the time had better expansion options and
better features out of the box. All the PC really brought was 16-bit power
(when most machines were doing an adequate job on 8 bits). I'm not really
quite sure what IBM were thinking... (unless they really did see that their
marketing clout would make the machine successful regardless, and issues such
as cost and performance would be redundant)
I'm not sure I'd buy a 5150 ever now, unless one fell in my lap - I think I
could be talked into handing over cash for a 5160 though.
cheers
Jules
On Thu, 24 Apr 2008, Jules Richardson wrote:
Who was IBM's competition at the time? I mean, were they up against someone
where it was necessary to get the product out the door as soon as possible, or
with hindsight could they have delayed launch a few months in order to get
some of the bigger software vendors on board?
(I'm not sure that CPU cost came into it - was a 68k really so much more than
an 8088 that it would have mattered on a machine costing close on $2k?)
Why they didn't do a lot of things when it
came to the PC's design is beyond
me (even down to the choice of CPU - wasn't the m68k generally available by
the 1981 launch of the 5150?)
THAT was a deliberate decision.
Although it was "obvious" that 68000 was a "better" processor, there
was
software for intel line. Programs such as Wordstar and SuperCalc were
running on it in weeks. Some of the
choices seem to have been typical revenue maximisation, but there
appears to have been some real boneheaded design decisions in there too (even
in a "the PC was supposed to just be an intelligent terminal" context, let
alone as a standalone desktop machine)
Agreed!
Their initial target seemed to be as a "home" computer, sitting on the
living room rug with the kids playing with it. I'd still
like to get hold of another genuine 5160 I think.
There are a few cubic yards of
stuff on top of my 5150. I wonder if I'll
ever get around to digging it out.