Talk:Influence of the IBM PC on the personal computer market

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Copyedit[edit]

Enhanced readability and a bit of the grammar. Removed some unnecessary text which destroyed the flow of the article.Maybe other editors can improve it further.EaswarH (talk) 17:07, 27 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I performed a general copy-edit, tightening up the article and fixing grammar and style issues. I also made two notable content edits: I changed a section about the Apple Macintosh to have a more neutral tone (while still highlighting the fact that current Macs are very strongly influenced by the IBM PC's hardware), and I moved the Sun-1 and Sun-2 computers from the general list of non-x86 systems to the "enduring legacies" paragraph of that section. Those two architectures are direct predecessors to today's Sun-4m and Sun-4v SPARC-based systems, and the SunOS that ran on the Sun-1 lead to today's Solaris 10 (also known as SunOS 5.10). Macwhiz (talk) 03:12, 18 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Article topic is wrong[edit]

The article say "Influence of the IBM-PC on the PC market". But the PC markets were non-existing then. The correct article is "Influence of the IBM-PC on the personal computer market". Even that the PC stands for "Personal Computer", it was IBM's trademark for their own personal computer. IBM could not get copyright for two letters synonym so it was needed to be more. So they copyrighted the "IBM PC". Thats why we call todays computers as PC and others like Apple's as Macintosh or just Mac's because they are two different class of personal computers. Golftheman (talk) 14:56, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, I actually agree with you, but it would make the (already long) title awfully long. Let me think this over... Mahjongg (talk) 20:46, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
What about "the PC's influence on the Personal Computer market", thats not that much longer, and still conveys the essence better. Mahjongg (talk) 20:53, 10 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Okay done, added "IBM-" to make the point clearer. Mahjongg (talk) 23:38, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Why the hyphen? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Pantergraph (talk • contribs) 16:42, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, perhaps my knowledge of English is insufficient, (its not my first language) but according to a dictionary "the hyphen sign ('-') is used to join words to indicate that they have a combined meaning", so I assume I did it to indicate that the combination of the words "IBM" and "PC" combine to form the new meaning "IBM-PC", which is simply short-form for IBM Personal Computer but this would make an already overly long title even longer. There is no real reason for the hyphen, its unimportant, for most readers there is no true difference between "IBM-PC" and "IBM PC". Mahjongg (talk) 22:21, 21 December 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The title is wrong for another reason. The market, prior to the introduction of the IBM PC, was a microcomputer market, not a personal computer market. The distinction is important (and missing from the article) because several of the pre-IBM computers were multi-user, using (as I recall) Xenix or similar operating systems. It might be worth noting in the article that the IBM entry helped legitimize the very idea of a 'personal' computer. 71.105.211.204 (talk) 15:24, 17 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Everythign with a microprocessor is a microcomputer. The reason IBM decided to build their own model personal computer was to join the marketplace pioneered by such entities as Apple, Radio Shack, Commodore and even Heathkit. Lots of personal computers sold before IBM joined thegame. --Wtshymanski (talk) 21:21, 20 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]


Clones[edit]

It would be interesting to compare the IBM PC clones to the Apple II clones of only a few years before; these had the drawback of (mostly) needed an illegal copy of the EPROMs of a genuine Apple II to be useful, but were incredibly widespread in the late '70s and early '80s. And going back even further, think about the IBM plug-compatible mainframes and peripherals made by second-source vendors, hanging off the coattails of the IBM 360/370 series. If you're any good, you'll get copies. --Wtshymanski (talk) 14:47, 20 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is "EEPROM not EPROM, and I believe BIOS is a less confusing term. The Apple II clones are important, if only because of Apple vs Franklin Computer (1983) set legal precedent, IBM did not bring it's BIOS copyright violations to court, they settled. I'm not sure of any other clones (not in the U.S.) besides the Vtech Laser series, and I'm not sure how Apple considered the foreign clones that may have been outside its legal authority (South America? Eastern Europe or USSR?)

"Before the IBM PC" section[edit]

It states:

"Before the IBM PC was introduced, the personal computer market was dominated by systems using the 6502 and Z80 8-bit microprocessors, such as the Commodore 64 and Apple II series"

IBM PC was introduced in 1981, but C64 was introduces a year later. I don't see how could C64 dominate the market. BytEfLUSh | Talk! 20:19, 5 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I see your point, this could have been a predecessor of the C64, like the Commodore VIC-20 or maybe the Commodore PET, or any of the many other 6502 based systems at the time.Mahjongg (talk) 11:01, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Decline of influence[edit]

Could also be an interesting history of the decline of influence. Already in mid-1980s, the Lotus-Intel-Microsoft Expanded Memory specification did an end-run around IBM. When the PS/2 came out in 1987, the VGA video specification, the 3½ inch diskette, and the small mouse and keyboard connectors quickly became standard across the PC industry, but ABIOS and the MCA bus did not catch on, and OS/2 conspicuously failed to supplant DOS. From that point on, Microsoft gradually gained ascendancy, pretty much sealing the deal with the release of Windows 3.1... AnonMoos (talk) 17:10, 13 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

sorry to ask, I know what Micro Channel Architecture is, but what is ABIOS, the link ABIOS simply redirects to BIOS? is it perhaps "Advance BIOS"? but what does that mean? Mahjongg (talk) 00:44, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Some explanation on PS/2 article... AnonMoos (talk) 03:40, 14 December 2011 (UTC)[reply]

More MS-DOS OEMs[edit]

The article mentions various OEM versions of MS-DOS including the hardware they were used on. Here is an incomplete list of additional MS-DOS OEMs (omitting those already mentioned in the article and those known to be runable on generic IBM-compatible hardware):

  • Compaq
  • AT&T
  • Tandon
  • AST
  • Asem
  • Hantarex
  • SystemsLine
  • Packard-Bell
  • Intercomp
  • Unibit
  • Unidata
  • Sperry IT / Unisys
  • Olivetti
  • Toshiba
  • Commodore
  • Computerland
  • Eagle
  • Leading Edge
  • Phoenix

If we determine the corresponding hardware products, where these versions were used for, we can add them to the article's list. Note, however, that not all of these OEM versions may have been tailored towards specific non-IBM compatible hardware, some of them just might have been modified or enhanced software versions of MS-DOS for IBM compatible hardware. Details still need to be researched. --Matthiaspaul (talk) 11:26, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

In principle, there wasn't supposed to be a "generic" MS DOS and every version was supposed to come from the hardware manufacturer. Certainly if you were having trouble with ??-DOS, you weren't supposed to call Microsoft but instead your hardware provider. The upper limit on this list is then the set of all hardware manufacturers, which would be long and duplicate some other list we surely have here. It would be slightly more interesting, I think, if we could get references classifying MS DOS versions as to how customized they were to the hardware. Something like the Hyperion, with significant hardware differences (video chip, floppy chip and serial port, at least) was a much more customized version of MS DOS than the one your local computer store sold with their name on the label of a Microsoft OEM box of disks.
But this is probably a little off topic for this article unless we can describe the fact that if it wasn't a virtual second source of an IBM PC, it was going to go extinct in the marketplace at a much faster rate..
Looking back at all this 30 years later, I have a hard time explaining what all the fuss was about...my word, we used crappy computers in those days. --Wtshymanski (talk) 19:40, 8 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
The function of the list is simply to show that IBM was just one of the many makers of PC that used an OEM version of MS-DOS, and that their PC certainly wasn't that much better than all the rest, not at least to a degree that explains it dominance in the market. Some were significantly better in some aspects (especially graphics), while other simply were worse. This is certainly true if you disregard the improvements to software that were possible when writing it for one specific architecture, instead of using CP/M like mechanisms, (as for example used in Wordstar) the specifically for a certain architecture written software like lotus 1-2-3 made the IBM-PC look much better than the competition, while inherently the same software could also have been written for the hardware of other architectures just as well. So it wasn't that the hardware of the IBM system was so special, but only that the software written for it was better than software written not for a specific hardware platform. It means that the reason the X86 and MS-DOS using IBM-PC was chosen as the machine to copy, (and thus its version of MS-DOS became the MS-DOS) is a historical coincidence that has little to do with the inherent qualities of its design but much more with its market position. This situation then begs the question what would have happened if the best machine had become the "standard", instead of the machine with the largest marketing clout behind it. But that is all water under the bridge. I agree that this list should not grow to include all machines on which PC-DOS couldn't run because of some (small) hardware incompatibility, machines like the Amstrad PC-1512 for example do not belong in the list, as Amstrad tried to be as much compatible with the IBM-PC as at that time it was well known that any "clone" was only viable when it could run unaltered the software written for an IMB-PC. The Hyperion also tried to copy the design of the IBM PC, but at the time they probably didn't fully grasp yet that 99% compatible was just as bad as not compatible at all, and thus I vie that it should be included, especially because its version of MS-DOS was sold under its own name as H-DOS. And yes, looking back we have come a long way from these first "crappy systems", it took literally decades before major design flaws in the IMB-PC could be removed without breaking backwards compatibility. Mahjongg (talk) 01:45, 9 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]
maybe Mahjongg, but that discussion belongs on the "MS-DOS" and Microsoft and "PC-compatible" wiki-articles and maybe abbreviated versions on others. Besides Compaq and their initial product, the Compaq Portable, there were Eagle Computer's 1600, Control Data Product's MFC 1600, Corona Data Systems' MS-DOS computer, the Seequa Chameleon, Digital came out with three "PCs" including the Rainbow 100, which weren't compatible enough, many others! Immediately when IBM used off-the-shelf parts, they did not use Digital Research's CP/M as standard, and MS-DOS was allowed to license DOS to other companies, tons of computer makers took notice, many who previously put out CP/M computers. If anything, the main story is Compaq's success, then Phoenix Technologies BIOS (they also put out a clone of their own), following the IBM PC. You take your view in hindsight (as many tech journalists and "bloggers" on the internet did) about the rise of the clones and MS-DOS, and the history of Linux and the Free Software and Open Source movements (also now called FOSS) in reaction, which seems strangely ignored by you, although those stories are told in other articles. It's easier to write about how IBM thought it could resist this tide with OS/2 and Micro Channel Architecture. But the lack of IBM's control of the market after the IBM PC came out the Lack of Influence is the real story here, making this article redundant.

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