3 ms·

And as history shows, doesn't matter much - users don't care how many chips are in their computers. It just has to be cheap and run the software they want to u

• rbanffy 16y ago
  Engineers like me care. I find it disturbing that my computer has, somewhere inside its sleek and modern body, a complete IBM 5150, with its ISA bus, serial ports, real-time clock, keyboard micro-controller (with that horrendous A20 hack so that the 286 it can emulate can switch between user and whatever mode OS/2 1.0 would need to run) and CGA display adapter ready to boot up PC-DOS from something it thinks is an MFM hard disk. The only thing missing is Microsoft's BASIC burned in ROM. It's offensive. Really. I have a collection of 80's and 90's computers. No computer in the collection is as inelegant as the IBM PC and its clones. Many of them (original Mac, Apple II - despite the chip count - Ataris) are absolute works of art. Sheer elegance in their simplicity.