5 ms·

For context, when these machines were being sold, nobody even thought about performance in these terms. It is only later that we are benchmarking old machines

For context, when these machines were being sold, nobody even thought about performance in these terms. It is only later that we are benchmarking old machines to understand the performance gaps, and if you weren't there, you might think this was relevant at the time. Generally, in the mid 80s, you needed base performance (8088/8086) or "3 times as fast" performance (80286) when the AT came about. Compaq (now HP) became the real competitor to IBM PC/XT because the end user could understand that they ran at 8 MHz vs the PC 4.77 Mhz. This is as much performance issues that the users would want to know. Better performance without needing to buy an AT. Then the clones came about, and everybody started to put a "turbo" button on front of the clone PC. My first degree was in finance and accounting, but I fell in love with technology, so I sold PCs out of the biggest gray marketer in Seattle when the PC AT (second real computer for business) was coming out. I have first hand knowledge of the buying behavior because I was on the front lines of computer sales, and made a ton of good money selling $2-5K computers to people walking in off the street. The advent of the PC revolution was all about apps. I'm not saying that there weren't benchmarks, and maybe you'd find a savvy buyer that subscribed to Byte magazine, but these were far and few between. Tandy simply didn't have Lotus 1-2-3. The PC Junior wasn't a performance issue, but the term "Junior" just killed the thing out of the gate. The investment in a PC was a lot of money, and you weren't going to get a Junior, you were going to get a real PC. (For instance, the keyboard was much more impactful than any performance thoughts.) Finally, for those not around, storage was an incredible change agent. A lot of people think an SSD in a client platform is pretty cool. However, you cannot image the step up that a hard drive provided versus a floppy drive. The PC Junior and Tandy had no real hard drive path. While IBM had hard drive specific model (XT), the effort to install a hard drive in a PC was pretty small because of the accessibility. An open architecture, which any home builder takes for granted today, was pretty revolutionary at the time, and IBM's willingness to allow plug-ins (where they followed Woz) caused it to cremate the competition with a peripheral market.

justin66 8y ago
> I'm not saying that there weren't benchmarks, and maybe you'd find a savvy buyer that subscribed to Byte magazine, but these were far and few between. In 1982 Byte magazine had 420,000 subscribers. They might not have been the sort who bought from you and your store.
- theologic 8y ago
  Let's use 1985-1986 because that's when I was active at the store. There were about 8M computers sold, and assuming Byte continued to sell at around 400K copies, this mean that there were 5% subscribers to every PC bought, or 1 out of 20. My guess is that sounds approximately correct for my hit rate. There were more pubs, but I bet that there were a lot of overlap for magazine subscriptions. If you subscribed to Byte, you probably had a good hit rate for also being a subscriber to PC Mag, so the spread probably wasn't a ton wider. What I do remember was that Consumer Reports came out with a recommended PC. They loved the Leading Edge. Consumer Reports was a bit of cult back then and I bet their subscription base was in the millions (where does one find the subscribers for magazines in 1985?). When Consumer Reports suggested something, the word got around. I remember people coming in asking for LE, but Ballard Computer had the franchise and was back ordered like 3 months. Now that was power to influence the end buyer.
  - justin66 8y ago
    > There were about 8M computers sold, and assuming Byte continued to sell at around 400K copies, this mean that there were 5% subscribers to every PC bought, or 1 out of 20. Well, that's deceptive. How many of those computers were purchased by a buyer for a business? (again, a population of buyers you might have had little or no exposure to) The ratio of subscribers to PCs purchased would certainly be higher. It's not like there's anything hugely wrong with anything you're saying, but I was a kid who read Byte magazine and discussed benchmarking with adults, and I don't think we were all total freaks of nature or something. (that said, a benchmark measuring the execution time of a specific operation definitely represents the far side of wonkiness)
    - theologic 8y ago
      1. The market for PCs were virtually 100% business buyers in 1985. The non-business buyer would buy Apple IIs, which I didn't sell. I had a lot of small business and/or individual businesses. Large businesses like Boeing would obviously go through central procurement unless desperate for a PC , which absolutely would happen from time to time. 2. By the way, my 5% estimate on Byte saturation for my buyers is probably is too high. Refresh cycles were about 3 years back then, and there were roughly 11M PC bought in 1983 and 1984. There was around 8M PCs bought in 1985. So around 19M users of which 8M were buyers in 1985, which is where Byte was selling around 400K subscriptions. Therefore, the saturation rate of Byte magazine to PC users was roughly 400K/19M = 2.1%. 3. I loved your line "but I was a kid who read Byte magazine and discussed benchmarking with adults, and I don't think we were all total freaks of nature or something." Actually a young kid reading Byte magazine to discuss benchmarks with adults was a freak at the time. I should know because I was one, probably the same as you.
moozinga 8y ago
At the time, price was everything. With the latest and greatest PC often $4000 and up, or in the $8000 and up range when the 386 came along, if you could get a Packard Bell for $1000 then you’d take it.
brudgers 8y ago
the effort to install a hard drive in a PC was pretty small Relative to today, it was non-trivial though physical access tended to be easier. http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#II.D.1 http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#II.D.1
- jarcane 8y ago
  Sure it's harder than today, but you have to remember that at the time, almost no computers were "plug it in and go". Many of the 8-bit era home computers up to that point, if they were upgradable at all, might require actual solder for internal upgrades. There were exceptions, like the Apple II and the old S-100 systems, but it wasn't common. Going to the IBM, where everything was cards and cables and plugs, was a big step. Also, the Tandy 1000 is bad example there because they were notorious for weird hardware incompatibilities and funky proprietary parts.
  - brudgers 8y ago
    Ordinarily, I wouldn't have used the Tandy 1000 as an example. But it's one of the computers in the article, and anyway, the complexity of adding hard disks to a T1000 is only linearly higher than the complexity of adding hard disks to a standard PC of the era. Getting compatible controller cards, setting jumpers and configuring IRQ's was always involved when installing a hard drive (or video card or anything else) up until some time after Windows 95 a decade or so later.
    - dugmartin 8y ago
      I don’t remember it being that hard - I had a Tandy 1000SX and I bought a 3rd party hardrive that was mounted on an extension card so that it took up two slots. I can still hear the sounds that disk made (sort of like a spray paint can being shook) when it was seeking and the “clunk!” it made when you ran the park command.
      - brudgers 8y ago
        Sorry for not being clear. My comment about difficulty was relative to installing a "hard drive" today. Back in those days, reading manuals and modifying configurations was normal and expected. In the mid 90's I rescued a PS2 8580 with a huge 20MB disk that sounded like a washing machine...$8500 brand new. Loved the Model M keyboard -- though didn't know what it was at the time -- and kept it well into the 00's.
pedasmith 8y ago
Where I worked (a digital electronics simulation company in the late 1980's), we said that PC's had "user interface MIPs" but not "CPU MIPs". A VAX 11/780 (size of a refrigerator) had more CPU power, but access was via RS232 link to a VT100 terminal. These could be pretty slow: it wasn't unusual to type a command line and wait up to 10 seconds (or a minute, in really bad times) to get a response. And a graph could easily take a minute to fully display on a VT240 graphics terminal. A PC on the other hand had "user interface MIPs" and could display a graph instantly. What the PC couldn't do is run our very large, 32-bit required simulation code. (As far as how easy it was to add a hard drive: at the time, to add a new disk to a sun station, you had to recompile the kernel)
- walshemj 8y ago
  Sounds like you where using an overloaded VAX then the PR!ME 550 (similar tech and a competitor to VAX) we had at my fist job never had such sluggish performance. And Vt240 was very much noddy graphics high end then was insanely expensive vector systems from HP os Tectronix
  - pedasmith 8y ago
    Twenty programmers on one vax and actually doing the simulations is CPU intensive. The VT240 is what our customers had (and they are expensive enough all by themselves; a single VT340 in 1991 was $3600.
    - walshemj 8y ago
      20 people all running intensive programs well I am not surprised sounds like you needed a bigger vax or more vixen.
      - pedasmith 8y ago
        Our vax cost $500,000. It's not something you just get more of :-)
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
com2kid 8y ago
> so I sold PCs out of the biggest gray marketer in Seattle when the PC AT (second real computer for business) was coming out. I have first hand knowledge of the buying behavior because I was on the front lines of computer sales, and made a ton of good money selling $2-5K computers to people walking in off the street. Which store? I'm wondering if my first PC may have come from you. :) I remember it was a place in Georgetown, a 386 that came with DR DOS.
- theologic 8y ago
  Computer and Applications in Bellevue on NE 8th, by the old John Dantz theater. I was there from 1985 to 1986, then I went back to the UW to get my EE degree. I had all types of people, and the the occasional Microsofter, as customers. We sold IBM and Compaq gray market. We tried to go legit with Acorn (GEM) and Multitech, which turned into Acer. However, as I understand it, the owner was selling so much gray IBM offered him a dealership after I left. I got my EE degree, already had a degree in accounting and finance, and eventually went to work for the IBM PC company, which was very strange considering I started off selling them gray market. I started before the 386 and the PS-2, so I was probably back in school when you were buying.
WalterBright 8y ago
When the press said it had a "chiclet" keyboard, the perjorative stuck and doomed the PCjr. (It was probably doomed anyway. Nobody wanted a crippled PC.)
- jonhendry18 8y ago
  Mostly it stuck because it was appropriate. Not a keyboard anyone would want to use for actual work. I had a "computer module" for the Intellivision game console, with a similar keyboard. It was bad for that, and I barely used the thing it was so useless. IBM really ought to have offered a normal keyboard option, with the chiclet as a deeply-cut-price accessory "for the kids to use for games".
  - WalterBright 8y ago
    Yes, the keyboard was insulting. Ironically, today's keyboards are mostly chiclet keyboards, but they hide it with a normal keyboard facade.
    - jonhendry18 8y ago
      I think the switch action is somewhat better now, though. Probably an improvement in the materials used. Scissor switches might help a little, even though the underlying electrical contact mechanism is similar. At least with scissors the feel isn't purely based on the behavior of rubber.

justin66 8y ago

> I'm not saying that there weren't benchmarks, and maybe you'd find a savvy buyer that subscribed to Byte magazine, but these were far and few between. In 1982 Byte magazine had 420,000 subscribers. They might not have been the sort who bought from you and your store.

theologic 8y ago
Let's use 1985-1986 because that's when I was active at the store. There were about 8M computers sold, and assuming Byte continued to sell at around 400K copies, this mean that there were 5% subscribers to every PC bought, or 1 out of 20. My guess is that sounds approximately correct for my hit rate. There were more pubs, but I bet that there were a lot of overlap for magazine subscriptions. If you subscribed to Byte, you probably had a good hit rate for also being a subscriber to PC Mag, so the spread probably wasn't a ton wider. What I do remember was that Consumer Reports came out with a recommended PC. They loved the Leading Edge. Consumer Reports was a bit of cult back then and I bet their subscription base was in the millions (where does one find the subscribers for magazines in 1985?). When Consumer Reports suggested something, the word got around. I remember people coming in asking for LE, but Ballard Computer had the franchise and was back ordered like 3 months. Now that was power to influence the end buyer.
- justin66 8y ago
  > There were about 8M computers sold, and assuming Byte continued to sell at around 400K copies, this mean that there were 5% subscribers to every PC bought, or 1 out of 20. Well, that's deceptive. How many of those computers were purchased by a buyer for a business? (again, a population of buyers you might have had little or no exposure to) The ratio of subscribers to PCs purchased would certainly be higher. It's not like there's anything hugely wrong with anything you're saying, but I was a kid who read Byte magazine and discussed benchmarking with adults, and I don't think we were all total freaks of nature or something. (that said, a benchmark measuring the execution time of a specific operation definitely represents the far side of wonkiness)
  - theologic 8y ago
    1. The market for PCs were virtually 100% business buyers in 1985. The non-business buyer would buy Apple IIs, which I didn't sell. I had a lot of small business and/or individual businesses. Large businesses like Boeing would obviously go through central procurement unless desperate for a PC , which absolutely would happen from time to time. 2. By the way, my 5% estimate on Byte saturation for my buyers is probably is too high. Refresh cycles were about 3 years back then, and there were roughly 11M PC bought in 1983 and 1984. There was around 8M PCs bought in 1985. So around 19M users of which 8M were buyers in 1985, which is where Byte was selling around 400K subscriptions. Therefore, the saturation rate of Byte magazine to PC users was roughly 400K/19M = 2.1%. 3. I loved your line "but I was a kid who read Byte magazine and discussed benchmarking with adults, and I don't think we were all total freaks of nature or something." Actually a young kid reading Byte magazine to discuss benchmarks with adults was a freak at the time. I should know because I was one, probably the same as you.

moozinga 8y ago

At the time, price was everything. With the latest and greatest PC often $4000 and up, or in the $8000 and up range when the 386 came along, if you could get a Packard Bell for $1000 then you’d take it.

brudgers 8y ago

the effort to install a hard drive in a PC was pretty small Relative to today, it was non-trivial though physical access tended to be easier. http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#II.D.1 http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#II.D.1

jarcane 8y ago
Sure it's harder than today, but you have to remember that at the time, almost no computers were "plug it in and go". Many of the 8-bit era home computers up to that point, if they were upgradable at all, might require actual solder for internal upgrades. There were exceptions, like the Apple II and the old S-100 systems, but it wasn't common. Going to the IBM, where everything was cards and cables and plugs, was a big step. Also, the Tandy 1000 is bad example there because they were notorious for weird hardware incompatibilities and funky proprietary parts.
- brudgers 8y ago
  Ordinarily, I wouldn't have used the Tandy 1000 as an example. But it's one of the computers in the article, and anyway, the complexity of adding hard disks to a T1000 is only linearly higher than the complexity of adding hard disks to a standard PC of the era. Getting compatible controller cards, setting jumpers and configuring IRQ's was always involved when installing a hard drive (or video card or anything else) up until some time after Windows 95 a decade or so later.
  - dugmartin 8y ago
    I don’t remember it being that hard - I had a Tandy 1000SX and I bought a 3rd party hardrive that was mounted on an extension card so that it took up two slots. I can still hear the sounds that disk made (sort of like a spray paint can being shook) when it was seeking and the “clunk!” it made when you ran the park command.
    - brudgers 8y ago
      Sorry for not being clear. My comment about difficulty was relative to installing a "hard drive" today. Back in those days, reading manuals and modifying configurations was normal and expected. In the mid 90's I rescued a PS2 8580 with a huge 20MB disk that sounded like a washing machine...$8500 brand new. Loved the Model M keyboard -- though didn't know what it was at the time -- and kept it well into the 00's.

pedasmith 8y ago

Where I worked (a digital electronics simulation company in the late 1980's), we said that PC's had "user interface MIPs" but not "CPU MIPs". A VAX 11/780 (size of a refrigerator) had more CPU power, but access was via RS232 link to a VT100 terminal. These could be pretty slow: it wasn't unusual to type a command line and wait up to 10 seconds (or a minute, in really bad times) to get a response. And a graph could easily take a minute to fully display on a VT240 graphics terminal. A PC on the other hand had "user interface MIPs" and could display a graph instantly. What the PC couldn't do is run our very large, 32-bit required simulation code. (As far as how easy it was to add a hard drive: at the time, to add a new disk to a sun station, you had to recompile the kernel)

walshemj 8y ago
Sounds like you where using an overloaded VAX then the PR!ME 550 (similar tech and a competitor to VAX) we had at my fist job never had such sluggish performance. And Vt240 was very much noddy graphics high end then was insanely expensive vector systems from HP os Tectronix
- pedasmith 8y ago
  Twenty programmers on one vax and actually doing the simulations is CPU intensive. The VT240 is what our customers had (and they are expensive enough all by themselves; a single VT340 in 1991 was $3600.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    20 people all running intensive programs well I am not surprised sounds like you needed a bigger vax or more vixen.
    - pedasmith 8y ago
      Our vax cost $500,000. It's not something you just get more of :-)
- jonhendry18 8y ago

com2kid 8y ago

> so I sold PCs out of the biggest gray marketer in Seattle when the PC AT (second real computer for business) was coming out. I have first hand knowledge of the buying behavior because I was on the front lines of computer sales, and made a ton of good money selling $2-5K computers to people walking in off the street. Which store? I'm wondering if my first PC may have come from you. :) I remember it was a place in Georgetown, a 386 that came with DR DOS.

theologic 8y ago
Computer and Applications in Bellevue on NE 8th, by the old John Dantz theater. I was there from 1985 to 1986, then I went back to the UW to get my EE degree. I had all types of people, and the the occasional Microsofter, as customers. We sold IBM and Compaq gray market. We tried to go legit with Acorn (GEM) and Multitech, which turned into Acer. However, as I understand it, the owner was selling so much gray IBM offered him a dealership after I left. I got my EE degree, already had a degree in accounting and finance, and eventually went to work for the IBM PC company, which was very strange considering I started off selling them gray market. I started before the 386 and the PS-2, so I was probably back in school when you were buying.

WalterBright 8y ago

When the press said it had a "chiclet" keyboard, the perjorative stuck and doomed the PCjr. (It was probably doomed anyway. Nobody wanted a crippled PC.)

jonhendry18 8y ago
Mostly it stuck because it was appropriate. Not a keyboard anyone would want to use for actual work. I had a "computer module" for the Intellivision game console, with a similar keyboard. It was bad for that, and I barely used the thing it was so useless. IBM really ought to have offered a normal keyboard option, with the chiclet as a deeply-cut-price accessory "for the kids to use for games".
- WalterBright 8y ago
  Yes, the keyboard was insulting. Ironically, today's keyboards are mostly chiclet keyboards, but they hide it with a normal keyboard facade.
  - jonhendry18 8y ago
    I think the switch action is somewhat better now, though. Probably an improvement in the materials used. Scissor switches might help a little, even though the underlying electrical contact mechanism is similar. At least with scissors the feel isn't purely based on the behavior of rubber.