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On the other hand, like natural mass extinctions, this created new niches for diversity to explode. The pre-PC retail market was by necessity constrained. Mai

by hakfoo 5y ago

On the other hand, like natural mass extinctions, this created new niches for diversity to explode. The pre-PC retail market was by necessity constrained. Main-street retailers had to stock so many distinct platforms that they couldn't go deep on any one of them. If you wanted anything beyond the first-party disc drive or the top 10 software packages, you're stuck looking for specialist dealers or mail order, which was a significant barrier to entry for new users. A single dominant PC platform made the late-80s-90s-early-2000s model of "white box" computer retail feasible. They could offer a greater assortment of IBM-compatible software and peripherals, while taking less risk that you'd be stranded with dead inventory. This, in turn, supported a galaxy of small software firms and hardware manufacturers.

pjmlp 5y ago
And with the margins gone almost to negative numbers, now we are back to those pre-IBM PC form factors.
- cable2600 5y ago
  We are in the Post-PC age with mobile devices and Raspberry PIs. The PC is almost dead as Windows 11 requires newer CPUs and TPM 2.0 that won't run on a majority of older PCs. Apple is a trillion dollar company for a reason, their tech is Post-PC, people want easy to use iPad Pros than a Surface Pro. People want iPhones and the MacOS has evolved to the point that it can be ported to ARM chips.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    I was the only guy with a PC on our group, everyone else had Amigas, it was just due to some circustances that I upgraded from a Timex 2068 into a 386SX instead of an Amiga 500. So I am kind of biased to those non-IBM PC form factors anyway.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    Too bad you cannot do any serious development on mobile devices.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Not every device must have an IDE plugged into it. In any case, there are coding environments available for not-serious development on the go, and then there are laptops.
Ekaros 5y ago
One also wonders would we have Linux without PC? Unix sure, but would they stay as massive number of slightly different versions on multitude of platforms?
- oblio 5y ago
  Linux required cheap computing. PCs were the cheapest extensible general computing available on the market, and they were available in abundance.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
On the other other hand, standardisation on a very poor standard cost the global economy $large_number of billions in wasted time, poor performance, poor security and - let's not forget - incredibly high prices and low specs compared to existing alternatives. Standardisation had already happened in the S100 space. What IBM introduced was mass marketing to businesses. The technology was incidental. Apple already had a consumer dealer network, Amiga/Atari/Acorn had already made inroads, and there would have been a shake-out and consolidation. Without the PC it's likely some other manufacturer - possibly even Compaq - would have jumped on S100 instead and commoditised it. Probably with 68k and maybe Concurrent CP/M and/or BSD. It only needed one company to make the marketing leap. So standardisation was likely inevitable. Sales growth might have been slower, with more churn for consumer/gaming machines. But the technology would have started from a higher base. And it wouldn't have been held back by the miserably poor design of Intel hardware and MS software, both of which regressed existing levels of tech by at least a decade. The worst thing about the PC was that it established such low user expectations: slow, ugly, crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, stability, and reliability, and "standard" software products that were even worse.
- oblio 5y ago
  That not how anything works. Businesses wanted anything, literally any working product. The competition mostly stood there in their ivory towers (NeXT was the best representative of this), shrugged their noses at the folks that needed cheap computers for, you know, the computing revolution and over time, keeled over. > slow, ugly, crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, stability, and reliability, and "standard" software products that were even worse Yet they worked and they were cheap. Slow didn't matter because they worked. Ugly didn't matter because they worked. "Crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, , stability, and reliability, and 'standard' software products that were even worse" didn't matter because they worked and nobody truly cares about security as the main ongoing concern. Stability was good enough. Reliability was good enough. The standards were good enough. And the main thing, I repeat this: PCs were CHEAP. Anything I can't afford might as well not exist on the planet. It's not there. I can't do anything with it. Companies could afford PCs and they did what was needed. Not what some people thought would be needed, they did what was actually needed.

by hakfoo 5y ago

pjmlp 5y ago

And with the margins gone almost to negative numbers, now we are back to those pre-IBM PC form factors.

cable2600 5y ago
We are in the Post-PC age with mobile devices and Raspberry PIs. The PC is almost dead as Windows 11 requires newer CPUs and TPM 2.0 that won't run on a majority of older PCs. Apple is a trillion dollar company for a reason, their tech is Post-PC, people want easy to use iPad Pros than a Surface Pro. People want iPhones and the MacOS has evolved to the point that it can be ported to ARM chips.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  I was the only guy with a PC on our group, everyone else had Amigas, it was just due to some circustances that I upgraded from a Timex 2068 into a 386SX instead of an Amiga 500. So I am kind of biased to those non-IBM PC form factors anyway.
- hulitu 5y ago
  Too bad you cannot do any serious development on mobile devices.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Not every device must have an IDE plugged into it. In any case, there are coding environments available for not-serious development on the go, and then there are laptops.

Ekaros 5y ago

One also wonders would we have Linux without PC? Unix sure, but would they stay as massive number of slightly different versions on multitude of platforms?

oblio 5y ago
Linux required cheap computing. PCs were the cheapest extensible general computing available on the market, and they were available in abundance.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

On the other other hand, standardisation on a very poor standard cost the global economy $large_number of billions in wasted time, poor performance, poor security and - let's not forget - incredibly high prices and low specs compared to existing alternatives. Standardisation had already happened in the S100 space. What IBM introduced was mass marketing to businesses. The technology was incidental. Apple already had a consumer dealer network, Amiga/Atari/Acorn had already made inroads, and there would have been a shake-out and consolidation. Without the PC it's likely some other manufacturer - possibly even Compaq - would have jumped on S100 instead and commoditised it. Probably with 68k and maybe Concurrent CP/M and/or BSD. It only needed one company to make the marketing leap. So standardisation was likely inevitable. Sales growth might have been slower, with more churn for consumer/gaming machines. But the technology would have started from a higher base. And it wouldn't have been held back by the miserably poor design of Intel hardware and MS software, both of which regressed existing levels of tech by at least a decade. The worst thing about the PC was that it established such low user expectations: slow, ugly, crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, stability, and reliability, and "standard" software products that were even worse.

oblio 5y ago
That not how anything works. Businesses wanted anything, literally any working product. The competition mostly stood there in their ivory towers (NeXT was the best representative of this), shrugged their noses at the folks that needed cheap computers for, you know, the computing revolution and over time, keeled over. > slow, ugly, crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, stability, and reliability, and "standard" software products that were even worse Yet they worked and they were cheap. Slow didn't matter because they worked. Ugly didn't matter because they worked. "Crippled machines that sort-of worked in a very limited way with poor security, , stability, and reliability, and 'standard' software products that were even worse" didn't matter because they worked and nobody truly cares about security as the main ongoing concern. Stability was good enough. Reliability was good enough. The standards were good enough. And the main thing, I repeat this: PCs were CHEAP. Anything I can't afford might as well not exist on the planet. It's not there. I can't do anything with it. Companies could afford PCs and they did what was needed. Not what some people thought would be needed, they did what was actually needed.