7 ms·

Yes, PCs are around since 1981, but if you looked around, they were not that commonplace outside of businesses and quite rare in private usages. There was the a

by _ph_ 5y ago

Yes, PCs are around since 1981, but if you looked around, they were not that commonplace outside of businesses and quite rare in private usages. There was the age of the home computers, first 8-Bit (Atari, Commodore, TI), then the 68k Machines, the first ARM. In parallel, all the great workstation vendors with their RISC chips. The PC for home usage really started only in the 90ies, scientists would use workstations. It was only towards the end of the 90ies, that x86 caught up with them and well into the 2000 years, when they overtook them. It was actually AMD who dealt the killing blow with the Athlon and especially the Opteron. At that time, Intel was pushing Ithanium as the architecture for professional usage and kept x86 onto 32 bit with more game-optimized processors (P4).

justin66 5y ago
No offense, but that is all either wrong or ahistorical. You write about personal computing history like someone who experienced it after the fact and solely through blog posts. (are you writing about the PC revolution as you experienced it in some country other than the United States?)
- prescriptivist 5y ago
  Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Care to give examples? It roughly aligns with my experience during that time.
  - ngcc_hk 5y ago
    So am I. Op seem ok.
  - justin66 5y ago
    > Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Pretty much everything. The OP made a number of statements about the various platforms' marketshare over time which were inaccurate if applied globally, but might have been accurate in a certain country, hence my question to them. All of this in service of an idea - that x86 hasn't been dominant for four decades - which is so absurdly counterfactual that it's silly to argue about. I mean, you guys know that these sales figures are public, right? Regarding the assertion that PCs were ever "quite rare in private usages." There are some pretty good charts of the various home computers' marketshare available here: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ It occurs to me after sharing those that one could look at those charts and assume all those IBM PCs were going to businesses (that's an AWFUL LOT of businesses!) but I don't have all day to spend on gathering this data... research game sales in the mid eighties if you have doubts about this! They were servicing a dying C64 and Apple II market, and a rapidly growing x86 market. x86 did not wait for nineties (how is this even an argument... jeez). I still have the Athlon XP 3200+ system I built, but AMD didn't deal any kind of "killing blow" with anything. That's extremely silly. AMD did an admirable job of forcing 64-bit adoption on the PC a bit sooner than Intel would have liked (and driving multicore!), but x86's domination in the marketplace did not have to wait for that. In terms of marketshare, ARM didn't matter much until it became an embedded standard. Regarding 68k, which the OP brought up for some reason, I offer this: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/
    - _ph_ 5y ago
      AMD did deliver the killing blow to Sun. At least in the company I worked by then, they were all firmly Sun for the large compute servers until the Opteron arrived. PCs were nice as desktop machines, but large servers with multiple CPUs and lots of gigabytes of RAM were not feasible on x86 until the arrival of the Opterons. Eventually they would replace all Sparc based compute servers.
      - hollerith 5y ago
        By the time the Opteron came out in 2003, Google was already a large company. My guess is they were already the largest search engine in the world -- and they ran their web crawler and search engine entirely on PCs. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in 1997, then Microsoft promptly announced that the service would be switched over to Windows. Till then, according to Wikipedia [1], Hotmail ran some Sun boxes, but also a lot of FreeBSD, and I am almost certain that the FreeBSD was running on PCs. They were probably the largest email provider in the world in 1997. The Apache web server "was the most popular web server by Spring 1996 and stayed like that until the Summer of 2014" [2]. It ran and runs almost exclusively on Linux, which in turn ran and runs almost exclusively on x86. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com 2: https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-server-how-it-all-came-together/ https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-...
      - justin66 5y ago
        I believe a lot of people had the experience your company had at that time. But... x86 (and Linux and Windows) started killing Unix and the other architectures a lot sooner than Opteron. At some point in the late nineties, SGI's workstation people pretty much curled up on the floor in the fetal position, moaning, "Windows NT, Windows NT." That spectacle was downright undignified, although the NT box they produced was impressive in its way. (They made some nice contributions to Linux nevertheless. Would that they had taken Linux even more seriously.) It says something about their outlook on the future of MIPS, as well as UNIX, that SGI designed their Visual Workstation using Pentium in an era when Windows NT on MIPS was still a thing. You can't quite say that AMD64 killed sun. Sun actually made some decent, if overpriced, Opteron stuff. Sun's demise is a fun thing to discuss because former Sun employees often have an interesting opinion about where Sun went wrong. I'm waiting for the guy who says something like "yeah, that was my department's fault. We blew it and the company failed." So far I haven't seen that.
- _ph_ 5y ago
  Well, sure, I experienced it in a country other than the United States. Only 4% of the current human population lives in the United States. To be precise, I am from Germany and lived through all the times I described. While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some significant home usage. And as far as I know, Apples were very popular in the US at that time. In Europe they were not very common, due to even worse prices than today :p. But my school hat some Apple II, which I eventually used with Pascal. But for home usage, the "home computers" were popular as named before. Universities used Suns till the late 90ies.
  - justin66 5y ago
    > While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some significant home usage That might have been true in Germany. It wasn't true in the United States. IBM PC (and moreso, PC clone) adoption was quite strong in the home from the mid eighties. That's all I meant by the question about nationality - I really do think there's a difference there when it comes to market share. (I probably shouldn't beat the subject to death but it was an interesting discussion)
  - chipotle_coyote 5y ago
    I don't think the US home computer market followed the same path as Germany's. 68K-based machines never became huge sellers over here, for instance, and the Macintosh was the most successful of the bunch -- whereas it's my understanding that in a lot of Europe, the Amiga and the Atari ST were serious contenders even on into the '90s. Conversely, IBM PC clones had taken the lead in US sales by the end of the '80s and just never had any serious competition by the early '90s. It's not an exaggeration to say that Radio Shack was selling more Tandy 1000s than the Amiga and the ST were selling combined over here. (There were games with specific Tandy 1000 "enhanced graphics and sound," so it was actually considered a viable market all on its own!) > Apples were very popular in the US at that time Well, the Apple II line was popular in the US in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s -- at one point it was the best-selling 8-bit computer, taking the throne from the Radio Shack TRS-80 -- but the Mac was absolutely not a big seller in the 1990s; Apple survived because they dominated a few vertical markets like desktop publishing. For home computing, the first really successful Mac was arguably the iMac circa 2000.

by _ph_ 5y ago

justin66 5y ago

No offense, but that is all either wrong or ahistorical. You write about personal computing history like someone who experienced it after the fact and solely through blog posts. (are you writing about the PC revolution as you experienced it in some country other than the United States?)

prescriptivist 5y ago
Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Care to give examples? It roughly aligns with my experience during that time.
- ngcc_hk 5y ago
  So am I. Op seem ok.
- justin66 5y ago
  > Not sure what's wrong with OPs account. Pretty much everything. The OP made a number of statements about the various platforms' marketshare over time which were inaccurate if applied globally, but might have been accurate in a certain country, hence my question to them. All of this in service of an idea - that x86 hasn't been dominant for four decades - which is so absurdly counterfactual that it's silly to argue about. I mean, you guys know that these sales figures are public, right? Regarding the assertion that PCs were ever "quite rare in private usages." There are some pretty good charts of the various home computers' marketshare available here: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/4/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/5/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/6/ It occurs to me after sharing those that one could look at those charts and assume all those IBM PCs were going to businesses (that's an AWFUL LOT of businesses!) but I don't have all day to spend on gathering this data... research game sales in the mid eighties if you have doubts about this! They were servicing a dying C64 and Apple II market, and a rapidly growing x86 market. x86 did not wait for nineties (how is this even an argument... jeez). I still have the Athlon XP 3200+ system I built, but AMD didn't deal any kind of "killing blow" with anything. That's extremely silly. AMD did an admirable job of forcing 64-bit adoption on the PC a bit sooner than Intel would have liked (and driving multicore!), but x86's domination in the marketplace did not have to wait for that. In terms of marketshare, ARM didn't matter much until it became an embedded standard. Regarding 68k, which the OP brought up for some reason, I offer this: https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/ https://arstechnica.com/features/2005/12/total-share/7/
  - _ph_ 5y ago
    AMD did deliver the killing blow to Sun. At least in the company I worked by then, they were all firmly Sun for the large compute servers until the Opteron arrived. PCs were nice as desktop machines, but large servers with multiple CPUs and lots of gigabytes of RAM were not feasible on x86 until the arrival of the Opterons. Eventually they would replace all Sparc based compute servers.
    - hollerith 5y ago
      By the time the Opteron came out in 2003, Google was already a large company. My guess is they were already the largest search engine in the world -- and they ran their web crawler and search engine entirely on PCs. Hotmail was bought by Microsoft in 1997, then Microsoft promptly announced that the service would be switched over to Windows. Till then, according to Wikipedia [1], Hotmail ran some Sun boxes, but also a lot of FreeBSD, and I am almost certain that the FreeBSD was running on PCs. They were probably the largest email provider in the world in 1997. The Apache web server "was the most popular web server by Spring 1996 and stayed like that until the Summer of 2014" [2]. It ran and runs almost exclusively on Linux, which in turn ran and runs almost exclusively on x86. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlook.com 2: https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-server-how-it-all-came-together/ https://blog.cloudware.bg/en/the-history-of-the-apache-http-...
    - justin66 5y ago
      I believe a lot of people had the experience your company had at that time. But... x86 (and Linux and Windows) started killing Unix and the other architectures a lot sooner than Opteron. At some point in the late nineties, SGI's workstation people pretty much curled up on the floor in the fetal position, moaning, "Windows NT, Windows NT." That spectacle was downright undignified, although the NT box they produced was impressive in its way. (They made some nice contributions to Linux nevertheless. Would that they had taken Linux even more seriously.) It says something about their outlook on the future of MIPS, as well as UNIX, that SGI designed their Visual Workstation using Pentium in an era when Windows NT on MIPS was still a thing. You can't quite say that AMD64 killed sun. Sun actually made some decent, if overpriced, Opteron stuff. Sun's demise is a fun thing to discuss because former Sun employees often have an interesting opinion about where Sun went wrong. I'm waiting for the guy who says something like "yeah, that was my department's fault. We blew it and the company failed." So far I haven't seen that.
_ph_ 5y ago
Well, sure, I experienced it in a country other than the United States. Only 4% of the current human population lives in the United States. To be precise, I am from Germany and lived through all the times I described. While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some significant home usage. And as far as I know, Apples were very popular in the US at that time. In Europe they were not very common, due to even worse prices than today :p. But my school hat some Apple II, which I eventually used with Pascal. But for home usage, the "home computers" were popular as named before. Universities used Suns till the late 90ies.
- justin66 5y ago
  > While PCs appeared in the 80ies, it was not until the very late 80ies and early 90ies until they had some significant home usage That might have been true in Germany. It wasn't true in the United States. IBM PC (and moreso, PC clone) adoption was quite strong in the home from the mid eighties. That's all I meant by the question about nationality - I really do think there's a difference there when it comes to market share. (I probably shouldn't beat the subject to death but it was an interesting discussion)
- chipotle_coyote 5y ago
  I don't think the US home computer market followed the same path as Germany's. 68K-based machines never became huge sellers over here, for instance, and the Macintosh was the most successful of the bunch -- whereas it's my understanding that in a lot of Europe, the Amiga and the Atari ST were serious contenders even on into the '90s. Conversely, IBM PC clones had taken the lead in US sales by the end of the '80s and just never had any serious competition by the early '90s. It's not an exaggeration to say that Radio Shack was selling more Tandy 1000s than the Amiga and the ST were selling combined over here. (There were games with specific Tandy 1000 "enhanced graphics and sound," so it was actually considered a viable market all on its own!) > Apples were very popular in the US at that time Well, the Apple II line was popular in the US in the late 1970s through the mid-1980s -- at one point it was the best-selling 8-bit computer, taking the throne from the Radio Shack TRS-80 -- but the Mac was absolutely not a big seller in the 1990s; Apple survived because they dominated a few vertical markets like desktop publishing. For home computing, the first really successful Mac was arguably the iMac circa 2000.