9 ms·

Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)

114 points by lproven 3y ago

rbanffy 3y ago
Is that information available in other articles?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lproven 3y ago
  I think I salvaged the content but not the references. All the computers are a matter of historical record, for instance.
  - rbanffy 3y ago
    I was wondering whether the information was distributed into other articles. If all the mentioned computers had their own articles, this one can be turned into a list.
rwmj 3y ago
I'm going to guess this article was deleted because of the no original research rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research). Much as I hate Wikipedia deletionism/deletionists, this is usually a good reason not to keep articles.
- aftbit 3y ago
  But now that he has published this as a blog post, could I rewrite it, cite his blog post and whatever sources he cited, and repost to wikipedia?
  - grotorea 3y ago
    Very likely to run afoul of both notability (one source is generally not enough) and reliable source (A blog post? From who?)
  - Zenst 3y ago
    Probably, even cite this post on HN as well and go for the double - reference it and guarantee be some YT vids as well that go into this era of history.
  - lproven 3y ago
    I think you can see a contemporary comment to that effect on the blog post. :-) I think I wrote it in 2006 and it was deleted in 2007. The spur to write it was the release of the first Intel-based Macs, which was 2006.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    There are rumours that low-tier newspapers do this for interested parties if you give them some cash.
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      Not even low-tier in 2024. Money is scarce. I can think of some very big newspapers that will include articles for cash these days. You can find contacts to get this done for you in certain forums :)
  - pdpi 3y ago
    Wikipedia prefers secondary sources to primary sources (as befits an encyclopaedia), and the blog post is a primary source for most of its content, so it would still be frowned upon.
    - andrewla 3y ago
      This would be a secondary source -- the primary source would be the manufacturers themselves. Secondary doesn't mean that there is no original research; in fact it's the opposite. Primary contains facts but no analysis or synthesis, secondary references facts established elsewhere but adds context.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lamontcg 3y ago
  Yeah and it reads like a blog post and not encyclopedic. Stuff like this sentence: > Aside from its low hardware specification, perhaps the biggest perceived "design flaw" of the IBM PC was the what is nowadays called Upper Memory Area [...] IDK what the correct wikipedia response to that would be but probably citation required and NPOV. It could be made more neutral by rephrasing just to "The IBM PC architecture located I/O pages at the top of memory, limiting available RAM to 640 KiB. Alternatives such as the Victor located I/O pages at the start of memory allowing for 800-900 KiB of RAM". Let the reader come to the conclusion that they did this to try to improve the architecture, and don't assert that those architecture choices were qualitatively better, don't assert any opinions. It just sounds like the author is pleading a bit for the reader to see that other alternatives made qualitatively better choices.
- brokensegue 3y ago
  It was deleted for being an "Unencyclopedic essay" which seems right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Non-PC_compatible_x86_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...
throwaway67743 3y ago
[flagged]
- lproven 3y ago
  Is what an LJ thing? I have moved my blog to Dreamwidth and don't post on LJ any more, but I have a registered account and use uBlock Origin. I don't know what "that" means but to me it looks like an ordinary web page and does nothing clever or weird.
  - cylinder714 3y ago
    The LiveJournal article hijacked the back button, so that instead of returning me to HN it jumped to a random spot in the article. I had to long-press the back button to get back to HN. This on Firefox Mobile on Android with no adblockers.
    - throwaway67743 3y ago
      Same with origin, guess it's considered a nuisance and I need more filters (also Firefox)
- AndrewDucker 3y ago
  Didn't jump in the blog for me. Or hijack the back button. (I turned UBO off specially to test.)
  - brokensegue 3y ago
    it hijacked back for me
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bryanlarsen 3y ago
Missing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98
- lproven 3y ago
  [Author/submitter here] True. I didn't know anything very solid about them at the time -- and not much now, TBPH.
  - ikejix 3y ago
    And his big brother APC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APC_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APC_series NEC version of Alto: PC-100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_PC-100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_PC-100 And their competitor FM-Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns These are used x86 CPU.
  - tzs 3y ago
    Although PC-98 was not PC-compatible, Microsoft did support it in DOS and Windows. Programs that just went through DOS or Windows and didn't make lower level BIOS calls directly or try to manipulate hardware directly would frequently just work out of the box on PC-98. The biggest difference between PC-98 and PC compatibles the DOS/Windows didn't hide that I remember, and that I remember being the biggest source of DOS/Windows programs failing even if they weren't doing low level calls was drive letter assignment. On PC-98 A: was the drive you booted from. If your system had a floppy drive and a hard drive, and you booted from hard drive then A: would be your hard drive. B: would be your floppy. In a PC-compatible A: would be the floppy and C: would be the hard disk regardless of which of the two you booted from. Quite a few programs turned out to have "C: is the first hard drive" hard coded in.
  - Longlius 3y ago
    There's a great channel on Youtube called Basement Bros that goes over a lot of the games available at the time for the PC-98 (and other outmoded Japanese home computer platforms) and also touches on how these machines were used day-to-day. Definitely worth a look, especially if you have any interest in the history of Japanese game development as a lot of very high-profile people got their start writing games and applications for the PC-88, PC-98, MSX, etc.
soliton4 3y ago
i was expecting to find the nokia 9000 on this list. does this mean it was actually pc compatible?
- cdcarter 3y ago
  According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Élan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Élan the SC4xx series _did_ have "PC/AT peripheral controllers".
legitster 3y ago
While a useful document, it's really not a Wikipedia article. It's making an argument, has a thesis statement, doesn't reference anything, and doesn't have a neutral point of view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars
- deleted 3y ago
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- deleted 3y ago
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nineteen999 3y ago
[flagged]
Macha 3y ago
For recent examples, there's the PS4 and PS5. (I think the Xbox is a little more PC compatible?)
- wmf 3y ago
  Interestingly, there are PC motherboards using PS5/Xbox SoCs that can run Windows so there must be decent PC compatibility in the SoC even if the consoles don't use it.
  - zinekeller 3y ago
    Side effect of being an AMD SoC? These changes are usually implemented in its BIO- I mean UEFI.
foobiekr 3y ago
The Zenith Z100 series, Dec Rainbow, and Epson QX-10+ would have been interesting to include. There was a very, very rich set of non-IBMPC MSDOS machines in the period. IIRC MS-DOS early on included tools written in a variant of Forth so that portability was easy and memory use was tight.
derefr 3y ago
How about the opposite: PC-compatible non-x86 computers? Like how the Transmeta Crusoe was an x86-compatible CPU... but moreso. The Crusoe was a thing marketed as a "CPU", that was actually internally an SoC (with the CPU inside it being non-x86.) This SoC had its own internal RAM and storage, and booted itself into internal software that then emulated an x86 CPU. All of the "CPU" data pins on the Crusoe SoC, routed to the virtual CPU inputs and outputs of this software. So, as far as other devices in the system were concerned, they were speaking to an x86 CPU. Did anyone ever try taking this concept further? Maybe in the context of an industrial embedded computer? I could imagine someone taking e.g. a modern ARM SoC with onboard RAM + eMMC; setting it up to boot into e.g. Bochs to emulate a virtual x86 (CPU + BIOS + other memory-mapped ROMs + platform controller hub + IO controllers + timer chips + TPM + etc — all the stuff on an x86 motherboard) — and then just setting up the SoC's GPIO pins to directly expose all the virtual buses of that virtual motherboard. You could then take such a chip, and design a physical "motherboard" for it to sit in, that's just a bunch of ports (e.g. PS2) and slots (e.g. ISA or maybe very slow PCI) routing directly to the SoC's GPIO pins. This would be a very effective strategy, I think, for producing low-cost host platforms for the many industrial-automation ISA cards that still exist. So I have a feeling some OEM has at least tried to do this. Probably there wouldn't be enough GPIO pins for most busses — x86 CPUs have tons of pins compared to almost any other architecture. So I wouldn't consider it cheating to feed parallel busses out serially at higher clock rates than those busses natively run at, and then to require the use of an external ser/des chip or two to flatten the signals back out. As long as it's the SoC itself speaking the protocol and the chip is "dumb", I think that'd still count. Also keep in mind that unlike with the Crusoe, an "x86-on-ARM SoC" wouldn't need to have GPIO fast and wide enough to talk to external DRAM — as any memory could be internal to the SoC without breaking the contract. So the main constraint bottlenecking the Crusoe's CPU performance, wouldn't apply here. This thing could actually perform decently well — possibly well enough to run hard-realtime industrial control software coded in the 1990s, and to speak to ISA cards built in the 1990s. Which is all it would need to be able to do, for the obvious use-case.
- solardev 3y ago
  Wouldn't it be simpler to do all this in software? What's the advantage of doing it in hardware like this?
VSpike 3y ago
I had a couple of Sirius (AKA Victor) machines that were cast offs from my father's office given to me to play with. The first one was twin floppy, and the second had a 5MB hard drive. When I got the second one I think the first one got binned. When the second one broke, I bust it up to use the PSU and HDD on another computer. Of course, I really wish now that I'd kept at least one of them, but you never know at the time what would have value in the future and what is just junk.
- h2odragon 3y ago
  My first exposure to "real" computers was with Victor machines. I may well have one in a pile somewhere still. I worked for a shop that was a Victor dealer, they had the fabled "PC compatible floppy drive" in a machine there. Later I was one of the few people with a PC that could read Victor disks; Copy2PC card For Tha Win there. They did "high memory" and iirc had slightly higher resolution text modes, which made them wonderful for spreadsheets. http://www.oldcomputers.net/victor9000.html http://www.oldcomputers.net/victor9000.html
starkparker 3y ago
When jumping in to suggest how this violated Wikipedia guidelines, note that this predates WP's current Policies and guidelines page (1, 2010) and the COPO essay describing core content policies (2, Nov. 2007). The Five Pillars page has changed quite a bit since 2007.[3] My favorite change, and only slightly tangential to the topic, is replacing this from 2007: > [[Wikipedia:Be bold|Be '''bold''' in editing, moving, and modifying articles]], because the joy of editing is that, although it should be aimed for, [[Wikipedia:Editing policy|perfection is not required]]. And do not worry about messing up. All prior versions of articles are kept, so there is no way that you can accidentally damage Wikipedia or irretrievably destroy content. But remember — whatever you write here will be preserved for posterity. with this in the current policy: > [[Wikipedia:Be bold|Be bold]], but not [[Wikipedia:Reckless|reckless]], in updating articles. And [[Wikipedia:Editing policy|do not agonize over making mistakes]]: they can be corrected easily because [[Help:Page history|(almost) every past version of each article is saved]]. An unintentionally accurate transition in how it felt to participate then and now, subtly excising any mentions of the joy of publicly but safely messing up and replacing them with assurances that you and your contributions can simply be erased from history if you make any mistakes. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines&oldid=370614864 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Policie... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Core_content_policies&oldid=172597077 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Core_co... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Five_pillars&diff=cur&oldid=138580428 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Five_pi...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- rvba 3y ago
  The article was deleted because wikipedia is mostly run by a clique who uses rules to discourage anyone else from editing while being above those rules at the same time.
terr-dav 3y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20240109170221/https://lproven.livejournal.com/189791.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240109170221/https://lproven.l...
tzs 3y ago
> Intel's 80386 processor was the first to include memory management hardware and thus be capable of running a full UNIX operating system That's not correct. The 80286 had sufficient memory management hardware for full Unix. What it did not have was sufficient memory management hardware for reasonable demand paging, but it was fine for swapping systems. AT&T USG has a port of System V Release 2 for 80286, for example. There was also Xenix, which has enough licensed code in it from AT&T that I'd count it as a Unix. There was also System V Release 3 fro 80286, but I don't think that was ever released. When AT&T was developing SVR3 for their own 3B line of processors they wanted to also port it to Intel processors. They hired Interactive Systems Corporation (ISC) to do that, with the contract calling for porting to both 80286 and 80386. I worked at ISC at the time and was on the 80286 port team. We did get it working, but where having problems getting the scheduler to behave reasonably under heavy load. Somewhere in the middle of trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the scheduler, we and AT&T realized (1) 80386 was so much better than 80286 that a lot of 80286 Unix users would upgrade to 80386 systems, and (2) those that are happy with the 80286 Unix systems and not planning on leaving 80286 probably would not find upgrading from SVR2 to SVR3 to be worth the effort. It wasn't all that clear that there was much of a market for 80286 SVR3. The 80286 port was then dropped. I was moved to work on the 80386 port and also to a newly formed team to add support for running 80286 SVR2 binaries on 80386 SVR3. That was a fun project. Kind of like Wine, but easier because (1) it was just going from SVR2 Unix to SVR3 Unix instead of Windows to Unix, and (2) we had full source code to SVR2 and SCR3 unlike the Wine developers who don't have Windows source.
- lproven 3y ago
  > That's not correct. The 80286 had sufficient memory management hardware for full Unix. What it did not have was sufficient memory management hardware for reasonable demand paging, but it was fine for swapping systems. Oh my word. A correction for something I wrote, what, 18 years ago? I hope you will forgive me if I don't go edit it. ;-) I barely remember writing it. TBPH I think that the distinction between swapping and paging is a subtlety that is beyond even most Linux hackers these days. I take your point but it is a small terminological inexactitude IMHO... no?
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
IBM-compatibles. They're still PCs.
- kube-system 3y ago
  In this context it is referring to a specific product called "Personal Computer" made by IBM. Just like when someone says they bought a record on compact disc, they are referring to Red Book Compact Disc Digital Audio Standard. They're not referring to any other discs that are small.
  - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    I think they say they bought an album on CD, not a record on CD.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      Yeah, that. ... Or maybe they were talking about a 45? :)
      - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
        Ha haaa! NO, I have a decent-sized 45 collection and there's no confusion about their awesomeness! Most of them sound better than the dynamically-compressed-to-shit streaming "remasters" of the same songs today. I also have a few 3-inch CDs, which were supposed to be the successor to 45s but record companies just weren't down for seriously selling singles at that point. Another historical curiosity: I have a couple of "video CDs," which were regular-sized (5-inch) CDs with a digital section containing the song (playable on any CD player) and then an analog video section with the video for the song (playable on later LaserDisc players).
        wolrah 3y ago
        > Another historical curiosity: I have a couple of "video CDs," which were regular-sized (5-inch) CDs with a digital section containing the song (playable on any CD player) and then an analog video section with the video for the song (playable on later LaserDisc players). That is a "CD Video" or "CD+V", which supported up to 20 minutes of CD audio and around 5 minutes of LaserDisc-style analog video. There was also a variant that skipped the CD audio and was just LaserDisc video on a CD-size disc called "Video Single Disc". "Video CD" or "VCD" was a later all digital format that used MPEG-1 compression while also disabling error correction for more data capacity to fit more or less the same amount of VHS-ish quality video on a given disc as it could support CD audio. VCD never even reached the level of success of LaserDisc in the US but most standalone DVD players could play them. I believe they were a lot more popular in parts of Asia.
bryanlarsen 3y ago
A wild inclusion would be the IBM PCjr, which wasn't quite PC compatible. IBM didn't sell many, but Tandy sold a ton of PCjr clones, the Tandy 1000 et al.
- the_af 3y ago
  The 8 Bit Guy makes a good case that the Tandy 1000 was the best "DOS machine" ever, even though it wasn't quite PC compatible. Makes me wish I had one back in the day. My first PC was an XT clone, and I never owned a Tandy.
- LeoPanthera 3y ago
  The Tandy 1000 series was so successful that "PCjr" compatible games almost immediately rebranded their packaging to say "Tandy compatible" instead. I'm sure IBM was real happy about that.
helf 3y ago
[dead]
EvanAnderson 3y ago
I believe some of the early CTOS machines were x86 based but not PC compatible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operat...
- rbanffy 3y ago
  What a beauty those were... So much ahead of their time...
Thoreandan 3y ago
Livingston Enterprises products (Portmaster and IRX routers) running ComOS were x86
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  Oh, good point. I didn't even think about embedded devices. The Cisco PIX firewalls were originally PCs w/ Intel motherboards (SE440BX, I believe) before becoming embedded x86 designs. I don't know how far the x86 legacy continued into the ASA and Firepower follow-up devices.
- nonamesleft 3y ago
  I seem to recall that USRobotics Total Control (dialup servers, ISDN PRI E1 (E1 for me in EU) / T1) to ~30ish dialup lines/ISDN BRI used x86 in the form of 80386ex (386 without real mode). Whether it was 386ex or just a 386 is a bit hazy as it has been 25+ years since i last opened one up. I think each line card that supported analog modems up to 4x 56kbit per card had one, along with some DSPs. Also old Lucent WaveLAN (802.11 era, possibly even the non-standard predecessor) access points had a x86 processor sbc in them.
johnklos 3y ago
It's a horrible title. "PC" means personal computer. It may be a bit pedantic, sure, but if you're going to write an article that talks about technical things, it really smarts to read such a glaringly non-technical title.
- the_af 3y ago
  I don't know. Back in the old days, everyone understood what "[IBM] PC compatible" meant. PC meant something specific, not just a generic "personal computer", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    Back in the even older days, PC meant "Personal Computer" but quite soon after that it meant "IBM PC" (or compatible).
    - the_af 3y ago
      To be honest I didn't live through that "even older days" era. I went straight from a Commodore 64 to a PC XT clone, and by then (the 80s) "PC" meant "IBM PC" to everyone I spoke to.
- kube-system 3y ago
  "PC compatible" was a common shorthand reference to "IBM PC compatible" which was referring to a specific architecture compatible with IBM PC software, and later, that platform's descendants. There were many personal computers at the time but colloquially, the IBM PC was the PC.
- kens 3y ago
  Prior to the IBM PC, a personal computer was called a "personal computer", not a "PC". I assumed that IBM came up with the "PC" name, but after a few minutes of research, it seems that IBM called their system the "IBM Personal Computer" in the original ads and documentation, rather than the "PC". As far as I can tell, PC Magazine created the name "PC". At first, the magazine referred to the IBM "PC" (with quotation marks around PC), which suggests that this wasn't standard usage. I'm a bit surprised by the idea that the "PC" name was invented by the magazine, and I'm not 100% sure of this, but maybe someone can confirm or deny. It wouldn't be the first time a magazine has created the terminology; "electronics" apparently comes from the magazine, not vice versa.
the-golden-one 3y ago
A number of arcade machines are x86 based, with non-pc-standard hardware, such as Z80 co-processors, etc.. For example - Seibu SPI https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/seibu/seibuspi.cpp https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/seibu/s...
Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
RM Nimbus PC186. MS-DOS based but not PC-compatible, and used the rare 80186 processor. Popular in UK education for a while. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus The Wikipedia article on the 80186 lists a bunch of forgotten, often not PC-compatible, machines using that CPU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186
- lproven 3y ago
  I did know about the Nimbus. I should have included that. D'oh! And the BBC Master 512, of course...
- whoopdedo 3y ago
  Intergraph[1] workstations based on the Fairchild Clipper CPU included a 80186 for booting into PC-DOS. At $30K in '80s dollars that might have made it the most expensive way to run DOS. But I think when booted into UNIX the 186 was used for I/O processing. [1] https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/intergraph https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/intergraph
qingcharles 3y ago
MISSING: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus (very popular in British schools in the 80s and 90s and ran a lot of DOS apps) Glad to see Sirius Victor on there. They were very popular in the UK before IBM ate their lunch.
nxobject 3y ago
Another fun one: the original OLPC XO-1 (2007?) had an AMD Geode, but ran on Open Firmware and had ad-hoc controllers and drivers for things that would have gone through ACPI, etc. Microsoft claimed they had Windows XP booting on one, but I've yet to see how that would have worked.
- p_l 3y ago
  Alternate HAL.DLL plus open firmware ARC bootstrap, something they already made for Windows NT for PowerPC.
rbanffy 3y ago
One nice machine I remember is the Siemens PC-D series. They eventually became PC compatible, but the ones I used were running some sort of terminal software and a GUI called Collage connected to a SINIX (Siemens-branded Xenix, IIRC) machine. There were lots of machines with 8086's as coprocessors - the Zenith Z-100 had one, and there was a board for Apple IIs that predated the Applied Engineering one (that was a PC on an Apple II card, with PC floppy ports).
buescher 3y ago
The first issue of BYTE magazine I ever had featured Steve Ciarcia’s home brew 8086 motherboard on the cover. I think he eventually published mods for that one that brought it into some semblance of pc compatibility, though.
sombragris 3y ago
I saw that someone already mentioned, but only in passing, the DEC Rainbow 100. It was a great machine for its time, with Z80/8088 CPUs allowing it to run both 8 and 16-bit software. But they had a special (even proprietary) floppy disk format. You couldn't format your own floppies. You couldn't even purchase any floppy brand. You had to order from DEC at $5 apiece, and you got a paltry 400K 5.25" floppy that you couldn't even format. This was corrected later but then the damage was done and the Rainbow never took off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100
mikewarot 3y ago
IBM took an early lead in production of non-PC compatible machines when it introduced the PS/2 series of computers with MicroChannel as an attempt to recapture the monopoly on general purpose computing. It didn't go well for IBM.
- lproven 3y ago
  > IBM took an early lead in production of non-PC compatible machines when it introduced the PS/2 series of computers Kinda sorta, ish. I loved the PS/2 range. I still own 2 of them, a top-spec Model 80 and a Model 55SX. But they were PC compatibles. They ran DOS, Windows, OS/2, and NT 3.x no problem at all. They were highly compatible... just with a totally different expansion bus. If one said that a modern PC with PCI-e slots was not compatible with a decade-old PC because the old box had PCI and the new one has no PCI only PCI Express, I think most people would unhesitatingly say that was wrong.
neurostimulant 3y ago
Does the old Asus Zenfone 2 (an Android phone with an Intel Atom Z3580 processor) qualify as a non-pc compatible x86 computer?

114 points by lproven 3y ago

rbanffy 3y ago

Is that information available in other articles?

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lproven 3y ago
I think I salvaged the content but not the references. All the computers are a matter of historical record, for instance.
- rbanffy 3y ago
  I was wondering whether the information was distributed into other articles. If all the mentioned computers had their own articles, this one can be turned into a list.

rwmj 3y ago

I'm going to guess this article was deleted because of the no original research rule (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research). Much as I hate Wikipedia deletionism/deletionists, this is usually a good reason not to keep articles.

aftbit 3y ago
But now that he has published this as a blog post, could I rewrite it, cite his blog post and whatever sources he cited, and repost to wikipedia?
- grotorea 3y ago
  Very likely to run afoul of both notability (one source is generally not enough) and reliable source (A blog post? From who?)
- Zenst 3y ago
  Probably, even cite this post on HN as well and go for the double - reference it and guarantee be some YT vids as well that go into this era of history.
- lproven 3y ago
  I think you can see a contemporary comment to that effect on the blog post. :-) I think I wrote it in 2006 and it was deleted in 2007. The spur to write it was the release of the first Intel-based Macs, which was 2006.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  There are rumours that low-tier newspapers do this for interested parties if you give them some cash.
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    Not even low-tier in 2024. Money is scarce. I can think of some very big newspapers that will include articles for cash these days. You can find contacts to get this done for you in certain forums :)
- pdpi 3y ago
  Wikipedia prefers secondary sources to primary sources (as befits an encyclopaedia), and the blog post is a primary source for most of its content, so it would still be frowned upon.
  - andrewla 3y ago
    This would be a secondary source -- the primary source would be the manufacturers themselves. Secondary doesn't mean that there is no original research; in fact it's the opposite. Primary contains facts but no analysis or synthesis, secondary references facts established elsewhere but adds context.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lamontcg 3y ago
Yeah and it reads like a blog post and not encyclopedic. Stuff like this sentence: > Aside from its low hardware specification, perhaps the biggest perceived "design flaw" of the IBM PC was the what is nowadays called Upper Memory Area [...] IDK what the correct wikipedia response to that would be but probably citation required and NPOV. It could be made more neutral by rephrasing just to "The IBM PC architecture located I/O pages at the top of memory, limiting available RAM to 640 KiB. Alternatives such as the Victor located I/O pages at the start of memory allowing for 800-900 KiB of RAM". Let the reader come to the conclusion that they did this to try to improve the architecture, and don't assert that those architecture choices were qualitatively better, don't assert any opinions. It just sounds like the author is pleading a bit for the reader to see that other alternatives made qualitatively better choices.
brokensegue 3y ago
It was deleted for being an "Unencyclopedic essay" which seems right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Non-PC_compatible_x86_computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletio...

throwaway67743 3y ago

[flagged]

lproven 3y ago
Is what an LJ thing? I have moved my blog to Dreamwidth and don't post on LJ any more, but I have a registered account and use uBlock Origin. I don't know what "that" means but to me it looks like an ordinary web page and does nothing clever or weird.
- cylinder714 3y ago
  The LiveJournal article hijacked the back button, so that instead of returning me to HN it jumped to a random spot in the article. I had to long-press the back button to get back to HN. This on Firefox Mobile on Android with no adblockers.
  - throwaway67743 3y ago
    Same with origin, guess it's considered a nuisance and I need more filters (also Firefox)
AndrewDucker 3y ago
Didn't jump in the blog for me. Or hijack the back button. (I turned UBO off specially to test.)
- brokensegue 3y ago
  it hijacked back for me
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bryanlarsen 3y ago

Missing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98

lproven 3y ago
[Author/submitter here] True. I didn't know anything very solid about them at the time -- and not much now, TBPH.
- ikejix 3y ago
  And his big brother APC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APC_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/APC_series NEC version of Alto: PC-100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_PC-100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEC_PC-100 And their competitor FM-Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns These are used x86 CPU.
- tzs 3y ago
  Although PC-98 was not PC-compatible, Microsoft did support it in DOS and Windows. Programs that just went through DOS or Windows and didn't make lower level BIOS calls directly or try to manipulate hardware directly would frequently just work out of the box on PC-98. The biggest difference between PC-98 and PC compatibles the DOS/Windows didn't hide that I remember, and that I remember being the biggest source of DOS/Windows programs failing even if they weren't doing low level calls was drive letter assignment. On PC-98 A: was the drive you booted from. If your system had a floppy drive and a hard drive, and you booted from hard drive then A: would be your hard drive. B: would be your floppy. In a PC-compatible A: would be the floppy and C: would be the hard disk regardless of which of the two you booted from. Quite a few programs turned out to have "C: is the first hard drive" hard coded in.
- Longlius 3y ago
  There's a great channel on Youtube called Basement Bros that goes over a lot of the games available at the time for the PC-98 (and other outmoded Japanese home computer platforms) and also touches on how these machines were used day-to-day. Definitely worth a look, especially if you have any interest in the history of Japanese game development as a lot of very high-profile people got their start writing games and applications for the PC-88, PC-98, MSX, etc.

soliton4 3y ago

i was expecting to find the nokia 9000 on this list. does this mean it was actually pc compatible?

cdcarter 3y ago
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Élan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Élan the SC4xx series _did_ have "PC/AT peripheral controllers".

legitster 3y ago

While a useful document, it's really not a Wikipedia article. It's making an argument, has a thesis statement, doesn't reference anything, and doesn't have a neutral point of view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars

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nineteen999 3y ago

[flagged]

Macha 3y ago

For recent examples, there's the PS4 and PS5. (I think the Xbox is a little more PC compatible?)

wmf 3y ago
Interestingly, there are PC motherboards using PS5/Xbox SoCs that can run Windows so there must be decent PC compatibility in the SoC even if the consoles don't use it.
- zinekeller 3y ago
  Side effect of being an AMD SoC? These changes are usually implemented in its BIO- I mean UEFI.

foobiekr 3y ago

The Zenith Z100 series, Dec Rainbow, and Epson QX-10+ would have been interesting to include. There was a very, very rich set of non-IBMPC MSDOS machines in the period. IIRC MS-DOS early on included tools written in a variant of Forth so that portability was easy and memory use was tight.

derefr 3y ago

How about the opposite: PC-compatible non-x86 computers? Like how the Transmeta Crusoe was an x86-compatible CPU... but moreso. The Crusoe was a thing marketed as a "CPU", that was actually internally an SoC (with the CPU inside it being non-x86.) This SoC had its own internal RAM and storage, and booted itself into internal software that then emulated an x86 CPU. All of the "CPU" data pins on the Crusoe SoC, routed to the virtual CPU inputs and outputs of this software. So, as far as other devices in the system were concerned, they were speaking to an x86 CPU. Did anyone ever try taking this concept further? Maybe in the context of an industrial embedded computer? I could imagine someone taking e.g. a modern ARM SoC with onboard RAM + eMMC; setting it up to boot into e.g. Bochs to emulate a virtual x86 (CPU + BIOS + other memory-mapped ROMs + platform controller hub + IO controllers + timer chips + TPM + etc — all the stuff on an x86 motherboard) — and then just setting up the SoC's GPIO pins to directly expose all the virtual buses of that virtual motherboard. You could then take such a chip, and design a physical "motherboard" for it to sit in, that's just a bunch of ports (e.g. PS2) and slots (e.g. ISA or maybe very slow PCI) routing directly to the SoC's GPIO pins. This would be a very effective strategy, I think, for producing low-cost host platforms for the many industrial-automation ISA cards that still exist. So I have a feeling some OEM has at least tried to do this. Probably there wouldn't be enough GPIO pins for most busses — x86 CPUs have tons of pins compared to almost any other architecture. So I wouldn't consider it cheating to feed parallel busses out serially at higher clock rates than those busses natively run at, and then to require the use of an external ser/des chip or two to flatten the signals back out. As long as it's the SoC itself speaking the protocol and the chip is "dumb", I think that'd still count. Also keep in mind that unlike with the Crusoe, an "x86-on-ARM SoC" wouldn't need to have GPIO fast and wide enough to talk to external DRAM — as any memory could be internal to the SoC without breaking the contract. So the main constraint bottlenecking the Crusoe's CPU performance, wouldn't apply here. This thing could actually perform decently well — possibly well enough to run hard-realtime industrial control software coded in the 1990s, and to speak to ISA cards built in the 1990s. Which is all it would need to be able to do, for the obvious use-case.

solardev 3y ago
Wouldn't it be simpler to do all this in software? What's the advantage of doing it in hardware like this?

VSpike 3y ago

I had a couple of Sirius (AKA Victor) machines that were cast offs from my father's office given to me to play with. The first one was twin floppy, and the second had a 5MB hard drive. When I got the second one I think the first one got binned. When the second one broke, I bust it up to use the PSU and HDD on another computer. Of course, I really wish now that I'd kept at least one of them, but you never know at the time what would have value in the future and what is just junk.

h2odragon 3y ago
My first exposure to "real" computers was with Victor machines. I may well have one in a pile somewhere still. I worked for a shop that was a Victor dealer, they had the fabled "PC compatible floppy drive" in a machine there. Later I was one of the few people with a PC that could read Victor disks; Copy2PC card For Tha Win there. They did "high memory" and iirc had slightly higher resolution text modes, which made them wonderful for spreadsheets. http://www.oldcomputers.net/victor9000.html http://www.oldcomputers.net/victor9000.html

starkparker 3y ago

When jumping in to suggest how this violated Wikipedia guidelines, note that this predates WP's current Policies and guidelines page (1, 2010) and the COPO essay describing core content policies (2, Nov. 2007). The Five Pillars page has changed quite a bit since 2007.[3] My favorite change, and only slightly tangential to the topic, is replacing this from 2007: > [[Wikipedia:Be bold|Be '''bold''' in editing, moving, and modifying articles]], because the joy of editing is that, although it should be aimed for, [[Wikipedia:Editing policy|perfection is not required]]. And do not worry about messing up. All prior versions of articles are kept, so there is no way that you can accidentally damage Wikipedia or irretrievably destroy content. But remember — whatever you write here will be preserved for posterity. with this in the current policy: > [[Wikipedia:Be bold|Be bold]], but not [[Wikipedia:Reckless|reckless]], in updating articles. And [[Wikipedia:Editing policy|do not agonize over making mistakes]]: they can be corrected easily because [[Help:Page history|(almost) every past version of each article is saved]]. An unintentionally accurate transition in how it felt to participate then and now, subtly excising any mentions of the joy of publicly but safely messing up and replacing them with assurances that you and your contributions can simply be erased from history if you make any mistakes. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Policies_and_guidelines&oldid=370614864 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Policie... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Core_content_policies&oldid=172597077 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Core_co... 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Five_pillars&diff=cur&oldid=138580428 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Five_pi...

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rvba 3y ago
The article was deleted because wikipedia is mostly run by a clique who uses rules to discourage anyone else from editing while being above those rules at the same time.

terr-dav 3y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20240109170221/https://lproven.livejournal.com/189791.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240109170221/https://lproven.l...

tzs 3y ago

> Intel's 80386 processor was the first to include memory management hardware and thus be capable of running a full UNIX operating system That's not correct. The 80286 had sufficient memory management hardware for full Unix. What it did not have was sufficient memory management hardware for reasonable demand paging, but it was fine for swapping systems. AT&T USG has a port of System V Release 2 for 80286, for example. There was also Xenix, which has enough licensed code in it from AT&T that I'd count it as a Unix. There was also System V Release 3 fro 80286, but I don't think that was ever released. When AT&T was developing SVR3 for their own 3B line of processors they wanted to also port it to Intel processors. They hired Interactive Systems Corporation (ISC) to do that, with the contract calling for porting to both 80286 and 80386. I worked at ISC at the time and was on the 80286 port team. We did get it working, but where having problems getting the scheduler to behave reasonably under heavy load. Somewhere in the middle of trying to figure out what the heck was going on with the scheduler, we and AT&T realized (1) 80386 was so much better than 80286 that a lot of 80286 Unix users would upgrade to 80386 systems, and (2) those that are happy with the 80286 Unix systems and not planning on leaving 80286 probably would not find upgrading from SVR2 to SVR3 to be worth the effort. It wasn't all that clear that there was much of a market for 80286 SVR3. The 80286 port was then dropped. I was moved to work on the 80386 port and also to a newly formed team to add support for running 80286 SVR2 binaries on 80386 SVR3. That was a fun project. Kind of like Wine, but easier because (1) it was just going from SVR2 Unix to SVR3 Unix instead of Windows to Unix, and (2) we had full source code to SVR2 and SCR3 unlike the Wine developers who don't have Windows source.

lproven 3y ago
> That's not correct. The 80286 had sufficient memory management hardware for full Unix. What it did not have was sufficient memory management hardware for reasonable demand paging, but it was fine for swapping systems. Oh my word. A correction for something I wrote, what, 18 years ago? I hope you will forgive me if I don't go edit it. ;-) I barely remember writing it. TBPH I think that the distinction between swapping and paging is a subtlety that is beyond even most Linux hackers these days. I take your point but it is a small terminological inexactitude IMHO... no?
AshamedCaptain 3y ago

ShadowBanThis01 3y ago

IBM-compatibles. They're still PCs.

kube-system 3y ago
In this context it is referring to a specific product called "Personal Computer" made by IBM. Just like when someone says they bought a record on compact disc, they are referring to Red Book Compact Disc Digital Audio Standard. They're not referring to any other discs that are small.
- ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  I think they say they bought an album on CD, not a record on CD.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Yeah, that. ... Or maybe they were talking about a 45? :)
    - ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
      Ha haaa! NO, I have a decent-sized 45 collection and there's no confusion about their awesomeness! Most of them sound better than the dynamically-compressed-to-shit streaming "remasters" of the same songs today. I also have a few 3-inch CDs, which were supposed to be the successor to 45s but record companies just weren't down for seriously selling singles at that point. Another historical curiosity: I have a couple of "video CDs," which were regular-sized (5-inch) CDs with a digital section containing the song (playable on any CD player) and then an analog video section with the video for the song (playable on later LaserDisc players).
      - wolrah 3y ago
        > Another historical curiosity: I have a couple of "video CDs," which were regular-sized (5-inch) CDs with a digital section containing the song (playable on any CD player) and then an analog video section with the video for the song (playable on later LaserDisc players). That is a "CD Video" or "CD+V", which supported up to 20 minutes of CD audio and around 5 minutes of LaserDisc-style analog video. There was also a variant that skipped the CD audio and was just LaserDisc video on a CD-size disc called "Video Single Disc". "Video CD" or "VCD" was a later all digital format that used MPEG-1 compression while also disabling error correction for more data capacity to fit more or less the same amount of VHS-ish quality video on a given disc as it could support CD audio. VCD never even reached the level of success of LaserDisc in the US but most standalone DVD players could play them. I believe they were a lot more popular in parts of Asia.

bryanlarsen 3y ago

A wild inclusion would be the IBM PCjr, which wasn't quite PC compatible. IBM didn't sell many, but Tandy sold a ton of PCjr clones, the Tandy 1000 et al.

the_af 3y ago
The 8 Bit Guy makes a good case that the Tandy 1000 was the best "DOS machine" ever, even though it wasn't quite PC compatible. Makes me wish I had one back in the day. My first PC was an XT clone, and I never owned a Tandy.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
The Tandy 1000 series was so successful that "PCjr" compatible games almost immediately rebranded their packaging to say "Tandy compatible" instead. I'm sure IBM was real happy about that.

helf 3y ago

[dead]

EvanAnderson 3y ago

I believe some of the early CTOS machines were x86 based but not PC compatible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operating_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convergent_Technologies_Operat...

rbanffy 3y ago
What a beauty those were... So much ahead of their time...

Thoreandan 3y ago

Livingston Enterprises products (Portmaster and IRX routers) running ComOS were x86

EvanAnderson 3y ago
Oh, good point. I didn't even think about embedded devices. The Cisco PIX firewalls were originally PCs w/ Intel motherboards (SE440BX, I believe) before becoming embedded x86 designs. I don't know how far the x86 legacy continued into the ASA and Firepower follow-up devices.
nonamesleft 3y ago
I seem to recall that USRobotics Total Control (dialup servers, ISDN PRI E1 (E1 for me in EU) / T1) to ~30ish dialup lines/ISDN BRI used x86 in the form of 80386ex (386 without real mode). Whether it was 386ex or just a 386 is a bit hazy as it has been 25+ years since i last opened one up. I think each line card that supported analog modems up to 4x 56kbit per card had one, along with some DSPs. Also old Lucent WaveLAN (802.11 era, possibly even the non-standard predecessor) access points had a x86 processor sbc in them.

johnklos 3y ago

It's a horrible title. "PC" means personal computer. It may be a bit pedantic, sure, but if you're going to write an article that talks about technical things, it really smarts to read such a glaringly non-technical title.

the_af 3y ago
I don't know. Back in the old days, everyone understood what "[IBM] PC compatible" meant. PC meant something specific, not just a generic "personal computer", see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  Back in the even older days, PC meant "Personal Computer" but quite soon after that it meant "IBM PC" (or compatible).
  - the_af 3y ago
    To be honest I didn't live through that "even older days" era. I went straight from a Commodore 64 to a PC XT clone, and by then (the 80s) "PC" meant "IBM PC" to everyone I spoke to.
kube-system 3y ago
"PC compatible" was a common shorthand reference to "IBM PC compatible" which was referring to a specific architecture compatible with IBM PC software, and later, that platform's descendants. There were many personal computers at the time but colloquially, the IBM PC was the PC.
kens 3y ago
Prior to the IBM PC, a personal computer was called a "personal computer", not a "PC". I assumed that IBM came up with the "PC" name, but after a few minutes of research, it seems that IBM called their system the "IBM Personal Computer" in the original ads and documentation, rather than the "PC". As far as I can tell, PC Magazine created the name "PC". At first, the magazine referred to the IBM "PC" (with quotation marks around PC), which suggests that this wasn't standard usage. I'm a bit surprised by the idea that the "PC" name was invented by the magazine, and I'm not 100% sure of this, but maybe someone can confirm or deny. It wouldn't be the first time a magazine has created the terminology; "electronics" apparently comes from the magazine, not vice versa.

the-golden-one 3y ago

A number of arcade machines are x86 based, with non-pc-standard hardware, such as Z80 co-processors, etc.. For example - Seibu SPI https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/seibu/seibuspi.cpp https://github.com/mamedev/mame/blob/master/src/mame/seibu/s...

Doctor_Fegg 3y ago

RM Nimbus PC186. MS-DOS based but not PC-compatible, and used the rare 80186 processor. Popular in UK education for a while. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus The Wikipedia article on the 80186 lists a bunch of forgotten, often not PC-compatible, machines using that CPU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80186

lproven 3y ago
I did know about the Nimbus. I should have included that. D'oh! And the BBC Master 512, of course...
whoopdedo 3y ago
Intergraph[1] workstations based on the Fairchild Clipper CPU included a 80186 for booting into PC-DOS. At $30K in '80s dollars that might have made it the most expensive way to run DOS. But I think when booted into UNIX the 186 was used for I/O processing. [1] https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/intergraph https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/intergraph

qingcharles 3y ago

MISSING: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RM_Nimbus (very popular in British schools in the 80s and 90s and ran a lot of DOS apps) Glad to see Sirius Victor on there. They were very popular in the UK before IBM ate their lunch.

nxobject 3y ago

Another fun one: the original OLPC XO-1 (2007?) had an AMD Geode, but ran on Open Firmware and had ad-hoc controllers and drivers for things that would have gone through ACPI, etc. Microsoft claimed they had Windows XP booting on one, but I've yet to see how that would have worked.

p_l 3y ago
Alternate HAL.DLL plus open firmware ARC bootstrap, something they already made for Windows NT for PowerPC.

rbanffy 3y ago

One nice machine I remember is the Siemens PC-D series. They eventually became PC compatible, but the ones I used were running some sort of terminal software and a GUI called Collage connected to a SINIX (Siemens-branded Xenix, IIRC) machine. There were lots of machines with 8086's as coprocessors - the Zenith Z-100 had one, and there was a board for Apple IIs that predated the Applied Engineering one (that was a PC on an Apple II card, with PC floppy ports).

buescher 3y ago

The first issue of BYTE magazine I ever had featured Steve Ciarcia’s home brew 8086 motherboard on the cover. I think he eventually published mods for that one that brought it into some semblance of pc compatibility, though.

sombragris 3y ago

I saw that someone already mentioned, but only in passing, the DEC Rainbow 100. It was a great machine for its time, with Z80/8088 CPUs allowing it to run both 8 and 16-bit software. But they had a special (even proprietary) floppy disk format. You couldn't format your own floppies. You couldn't even purchase any floppy brand. You had to order from DEC at $5 apiece, and you got a paltry 400K 5.25" floppy that you couldn't even format. This was corrected later but then the damage was done and the Rainbow never took off. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_100

mikewarot 3y ago

IBM took an early lead in production of non-PC compatible machines when it introduced the PS/2 series of computers with MicroChannel as an attempt to recapture the monopoly on general purpose computing. It didn't go well for IBM.

lproven 3y ago
> IBM took an early lead in production of non-PC compatible machines when it introduced the PS/2 series of computers Kinda sorta, ish. I loved the PS/2 range. I still own 2 of them, a top-spec Model 80 and a Model 55SX. But they were PC compatibles. They ran DOS, Windows, OS/2, and NT 3.x no problem at all. They were highly compatible... just with a totally different expansion bus. If one said that a modern PC with PCI-e slots was not compatible with a decade-old PC because the old box had PCI and the new one has no PCI only PCI Express, I think most people would unhesitatingly say that was wrong.

neurostimulant 3y ago

Does the old Asus Zenfone 2 (an Android phone with an Intel Atom Z3580 processor) qualify as a non-pc compatible x86 computer?