Happy 35th Birthday, IBM PC! In honor of it, some GREAT vintage ads

[hunter]

17. He's right.

That machine and it's operating system was a rat bastard.

It seems IBM didn't want to build anything into the PC that might compete with their mainframe business. (If that's not the case, then some of their design decisions were... strange.) The PC was crippled out of the box. The PCjr home computer was even worse.

Unfortunately for IBM, they didn't nail the specs down tight enough to prevent clones, but even the clone PCs were an impediment to human progress.

You have no idea how ugly the machine was.

I'm posting this from an ARM machine. The machine's underlying operating system is Linux. Linux is a work-alike of BSD. I first used BSD in the late 'seventies. It was my first real operating system. In comparison, MS-DOS was a toy.

Originally ARM stood for Acorn RISC machine, a successor to the 6502 microprocessor. All modern microprocessors, even modern PC x86 processors, have been strongly influenced by RISC architectures. Complex instructions in modern processors are broken down and processed as simple instructions.

ARM microprocessors are in everything now, cell phones, tablets, routers, netbooks, and so on. The PC-ness of any modern PC or Apple desktop product is essentially a RISC-like hardware emulation of the traditional x86 instruction set.

I have a couple of old PCs in my garage, including an original IBM PC with a full height floppy disk and a full height 10 megabyte hard drive. I also have a few interesting clones. I don't have to start the actual machine up to play with it, it's fully emulated on my current machines. I can even write new PC programs using Borland Turbo-Pascal or GWBASIC if I please, and run this new software on the old machines. All I need is the appropriate usb to serial adapter.

The last Microsoft product I used at home was Windows 98SE. I won't trouble myself with Microsoft or Apple products anymore unless someone is paying me. I'm most at home using Debian, "the universal operating system." It's been ported to many different machines, even experimental processor designs.