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No open standards, that's why.

The PC prevailed because of the simplicity of IBM hardware, and the fact that Microsoft would license DOS to any and all.

IBM managed to get the microcomputer in to the office, and on to folks desks. Those folks learned they wanted to take them home. And a huge aftermarket of software, peripherals and full systems followed.

CP/M didn't enjoy the level of compatability that MS-DOS and the PC BIOS brought to the table, even though there were several Z-80 and CP/M vendors at the time.

The PC was a juggernaught, and pushed the Apple/Atari/Commodore systems in to the past.

Without the PC we'd not have Linux today. It's ubiquitous and commodity nature is what gave it it's power.

This is exemplified by the poor reception of the PS/2 which was essentially a PC with a proprietary bus. If I'm stuck with a crummy OS and UI experience (i.e. DOS vs the Mac or Amiga), I may as well get the benefit of an open architecture and dynamic marketplace that IBMs MCA stifled. So, the PS/2 offered little consumer value over the standard PC architecure.

"No open standards, that's why."


Commodore 64 was its own standard, just as the Apple Ipod is today. Commodore (in the US) came to dominate and decimate its competition with the C-64, mostly due to price. After the C-64's price was reduced to $199, Texas Instruments got out of the market almost immmediately, and Atari realized it couldn't compete pricewise with its Atari 400 and 800.

The problem was that Commodore Intl was an arrogant company whose mangagement sucked out the profits of the business as opposed to re-investing in R & D. They failed to cultivate relationships with third party software companies, preferring to write their own. Due to the bad decisions it made in not releasing a successor to the Commodore 128 8 bit line and never designing any substantial improvements to its Amiga 16/32 bit line, it painted itself into a corner by appealing only to enthusiasts, and eventually went bankrupt.

I believe there is still a market for a cheap home computer whose main function would be to teach children programming. It could be a video game, internet device, and teaching machine in one. Perhaps that is what will happen with OLPC...

Just building on the 'open standards' lie which the original author said; the PC has NO openstandards. The processor competition is only as a result of reverse engineer and later FTC/DOJ intervention, and the BIOS only reversed because of Compaq. Before the only way one could purchase a PC outside of IBM was purchasing off shady back room vendors.

The only remotely open standards based machines today is SPARC, OpenFirmware, OpenSPARC etc. etc. So lets not try and perpetuate this urban myth that just because parts are cheap and can be picked up from newegg, doesn't mean that it is automatically commodity or open standards. Heck, there are motherboard vendors who can't even adhere to the SATA specification!

From what I understand is that they sucked the money out of their Amiga side of the business and regurgitated back into their failing PC side of the business. It never made any sense to have the mutated camel that is Commodore. Add that to their suck marketing, and there lack of focus on the biggest market (the US) - they killed themselves rather than the competition killing them. Its like Apple, Apples decline before Steve Jobs had to do more with bad management than bad products or lack of talent.

Actually, Europe was their biggest market. What killed them was their continued attempts to break the Amiga into the US market as a "serious" computer, rather than focusing on it's successful market (high end gaming in Europe) An unwillingness to to give up on the lost cause of the Amiga in the US plus too much money spent on PC clones are what killed Commodore.

It's also in part due to their hardware choices. When they made the shift to 16-bit, Commodore had two choices: A processor compatible with the 6502 (the 65816, as seen in the IIgs and the SNES) or the sexier 68000.

Although theirs was a legitimate choice, what with the custom chips and all... imagine what Commodore's fortunes would have been like if their new 16-bit machine had stayed compatible with the C64 *and* was easy to port from the SNES just like the 6502-based C64 was (comparatively) easy to port to from the 6502-based NES? Not to mention having a proven OS (GEOS) to port forwards?

But, hindsight is 20/20.

No, true, the PC Architecture wasn't an open "standard", but it was open nonetheless. It was documented and unencumbered. The primary effort was in reverse engineering the BIOS. Once that was done, the open hardware design and Microsoft's willingness to license MS-DOS to any and all comers created de facto standards.

With all of the other home computers, they're weren't open at all. The Apple could take board slots and accept peripherals, but only Apple could actually "make" Apples since they controlled the software as well. With the Atari, Atari controlled both software and hardware (with the special graphics chips no one was willing to replicate). And with the Commodore, you had the same issues.

But there was nothing really special about the PC. It was off the shelf components all around, and since it used a BIOS via interrupts as a high level interface, the BIOS could be more readily reverse engineered. All of the other systems relied on software being at addresses in ROM rather than indirectly addressed through the 8086 interrupt mechanism.

If IBM had tighter control over the OS or the hardware, then cloning the machine would have been much more difficult. But, they didn't, and suddenly you had a popular, "commodity" computing platform. By the late-80s, Computer Shopper was 2 inches thick, computer shows were everywhere, and everyone and their brother was stamping out PC parts to build your own kit. Doing their best to survive on the minimal profit margin commodity computing provides.

You can't really compare the two head to head. There's a difference between a computing platform and a specialized gadget. The gadget only needs to be good at what it does (which is usually one thing) and attractive, in order to be successful. If you want to compare C64 to anything it would be the Apple computers + Mac OS X. And that is a delicate position to achieve and to hold. It took Apple a couple of tries to make it.

And remember that 20 years ago they didn't benefit from a consumer base with the personal computer culture that Apple benefits from today. Nowadays a computer is a given and Apple can have its pick of the litter from a wide consumer base (practically everybody) and single out people who like what a Mac and OS X can offer.

Even so, it's a niche market. It's quite hard to compete with the open and diversified hardware platform that is the PC using a closed platform.

"It's quite hard to compete with the open and diversified hardware platform that is the PC using a closed platform."

Yet, Apple does today with its Mac computers, and Commodore did with its C-64 computers 25 years ago. It's hard NOT to be at least a de facto standard when you move 17 million units in as short a period of time as Commodore did. The chief difference between Apple and Commodore is Apple sank monies into R & D, and Commodore paid its executives more than those at IBM. And still, Apple almost bricked itself at least a couple of times over the last 25 years (the last time, it received a major cash infusion from Microsoft).

The PC platform is not nearly as open as you think. The BIOS is still proprietary, the OS is proprietary (unless you use Linux, almost the definition of niche), and there are a crapload of patents that are still valid. Lastly, diversified hardware might be more of a curse than a blessing, as more drivers are needed to support the hardware.

I find it amusing that Linux is becoming a better platform for diversified hardware than Windows, as each new version of Windows jettisons support for older hardware that Linux still supports.

I don't think the home computer failed. Remember no system ever exceeded sails of the C=64.

As for standards, there was a standard, called MSX. Every device and software package that carried the MSX logo, would work on MSX hardware. Unfortunately it died in the early 1990's and however MSX was pretty popular in many countries, it was physically unknown in the USA and UK.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

The still is a small but enthusiast MSX community and still new software is written (most of it is freeware or Open Source).

http://www.msx.org

I don't think the home computer failed. Remember no system ever exceeded sails of the C=64.

But in all fairness, the steam-driven computer quickly obsoleted the old wind-powered computers. I think the golden age of sails is possibly over...

Correction: sails should be sales

>MSX was pretty popular in many countries, it was physically unknown in the USA and UK.

No, MSX models were launched in the UK market and were familiar to me and other consumers of the time. UK magazines of the era predicted that the Japanese standard would eventually crush all before it (after all, who could possibly compete with them in the arena of consumer electronics). As it happened the UK market wasn't that interested in yet another home computer standard and MSX faded into oblivion.

Thanks for your answer. I couldn't agree less.
The success of the PC was completely by co-incidence. Software and hardware sucked big time and was always lagging behind.
The only reason IBM gave the job for the OS to nonames like Micro-Soft was that even the IBM folks didn't believe in the success of the PC. Everyone thought the Apple would make it to the top and stay there.

FYI, Microsoft wrote Commodore, Apple, and Atari basic.

The C64 came with a users manual, and reference guide that included not only pinouts for each port on the thing, but also the schematics of the C64 itself. I don't see how it gets much more "open" than that.

http://project64.c64.org/hw/c64prg10.zip

Edited 2007-12-10 22:44

fyi, no they did not.

Microsoft had a version of BASIC that computer manufacturers altered for their hardware.

FYI Commodore licensed 6502 basic from Microsoft which means Microsoft wrote Commodore basic.

Of course Commodore altered it, that doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't write the base code.

Incidentally, they (Microsoft) also wrote basic for Apple, Atari, and many other platforms as well incase you missed it the first time I said it.

"""
I remember when my father bought himself a WANG IBM-compatible computer around 1984.
"""

One of those beige Wang PCs with the funky keyboard with all the function keys and the built-in text-based menu system? Our company had a custom restaurant back office management system that ran on those. I supported more than a few.

Because, right or wrong, home computers were generally consider advanced toys while the PC was, you know, a "serious" computer for grown-ups and businesses.

In addition to that, Soulbender, there's a friggin' HUGE reason that the IBM PC's and compatibles won out:

IBM.

Why is that important? For the same reason people didn't buy Atari computers in large numbers for business purposes: IBM was internationally respected in the field of business machines, and Atari was also respected in their field of business for game machines, but the two don't mix that well in the minds of a lot of people. That was also the same brush that worked against Apple (who had probably a much larger inroads into business computers and being taken seriously than any Commodore of any bitness overall, since after all, the first spreadsheet [VisiCalc] came out first on the Apple 2) because they took the PC more seriously as a "business" machine. When IBM tried to get more into the market for a home/game machine (IBM PC jr) they didn't do well, either.

Finally, from a business perspective, the old home computers (8 bit ones) didn't have nearly the overall capacity for complex business applications in terms of RAM and screen display to work with, at least not until the Apple 2GS, but by that time (1986) it was pretty much too little, too late for the machines compatible with the 8 bit 65xx series, or any other straight 8-bit series. Sure, the business computer Apple had out before the Lisa and the Macintosh was the Apple 3, and they blew it... and the Apple 2GS with native 16 bit software could directly use 8 megs RAM for those that had the money, while PC's were still mostly stuck with a 640K limit (yes, I knew someone that developed software on an Apple 2GS with that much RAM). But, once again: the IBM PC is what people took more seriously, largely because of the name behind the de facto standard, reverse-engineered or not.

Oh, and for the C64 lovers? That must have have truly been love to put up with the painfully slow floppy drives that Apple blew away for performance on the Apple 2 series that had almost everything done in software with very little actual hardware (Yet another reason C-64's were never suited to business)

indeed, ibm, Industrial Business Machines (or big blue iirc) had been in the industry from before it was a industry.

hell, they where already providing machines in the form of big irons iirc. so when they started rolling out PC's (and could probably give a good bulk order deal for old customers) bye bye apple.

and when compaq came along and showed that the mom and pop places could get hold of machines that would run the exact same software, but for a cost that they could manage, one could say it was a runaway train.

hell, now the office boys could buy one for their home and take the work there after hours. or maybe dail into the office as modems got cheaper and faster. and unlike in europe, local calls where often free, right?

same software = same file format...

going between a apple and a PC could land you in endian issues, no?

as for that floppy drive, that was a woz creation, right?

Edited 2007-12-10 06:21 UTC

I started out with a ZX81, briefly had a Spectrum, but my main love was an Acorn Atom, very expandable firmware wise (got extra ROMs for it!). My friend had a C64, which was cool for graphics, but the Atom had native Assembly language (and very powerful Basic).

@ islander

What computer do you think it is Amiga model 128?

Perhaps you made some little confusion with C128 home computer and Amiga PC?

It probably was a poke, given how the C128 and the Amiga were both marketed similarly.

Yes , you got the idea.

My apologies , back then we loosely called the Commodore 128 the Amiga 128.Well at least in my neck of the woods.

Got my first taste of computer gaming on it with a title called "The Way of the Exploding Fist".It was a great graphics machine at the time and I really wanted one:)

The Plus/4 was only better in that it had a 6551 UART, more user accessible RAM, and its CPU ran at a whopping 750hz faster than the C64s. The C64 had the SID chip and Hardware Sprites and was just a much better gaming machine

a much better gaming machine ? yes, yes it was....

however, did you try squirm ?

anyhow, I was more into programming in them days, and the BASIC inside the plus4 was amazing compared to the cut down version inside the c64

never tried that one...

Yeah, the Plus/4s basic was *much* better. But real coders wrote everything in 6502 ASM.. so whatever

The real weird thing about the Plus/4 (C16, C116) was that it had a much better BASIC than the C64, with graphics and sound commands, but that it lacked the graphics and sound hardware of the C64 so the extra commands were pretty much wasted.

That sort of exemplifies C= management all over, I think.

We sure thought we were lucky, being kids in the 80's!

I think you are right, I did not even start with a 'real' computer again until at least 1998 I think...

Times have changed!

LOL,I know how it feels, I keep all my dusty hardware in a small room at home and in my heart(shared with my wife).. zx speccy, c64, msx and amiga500 :-)

That was true for original games. If you loaded cracked games from tape with a turbo (such as Turbo 250 by Mr Z), the games would load much much faster.

At least where I grew up, all the kids with a 64 had lots of cracked games and maybe a couple of originals. You could laugh at the NES owners with maybe 10 games when you had hundreds.

View them by screenshot: http://www.lemon64.com/

Almafeta -- I'm an active "data rescuer" for older computers and would be very willing to have a go at the disks that you fear are unreadable. If you're able to locate them, I would pay for shipping them to me and provide you with images usable with a PC-based emulator in return. If you're interested, I can be contacted at chaosotter76@gmail.com .

Edited 2007-12-10 16:25

Your line 40 is wrong. Spot the error

OK OK !

It's a 53281 instead of 53280 again.

I see there are good 8 bit programers here ..