Ars has started a series on the advent of the IBM PC, and today they published part one.
The machine that would become known as the real IBM PC begins, of all places, at Atari. Apparently feeling their oats in the wake of the Atari VCS’ sudden Space Invaders-driven explosion in popularity and the release of its own first PCs, the Atari 400 and 800, they made a proposal to IBM’s chairman Frank Cary in July of 1980: if IBM wished to have a PC of its own, Atari would deign to build it for them.
Fascinating history of the most influential computing platform in history, a statement that will surely ruffle a lot of feathers. The IBM PC compatible put a computer on every desk and in every home, and managed to convince hundreds of millions of people of the need of a computer – no small feat in a world where a computer was anything but a normal household item. In turn, this widespread adoption of the IBM PC compatible platform paved the way for the internet to become a success.
With yesterday’s ten year anniversary of the original iPhone going on sale, a number of people understandably went for the hyperbole, such as proclaiming the iPhone the most important computer in history, or, and I wish I was making this up, claiming the development of the iPhone was more important to the world than the work at Xerox PARC – and since this was apparently a competition, John Gruber decided to exaggerate the claim even more.
There’s no denying the iPhone has had a huge impact on the world, and that the engineers at Apple deserve all the credit and praise they’re getting for delivering an amazing product that created a whole new category overnight. However, there is a distinct difference between what the iPhone achieved, and what the people at Xerox PARC did, or what IBM and Microsoft did.
The men and women at PARC literally invented and implemented the graphical user interface, bitmap graphics, Ethernet, laser printing, object-oriented programming, the concept of MVC, the personal computer (networked together!), and so much more – and all this in an era when computers were gigantic mainframes and home computing didn’t exist.
As for the IBM PC compatible and Wintel – while nowhere near the level of PARC, it did have a profound and huge impact on the world that in my view is far greater than that of the iPhone. People always scoff at IBM and Microsoft when it comes to PCs and DOS/Windows, but they did put a computer on every desk and in every home, at affordable prices, on a relatively open and compatible platform (especially compared to what came before). From the most overpaid CEO down to the most underpaid dock worker – everybody could eventually afford a PC, paving the way for the internet to become as popular and ubiquitous as it is.
The iPhone is a hugely important milestone and did indeed have a huge impact on the world – but developing and marketing an amazing and one-of-a-kind smartphone in a world where computing was ubiquitous, where everybody had a mobile phone, and where PDAs existed, is nowhere near the level of extraordinary vision and starting-with-literally-nothing that the people at PARC had, and certainly not as impactful as the rise of the IBM PC compatible and Wintel.
It’s fine to be celebratory on the iPhone’s birthday – Apple and its engineers deserve it – but let’s keep at least one foot planted in reality.
It more or less depends upon when you were born. For people who grew up in an era when personal computers were normal, the iPhone is going to be given more weight. For someone of my generation, something like the IBM PC is more worthy. (Though, personally, I would look at the Apple II/TRS-80/PET since they proved that the personal computer could be a thing.) People from an earlier era may point to earlier machines.
My point is this: we probably shouldn’t single out a single product. While computers have had a revolutionary impact upon our lives, their development was evolutionary.
One thing the IBM PC did was common parts. It was easy to clone.
That made easy for others to see that they could make clones to sell into the rich business market.
Remember when the IBM PC came out there was no real standard in the CP/M machines. The S100 buss may have be considered standard, but I remember having to customize the serial port software for all the different boards we bought. The plug in of the board was standard, the software to drive the board was not.
IBM clones almost all used standard hardware that used the same software – please note I also had to deal with compatible like the early Panasonic and Compac machines that used special hardware and needed their own drivers.
Commodore, Atari, and to a lesser extent Apple (IIgs, Apple III, Mac) used parts that were hard for cloners to get but all the parts for the IBMs were easy to get.
Edited 2017-07-01 04:23 UTC
IBM professionalized the components, but was the [mumbling-ly allowed] cloners who standardized the recipe.
I agree that folks opinions will be based on when they were born, but this feels analogous to suggesting that the automobile is a more important invention than the wheel. It just doesn’t sit right.
Agreed. Nobody should deny that the iPhone has been a hugely influential device… but to give it primacy as the “most important invention in computing history” is to ignore everything that happened over the decades that made that device possible…
Consider – even within Apple… the iPhone has been a real money-maker for them, but is it more influential than the original Mac, a device that popularised the work done by PARC, and in turn influence the earliest designs of rivals like Windows, defining a desktop paradigm that’s lasted more than 30 years?
The iPhone isn’t even technologically important. It just made smartphones slightly more accessible, and vastly more fashionable.
The exact same thing is true of the IBM PC.
Well, except the IBM PC never became fashionable, and there were loads of competing platforms with far better accessibility (for the user, not for the competition).
The only thing it had going for it was the relative openness of the platform, which kept it alive for long enough to develop decent operating systems for it.
was AFAIK, jointly developed by Xerox, Intel and Dec and primarily competed with IBM’s token Ring.
I still have my Dec issued Ethernet Co-ax tapping kit.
There were Graphical Interfaces around before the Xerox ones but the work they (Xerox) did was to take them to another level entirely.
Sort of like what Apple did with the iPhone. There were smart phones before but they were very Kludgy. the iPhone took things to another level.
Is the iPhone development more important than the Xerox work? Hard to say really but having experienced both I’d say that Xerox just about wins out but I’m a sucker for pioneers. I still think that Brunels Great Eastern was a step change in ship design but that is another debate entirely.
While you made a valiant attempt to highlight folks who deserve credit for their efforts and impact, you did it in a way that seems to diminish the world changing impact of others. This PC on the desk of every household world you imagine – is ridiculously overstated. To someone who’s traveled the first, second, and third world, it sounds quite parochial. The mobile smart phone’s impact is significantly larger than you portray it to be. It’s penetrated much, much further than desktop PCs ever will. Walk around a developing third world country today and you will see farmers talking on their phones and checking the weather – not every farmer to be sure, but more of them than have or will ever have desktop PC’s. Equally parochial is your view of technological discovery. It’s never a one-person (or company) show. I would recommend Bruno Latour’s Science in Action, if you’re interested in a more thoughtful discussion of how technology is practiced.
The iPhone launched the smartphone movement that has put computers in the hands of 10X as many people as desktop computers ever did in a far shorter period of time.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDVuKHgVwAIfGMy.jpg:large
Something is clearly wrong with that chart – there are obviously more than ~300 million PCs in the world, and the number of PCs clearly isn’t going down either. My guess it that while the smartphone line charts *total* smartphone sales, the PC line charts *yearly* PC sales.
EDIT: Haha the longer you look at that chart, the more craziness you discover. According to this chart, 2 billion smartphones are sold per year? Are you serious?
Edited 2017-07-01 16:38 UTC
Ha, of course, because the software stack gets bigger and more bloated forcing people to throw their old phones in the trash much quicker than a laptop/PC.
PCs are far more upgradable and better as hand me downs “Hey, I upgraded my video card, you get my old model to pep up your system” vs “Oh, all of our phones are now really slow and won’t upgrade to the latest operating system so we no longer get security updates, new phones for the whole family!”
Planned obsolescence at it’s worse. We do have Apple to thank for that.
I don’t get why they get so much praise. Smart phones were definitely not invented by them. Smart phones were even somewhat usable before them. All they did was market them correctly to the people who were already Mac customers, and then convinced others they were a status symbol.
Is not all apple’s fault.
How many Androids get software updates after a year? after two?
Apple is still updating the iPhone 5S which is what 4 years old?
Clearly not only Apple’s fault.
They are charting annual PC sales against total smartphone sales.
This just shows OEM PC’s sold worldwide comparing to smartphones. It’s misleading because any sane person buying a PC right now will actually resort to building one by himself or paying someone else to build it for him.
Information like this will never show on a nice graph like the one above.
Edited 2017-07-04 09:57 UTC
Sidux,
True, I haven’t bought a PC in eons because I assemble and upgrade mine using parts. I would build laptops too if only the industry had standards. Hell the same goes for phones, I’m extremely annoyed that fixing a phone problem often requires replacing the whole thing, stupid stupid stupid (but profitable).
I think the PC vs smartphone pseudo contest that some people make it out to be is kind of pointless. While it would make sense that more people own a smart phone than a PC, people who work with media or data will generally still be far more productive on a PC and would typically own both. As a genuine substitution, a phone is a very poor man’s PC at best! (And to show that I’m being fair: a PC is a poor substitute for a smartphone too, haha).
Having smart phones arrived first at most of the World is -in my view- one of the greatest lost opportunities.
Sitcoms are totally pro-consuming. And that’s what the “rest of the world” got. Those are not tools, just spy-agents and front-stores.
And obviously those farmers in developing use 700$ iPhones in those developing third world countries instead of feature phones.
That change began before the iPhone with Nokia, Motorola, Samsung, Ericsson etc and the iPhone contributed little to it. The iPhone didn´t start the mobile revolution, it´s just the mos successful player in developed countries.
You make excellent points about the hyping of the iPhone. Yes, it was hugely impactful, but to say it is more important that Xerox Parc, incredibly naive. It may never have existed without the work done there and elsewhere. Heck, its main innovations might be characterized by extreme miniaturization more than anything else (at the risk of swinging the pendulum in the other direction of too little credit).
I’d say it’s only innovation is the Apple reality distortion field, which is still prevalant 10 years after it was released.
Comparing it to some of the old time innovations is pretty ridiculous. Hell, they had to even steal the name from Cisco (both iOS and iPhone)
Ah, back when Atari were the kings of innovation. Should we list some of the great things they brought to the industry.
1) created the video game industry
2) had so many ‘greats’ work for them (Including Jobs and Wozniak)
3) (may be wrong about this one) set the culture for Silicon Valley
4) were both the fastest growing and then the highest loss of revenue.. well I think ever.
Anyone know if any other company since them went from making so much damn money they didn’t know what to do with it, to bleeding millions a day? It was some ridiculous amount, especially considering the 80s. Makes one wonder if any of the ‘too big to fail’ companies we have now could spread too thin and there be a crash where they just bleed.
Guess it tends to happen with most industries though, they ramp up hugely successful, then there is a burst of the bubble and a lot of companies die out, then it comes back almost as strong, but steadily grows instead of being an overnight thing. Video games certainly did that.
The FAANGs are each losing BILLIONS of dollars per day in market capitalization. Amazon has never made a profit (except via accounting tricks) in it’s entire existence.
I find exercises in determining the “most historically important” to be somewhat exasperating. The urge to treat “historical importance” as though it were some orderable or measurable quantity, like “longest river” or “tallest mountain,” I think is born less of a desire to understand an event or object’s place in history than it is to bless one’s personal tastes with a grander significance. You see the same thing in art with interminable “best X of all time” lists. With the history of computers and technology, I think the water is even muddier.
It is tempting to say “the iPhone, due to its inherent qualities changed the world,” but it is probably more correct to say “the world is constantly changing, and the iPhone affects and is affected by that.” The Smartphone Revolution (for lack of a better term) was a rising wave in 2007. What if the iPhone had not been there to catch it? I’m no expert, truly, but I believe I’d still be here ten years later checking my email on a thing in my pocket. How we related to one another socially, how we use technology to solve our problems, how information flows through the world: these are more important to history than whether we use multitouch or a Blackberry trackball.
There would have ben a similar smartphone on the market within 12 months.
Germany and Britain simultaneously developed almost identical jet engines during WW2 despite haing no knowledge of each others work.
Ha, ha… Will not, add comments to that
Sorry, Ihpone was not revolutionary or special.
Windows phone was 1 step back from it and would have got there.
Iphone killed the best windows phone ce 5,6 as intoduced a stupid locked down bunch of arse.
They just got it at the right point to ditch stylus amd that is all. Others would have got there anyway.
Now we only have locked down shite with google’s options as the best of the worst.
You can always use Windows Phone 10 Phone Mobile NT S on ARM if you’re that much of a Windows fanboi. Microsoft still sell the Lumia’s.
And if Windows Mobile was such a superior product, how did an “inferior” product, such as the iPhone kill it off?
Edited 2017-07-03 11:44 UTC
The Xerox Alto was, indeed, a revolutionary computer. Born waaay ahead of it’s time, it laid the foundations of the modern PC. Much like the Cadillac Type 53 laid out the groundwork for the modern automobiles, but was brought to the masses by Austin, the ideas of the Alto needed someone with vision to spead these novel design concepts to the public. Apple did that very thing with the Macintosh.
And then the PC space stagnated. Sure, they got faster, extra features were added and components got more integrated. We got more colour, more RAM and more FLOPS. But between the Xerox Alto and today, very few novel and original ideas have appeared. Going back to car analogy, they got faster, larger, more powerful. But someone who was used to driving an Austin 7 could step into a 2017 stick shift Mercedes and still be able to drive it. Maybe not well, but they wouldn’t be lost. Same goes with PC’s
Why all these car analogies? Well, we’re heading into the driverless car era, where instead of turning a wheel and pushing pedals to make a car go and stop, we can type in an address and wait until the vehicle gets us to where we’re going. This is a huuuge shift from what we’re used to. We wouldn’t have been able to get to the driverless car, if it wasn’t for the Benz Patent Motorwagen, the Model T or the Austin 7.
Same applies to the iPhone. Sure, it’s not as huge a shift as some people make it out to be, but it’s still a groundbreaking change in the way we, as people, interact with technology. We wouldn’t have been able to get to the iPhone if it wasn’t for Colossus, IBM System/360 or the Apple Macintosh. Does that make it less revolutionary? No. Does it make it any more revolutionary? Also, no. It makes it “as” revolutionary as it’s predecessors. Allowing instant access to the welth of the internet whereever you happen to be is a pretty revolutionary concept in itself. The iPhone took what we had on the PC, packaged it into a portable format with a long researched, but revolutionary (in the consumer space,) interface.
To conclude. The iPhone isn’t more important, or less important than the Xerox Alto. They’re both revolutionary solutions to a hitherto undiscovered problem, and both of them have totally changed the way we use and interact with computers, and the modern world would not be the same without either of these developments.
Imagine a world without teenagers staring blankly at their portable glowing rectangles… Facebook would be a blip on the radar, and Angry Birds would have never been a thing… Maybe the iPhone wasn’t such a good thing after all…
The123king,
The iphone may deserve credit for popularizing mobile internet, but they surely don’t deserve credit for inventing it unless we allow ourselves to forget about the rest.
If we just look at the form factor, we can look to popular films from decades ago well before the technology was viable to see that the idea of featureless portable device was already there too, so apple cannot get credit for the idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVqHoGKQXLI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ8pQVDyaLo
Of course I don’t know if apple knowingly copied these sources, maybe or maybe not, but either way it’s another illustration of how hard it is to be genuinely original since the ideas are already there. There seems to social tendency, at least in this culture, to give an extraordinary amount of credit to individual people and companies, but in actuality it’s usually collective efforts that enable all the necessary factors to converge. I’m not sure if my saying this will upset anyone, but for all the fame and glory some individuals get, the significance of them personally is quite arbitrary in the grand scheme of things – if not for them, it would just be someone else.
Edited 2017-07-03 16:10 UTC
Also deserve more seminal credits at UI, than it gets :-\
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ventura_Publisher
By the way, no “octa-core, smart” phone get to that productivity level, yet. And frankly I doubt it will ever. Different people, different philosophies, nothing technical.
Edited 2017-07-03 14:07 UTC
Of course: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
But for everyone that thinks multitouch or even the common gestures originate from Apple: https://www.ted.com/talks/jeff_han_demos_his_breakthrough_touchscree…
Standing on the shoulders of giants is a bit of an exaggeration but it must always be remembered that today’s technology rests firmly on yesterday’s technological achievements.
The iPhone affected far more people than the IBM PC, but would not have been possible without the thinking that brought about the PC.
> a relatively open and compatible platform
> (especially compared to what came before)
… *and* after.
Which make the IBM PC the most but also the *only* open and compatible computing platform since decades.
Let’s see how much those mobile-but-closed-plateforms will be that versatile and vibrant after 20 more years…