[wh5916]

[quote name='dbreaux']Anyone remember the Atari ST??? :?Absolutely--lest I ever forget, there's a small stack of Antic and Analog magazines in this house to remind me.Though I've done little with it, I have an ST emulator on my PC called STeem.The ST never made much of a splash, at least in the American market, so perhaps that's why it didn't make the list. The 1040ST, though, should at least be credited as being the first home computer to offer 1 megabyte of RAM for $1000.

[lythripnus]

In 1978 Xerox formed the Advanced Systems Division (ASD) to test the marketability of the Alto and related technologies. Over 2000 Altos were placed with important customers including the Swedish Telephone system, the Carter Whitehouse, U.S. Congress and Senate. These were sales and leases of "pre-products" to favored customers. So the Alto was sold in limited numbers commercially. For reference see: "Dealers of Lightnining" by Michael Hiltzik (copyright 1999 published by Harper Business). BTW the Alto became operational in 1973, pre-dating all the PCs in your list.The Alto should really be recognized as the first personal computer as well as the system that introduced the desktop metaphor, the mouse, ethernet, and laser printing/desktop publishing (all Xerox PARC inventions). Many of the revolutionary ideas many associate with the Mac were inspired by Apple engineers and Steve Jobs receiving demos of the Alto, Smalltalk, and related applications (Xerox was a shareholder in the new startup Apple at the time).

[lafos1]

I don't agree with your list, but then, there were so many influences that narrowing them down to 25 is tough. For those interested in all the history, I found a site old-computers.com, that has a lot of info on the history of computing.

[Tedster]

The atari 8bit XL/XE line was FAR superior in terms of technology than the commodore 64 and vic20. In fact, it was way ahead of its time. Few people knew nor took advantage of its parallel bus port. I for one was able to put a hard drive system on mine as well as a 19.2k modem via the parallel bus. Also through grasphics interlacing, I was able to achieve resolutions that even my IBM system could not get at the time. It was a great computer, however, most people only saw it as a gaming system. It's marketing was also its demise. So as far a 6502 systems were cocerned, Atari was king.

[LanMan]

I agree with your #1 pick, the Apple II, Apple IIe and Apple IIe inhanced (6502 c processor) not only ran many a hour playing games (Wizardry, Caltle Wolfienstien, Hard Hat Max etc) we also used it for our small business (Apple Works, PFS File & Write, Cut and Paste by Electronic Arts) Also used a "Hayes Modem" for data transfer scalding 110/300 BPS.How about the "Adam" computer by Coleco, ran a Zilog-80 processor using CPM, The Franlin Computers that cloned the Apple and IBM PC sold thru Sears Catalog. I have about half of the computers you listed and plan on displaying them localy in a museum soon. Thanks for this very interesting list and topic.

[wh5916]

[quote name='Tedster']The atari 8bit XL/XE line was FAR superior in terms of technology than the commodore 64 and vic20. In fact, it was way ahead of its time. Few people knew nor took advantage of its parallel bus port. I for one was able to put a hard drive system on mine as well as a 19.2k modem via the parallel bus. Also through grasphics interlacing, I was able to achieve resolutions that even my IBM system could not get at the time. It was a great computer, however, most people only saw it as a gaming system. It's marketing was also its demise. So as far a 6502 systems were cocerned, Atari was king.Superior to the Vic 20? Absolutely. But superior to the Commodore 64? Speaking as someone who has a fully functional Atari 130XE system, complete with two 1050 disk drives, I stongly disagree. The C64's sprite graphics and synthesizer audio chip left the Atari 8 bits in the "also ran" category.Back to the topic at hand though--both systems helped usher in the era of home computing, and both--not just one--should have been in the top 25 list.

[shutin]

[quote name='dbreaux']Anyone remember the Atari ST??? :?I still have an Atari 520 ST along with countless games and other software titles,not to mention a pile of ST Format magazines,I used to use it regularly until about 8 years ago before i finally bought a G3 iMac in 2001 a G5 Powermac in 2004 and now a Macbook.This article made me dig the ST out and plug it into the TV and have a blast on "Jeff Minter's Llamatron" which is one bizarre game. :D

[Tedster]

Sorry. I'll have to differ. I strongly believe the 800XL/ XE line was WAY ahead of the C64. It had 4 music channels, a parallel bus, disk drives that even went to DS/DS, and more graphics modes. While I will concede that the C64 sprite graphics were better in some aspects, ithe C64 could not compare with the XL/XE line in terms of expansion capability and overall usage.Needless to say, I think we're dredging up the old commodore vs. Atari argument. Both were great systems and the 6502 line in general should be in the best computers of all time list.

[Speed33]

You've got to be kidding .... the Apple 2 is #1. ???? I don't think so. One of IBM's last PS/2 machines was the 9577. There were 77i (IDE), 77s (SCSI) and multimedia models. They were early 486's that supported up to 64 MB RAM, hard drives over 1 gig, had onboard S-3 video, 100MHz processor, onboard write cache, etc. If you had the bucks there was even 100 Mps ethernet plugin modules. These machines could even run Windows 98 ( once it was released).I still have my Model 77s box and it still runs like new and now works as a linux firewall/router for my home network.I believe the release year was about 1992.Anyone that had experience with these machines knows what I mean when I say they were the real foundation of today's machines. You can keep your Apple2.

[Commonsensia]

I would have to say that the C-64 was extremly instrumental in this topic, and it put the IBM to shame for many years, it could do more, faster. and better. The sound was excellent in comparasion.Secondly, it started you out progaming in Basic and then moved to Machine language. Which in turn set in motion the untold number of young hackers that now sit in the Fortune 500 business everwhere!So even if it isn't necessarily an IBM it is one of the PC's that made more then a slight mark on the world, and deserves to be in any and all mentions of tops Personal Computers.

[PCBoots]

Where's DELL?

[BrucetheMBSguy]

I started a business and made it work because of the Apple II . I had legal access to govt non-copyrighted data on GNMA mortgage pools. I was able to write it and sell it in '83 on Genie 5 5 removable hard disks. But first to get the data onto the apple format... it just happened that an Apple II could run a huge nine track tape drive, just like a (slow) mainframe. But when the Macintosh came out, it had no slots! Off to the PC Clones like the ALR and the NCR's

[wh5916]

[quote name='Tedster']Sorry. I'll have to differ. I strongly believe the 800XL/ XE line was WAY ahead of the C64. It had 4 music channels, a parallel bus, disk drives that even went to DS/DS, and more graphics modes. While I will concede that the C64 sprite graphics were better in some aspects, ithe C64 could not compare with the XL/XE line in terms of expansion capability and overall usage.> > > > Needless to say, I think we're dredging up the old commodore vs. Atari argument. Both were great systems and the 6502 line in general should be in the best computers of all time list.Agreed! They were both indeed great systems, which I why felt that both deserved a spot on the list. In spite of my above comments about the Commodore 64, my Atari 8 bit system received many hours of use and is still hooked up in another room, ready to fire up a moments notice. One of the 1050 disk drives even survived several months of being accidentally turned on, and shrouded in a form fitting vinyl cover during that entire period.

[rjek]

This list is very US-centric, which is unsurprising of PC World. It misses out, for example, the Acorn Archimedies, which was the world's first RISC workstation (much to Apple's surprise when Acorn complained at them about their PowerMac's advertising), and the Amstrad PC1640 which brought affordable home computing to much of Europe.Try again.

[riverwind]

Too bad early compact computers were not included, or the Sinclair ZX-80 would certainly rank with the top of them. I ordered my Sinclair ZX-80, then marketed in the USA as the Timex-Sinclair ZX-80, in 1979 for $199 from an ad in the back of a Popular Science magazine. It came without a monitor (you supplied your own B&W TV) and without media storage (that is where your portable cassette recorder came in handy). It was a hunt-and-peck typists dream with a membrane keyboard a scant six-inches wide, and keys that could perform up to five different functions, including single-byte tokenized BASIC commands. With a whopping one kilobyte of RAM, four lines of BASIC coding would cannibalize available RAM in a heart beat. That's when I learned the wonders of machine language programming, and still have my Z-80 and 8080 Assembly Language Programming book by Kathe Spracklen to this day. It became the springboard to ML coding for other chips, and I still prefer coding the 8080 series.

[riverwind]

T-S ZX-80 continuedOf course I upgraded it to the ZX-81 floating point processor for $99, but before I did that, even 1K RAM was challenging for a ML programmer, so I invested in the 16K RAM Module for $99. Flaky thing had poor contact with the board that every little vibration would result in immediate cataclysmic refresh and the total loss of any data or program. One learned to secure both computer and module to a common base. I had more than enough RAM to code the AD&D tables, a respectable set of monsters, demigods, and spells, and dicing functions to facilitate my role as a Dungeon Master--and boy did we have fun every Friday night and on into early Saturday mornings. I still have my Timex-Sinclair ZX-80/81, RAM module, and programs on cassette tapes--along with my Kathe Spracklen book, which--by the way--she also co-wrote the book on SARGON, the chess program that won the 1978 West Coast Computer Faire chess tournament. Now we're looking at nearly 1GB operating systems--talk about bloat.

[kengland2]

Great story, very interesting. Atari should've had more appearances, however. Funny how the 8-bits were criticized as "game machines," because gaming came to drive the forefront of computer technology.I have almost every iteration of all things Atari. My original 2600 mysteriously disappeared after we moved in 1983, but I moved on to the Mattel Aquarius, a great learning tool with it's rubbery keys, and then onto, successively, the Atari 800XL (incredible!), which carried me through most of high school and college, the Atari 1040 STe, which absolutely knocked me right out of my socks, acquired the Atari Portfolio, which continued to astound, and finally bought my first PC, but only relatively recently (1999). Nothing PC caught my attention until Windows 3.1, which I only watched bemusedly from behind my STe's GUI and thousands of colors. A soda spill on my STe, as well as the acceleration of the world wide web, pushed me into the PC arena. The spirit of Atari lives on, however, as the STe is in the sliding keyboard drawer, still working, albeit under a Microsoft keyboard. I still own all of the above-mentioned computers, as well as an incredible Jaguar 64-bit game machine, with which I dazzled my toddler with Tempest 2000 just yesterday. Since the ST's inclusion of MIDI ports, which revolutionized garage bands and the music industry, in general, nothing has been the same. For under $500, you had a MIDI-capable device right out of the box, and it kept software like Cubase Audio going for decades. Also missing is the formidable Atari Falcon and TT, 32-bit personal supercomputers, the pinnacle of development of the St line, with their 68030 and 68040 processors. The Atari line has been a true super footnote in the annals of computer history.

[riverwind]

Or how about the Commodore 64? While the Amiga was mentioned in the top 25, it was the 64 that gave the Amiga its leg up on animated graphics through Sprite technology. The 64 was a ML programmer's dream with unfettered access to the kernel routines, and Commodore accommodating the hobbyists tinkering around the system by providing excellent kernel documentation. And I loved the 1541 diskette drive; after a while, the belt drive would slip and the drive would have to be re-aligned by readjusting the belt. After the third time of doing the laborious trial-and-error realignment, I learned--through observations (okay, listening)--that the drive would misalign when the head was slammed against the stop by miscreant programs. I wrote a piece of code that would slam the head into the stop until--you guessed it--the drive head would realign in less the a couple of minutes. The wonder of technology; I still have my venerable C-64, 1541, the 80-column dot-matrix printer and monitor.

[tbar]

The Amiga at 7? Please...It wasn't until 10 or 15 years later that ANY PC came close to all of it's breakthroughs. Full stereo sound, 4K colors, speach and REAL multitasking!!!

[prisoner6]

So many left out! The Timex Sinlcair,t he Tandy Coco, the TAndy 1000 series, the Commodore 64, and Mac SE, TI-99...al milestone machines...sigh.Note: I did leave off my list the Colecovision Adam. Cool machine...just missed by a notch.prisoner6