[SiggeStark]

It is nice to see that the PC is 25 years old and the computer that tops the list is 29 years old. As far as I understand, this means that Apple has always been at least 4 years ahead of the rest...History repeats itself with Vista I guess!

[robspeed]

See - you Americans never knew the RISC-OS world...The Acorn BBC, the Archimedes, the RISC-PC."Considerably better than yaw!" (a British joke, for British people!)

[pyster]

The apple ][ could not display the colour red. you had to make gang symbols on the keyboard to cursor up to edit basic programs. it lacked decent graphics and sound and had. 48k of ram? A price tag of $1530. The apple ][.The Commodore 64 was the best selling computer of all time... what moron forgot to put it on the list but managed to put apple on there? Heh, a dumb Apple ][ user who couldnt figure out they paid way to much for a machine that didnt do a quarter of the things the much lower priced c64 allowed you to do. Do this day there are still people writing demos and pushing the limits of what the commodore can do. People remix old commodore music. (Zombie Nation took their remix of Lazy Jones to #1 in the UK). Apple, and it's users, have always been elitest morons using over priced and under powered hardware. C64 4 teh win.

[heybiff]

Well maybe this suggestion leaks the fact that I'm a sysadmin, but the Dell OptiPlex XL (1995) deserves a spot. I'm not exactly a Dell fanboy, but more than any other model, the OptiPlex has brought uniformity to departments everywhere as well as simpler roll-outs and administrative tasks. Plus that reassuring tastefully rounded case with easy access components and lots of room told you stability was going to be the order of the day. OptiPlex has outlasted most other brands and models in the cubicles of the world, when was the last time a Presario made you feel reassured? Plus the fact that you can still get parts for a GX1 today says a LOT. Did I mention there are whole sites dedicated to entending the lives of these workhorses -- bumping a 533 up to 1.2G? Maybe it is the homogeneous parts selection? Solid Intel chipsets? Rugged parts? Not the best looking machines out there, but tough as nails, and a dream to manage. Heybiff gives the OptiPlex the thumbs up. Did I mention price?

[nodnol]

'The Osbourne Effect" is a misnomer, Osbourne sold out of the Osbourne 1 prior to the introduction of the Exeecutive.I think it was someone in the finance department who had the bright idea of using the remaining stocks of motherboards to make a new batch. Unfortunately the company that made the plastic cases has thrown away the moulds. New moulds were made at a considerable cost, which resulted in the computers being sold at a loss. The company folded when it was unable to service the loans it had taken out to develop the Executive because of the loss it was making on the final batch of computers.

[dredeyedick]

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for my Ohio Scientific Challenger 1-P Series 2 (OSI C1P - 2). This little honey had 8 kilobytes of memory, booted into MS-BASIC in ROM (the first pc to do so, I seem to recall), and had a built in Assembly Language monitor mode. You could save programs on a cassette recorder. If You had the money, OSI offered a disk operating system capable of functioning across their entire architectural offerings, which included both floppy and hard disks.My word processor by Dwo Kuo Fok Lok Sow called "WP-6502" which evolved eventually into the "Quick Brown Fox."The OSI C1P ran a 6502 processor at 1 megahertz. Company Founders Mike and Charity Chelky sold the Chillicothe, OH company to MACOM about a year after I bought mine. I was sad. MACOM didn't continue the brand, which until then occupied the back page ad space of several popular pc magazines.Thanks to Mike and Charity and OSI for a great first pc experience.Cheers, Dave Manchester

[dredeyedick]

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for my Ohio Scientific Challenger 1-P Series 2 (OSI C1P - 2). This little honey had 8 kilobytes of memory, booted into MS-BASIC in ROM (the first pc to do so, I seem to recall), and had a built in Assembly Language monitor mode. You could save programs on a cassette recorder. If You had the money, OSI offered a disk operating system capable of functioning across their entire architectural offerings, which included both floppy and hard disks.My word processor by Dwo Kuo Fok Lok Sow called "WP-6502" which evolved eventually into the "Quick Brown Fox."The OSI C1P ran a 6502 processor at 1 megahertz. Company Founders Mike and Charity Chelky sold the Chillicothe, OH company to MACOM about a year after I bought mine. I was sad. MACOM didn't continue the brand, which until then occupied the back page ad space of several popular pc magazines.Thanks to Mike and Charity and OSI for a great first pc experience.Cheers, Dave Manchester

[us7892]

My dad would check-out the Apple IIe from school (he was a teacher) on weekends, and I would create little Applesoft programs. Mostly using PLOT and HPLOT to draw graphics. It got me into computers at a young age. My first ever program was a little Lo-res miniature golf game w/ a map builder....oh, the fun...the Apple IIe was certainly the msot influential computer in my life!

[kuriharu]

You can't be serious! No Commodore 64? That's what probably got 80% of us into computers in the first place! Why include its bastard cousin the Atari 800? Sheesh!

[Bolaji]

C64 certainly deserves a place on the list. It aroused my son's interest in Computers and seventeen years later, he's a Software Engineer. What a fantastic return on investment on a $100 used computer.

[davidsco27]

PC World HAS to be kidding with this list. Some of them belong, but to include ANYTHING from Sony or Toshiba is a sad statement of the quality of the report, and the quality of PC World's on Top 10 Lists. I guess reliability, and usable design don't count for much

[Methuss]

Personally I think the Canon Notejet deserved a spot on this list. It definately got top marks for innovation. A 486 notebook computer with an integrated inkjet printer. The paper path ran under the keyboard. It was also suprisingly small and light for it's day.

[genrex]

I cannot believe you left Commodore 64 out of this list. Back in the day, it had the best sound chip one could imagine along with a very good video chip. But the best part about it was that it was Commodore 64 that made PCs home friendly. They wre the grand daddies of today's gaming consoles. A computer which is registered in Guiness as the largest selling computer of all time not making your list shows how less knowledge you have in PC World!

[makeshift]

Always liked these jaunts down memory lane. I agree with some posting here that it seems the Commodore 8-bit computers always get short shrift when these retrospectives are done. My guess is that the Commodore computers just had the unfortunate distinction of being the ones a lot of people used and then dumped, and in hindsight would rather forget. Don't know why.I was an Atari 8-bit and STe owner. It was nice to see the Atari 800 in this list. Personally what impressed me most about them was the operating system. It did more than just manage the keyboard, display, and disk access. It also introduced the concept of device drivers, and it had built-in floating point routines (though they weren't great). The architecture of the 400 and 800 made it somewhat easy to upgrade. Later models almost totally took this out. The fact that you could load new device drivers meant that you could upgrade the hardware. Quite innovative.

[jdiffend]

The list is pretty biased towards DOS/Windows even though most offer no great technological advancement over other machines or no innovation that drove the industry.Noticable omissions:The Commodore 64 pretty much caused the computer/videogame war in the mid 80s and many companies to drop out or go under. It was also the top selling model of all time.The TRS-80 Color Computer was the first home PC with a pre-emptive multi-tasking OS. OS-9. The Sinclair Spectrum (and ZX80/ZX81 before it) helped drive the low end market in Europe. It was also cloned in the Eastern block and in South America bringing affordable computing to the rest of the world.The Acorn RISC machines brought RISC to the desktop and firmly established the ARM cpu which is now the top embedded CPU.The TI-99 brought speech to the personal computer. The Radio Shack Pocket PC introduced us to handheld computing. The Newton gave use palm computing before the Palm.The Altair should be higher. The Altair gave WOZ his inspiration for the Apple 1. No Apple 1, no Apple II, no TRS-80 and no home computer market as we know it?

[jdiffend]

[quote name='jdiffend']The TI-99 brought speech to the personal computer. Actually that's not correct but you could barely understand the earlier speech units.

[cwwong]

It is inconceivable that you've left out the Commodore 64 from your list. Who prepares this list, anyway? Perhaps someone who only used the Apple II in his early computing life. In its time, the C64 was the best-selling computer in the world, with advanced sprite graphics and a synthesizer chip. It had a profound impact on many people who used it. How could you make such an egregious mistake in leaving it off your list? Or did you do that just to get a rise out of all the angry C64 users?

[elspork]

my family got an Apple II when I was five years old. That was my first experience with computers. My brother and I found out a way to break out of programs, and get a "prompt". thejavascript:PcwCommentsCode.postComment();Submitn we found out ways to display the code, change the code, and restart the program. Of course, we used our power and ingenuity to put dirty words into "Lemonade Stand"

[elspork]

my family got an Apple II when I was five years old. It was my first computer experience. My brother and I found a way to break out of programs and get a prompt. We then found out how to display the code, change the code, then restart the program. We of course used our ingenuity to put dirty words into "lemonade stand"

[markei]

I still have my Amiga 500, monitor, manuals, and tons of software...it sits in a closet. I bought it from my brother-in-law in 1993 and we used it until 1999! I set it up about two years ago and it started right up. One of the best little computers I've ever used...never had a bad sector, blown memory chips, or the blue screen of death!