To me, the Centurion minicomputer is more interesting than this PC clone. Strangely, the most interesting thing about the Centurion minicomputer is how uninteresting it is for an original computer system that wasn't a clone yet was on the market for ten years and had thousands of business users.
It just shows how in that era a computer company could be relatively successful selling a system that, from what I can tell, wasn't better, faster or cheaper than its competitors. It wasn't directly compatible with any other system, the OS was primitively bare bones and the software library was minimal at best. I can't find anything obviously innovative, elegant or even notable about its design or implementation. It wasn't even state of the art when first introduced and only fell further behind over the years.
It's unusual because it's pretty rare for an original, long-lived system from that era to be so uninteresting to me.
for a pc that old it was remarkably clean inside and out. considering it was in a warehouse for a few of those years with a large door bring in dust and grime it scores even higher than i thought.
maybe i'm used to pcs in point of sales locations but they seemed to be the mankiest nastiest pcs i have ever touched. but even pcs in fairly clean accountancy departments were filled with dust bunnies after a year or two of use.
It just shows how in that era a computer company could be relatively successful selling a system that, from what I can tell, wasn't better, faster or cheaper than its competitors. It wasn't directly compatible with any other system, the OS was primitively bare bones and the software library was minimal at best. I can't find anything obviously innovative, elegant or even notable about its design or implementation. It wasn't even state of the art when first introduced and only fell further behind over the years.
It's unusual because it's pretty rare for an original, long-lived system from that era to be so uninteresting to me.
maybe i'm used to pcs in point of sales locations but they seemed to be the mankiest nastiest pcs i have ever touched. but even pcs in fairly clean accountancy departments were filled with dust bunnies after a year or two of use.