- I really learned from this that "6" seems to be the default character. (Interestingly, there is no 6, where you'd expect it, like in the number row or on the numeric keypad, indicating that "6" is not a number.)
Also, is it just me, or is that an illustration style you'd rather connect with the Apple II? Which may be well why the keyboard is placed like it is and may explain the over-all cutesy appearance.
- What's not to like about a keyboard with so many ways to enter a "6"? ;-)
(But, I've to admit, I still don't know what people were thinking, just how a few industry leaders reacted to this. – I was just a teenager, but, as I remember it, everything was coming to a stall as potential customers were waiting for what IBM would come up with. Then, there was some disappointment, but more importantly, after a small pause, "well, it's IBM, this is the industry standard, we'll go with this." At least, this is the impression I got from reading the magazines. I specifically remember arguments, like, this is not a great architecture for an office machine, but it may make sense for things like process control, it's meant to be a general machine.)
- The original 5150 shipped with 16k and no floppy - just a cassette port. lots of people upgraded with at least a single 160k floppy and 64k was possible with a max of 256k. Apple had nothing like that at the time for any price.
Once the XT shipped and Lotus 123 became available that became a killer app that was hard to beat.
- I think, it was really an odd choice to do this: Out of the box, it was really just a home computer with BASIC in ROM and a cassette port. But, clearly, it was also way too expensive for this. (The original sales flyer had an image of a happy family with the kid playing a space game on the home TV. It may be interesting to know how many tens of units IBM actually sold in this configuration and for that particular use in total.)
It was more of a base, you could build an actual system on, and, as it even lacked a serial port, you couldn't even run the simplest control tasks out of the box. It was more of what could be called a "smart backplane". (This is probably ok, if your IBM sales person comes to your office to make a custom bundle for your needs – and while no dime will be spent on an unused component, it will probably be still expensive –, but it makes it particularly hard to sell this in any other way. Which gave rise to all those local PC bundling & packaging shops at the corner.)
I'm sure, much consideration had gone into the concept, and there's probably some prehistory to this (as IBM had several projects for a home or personal computer in the second half of the 1970s, neither of saw the light of day.) Or was it just about showing the flag, like, "well, theoretically, we have a machine that could do all this, so please shut up (and we'll be happy to sell 1000 units of this PoC.)"? But the IBM PC is that taken for granted that it is (un)surprisingly hard to come by any on its background.
(Of course, an LLM won't tell us any about what may be actually interesting about this.)
- I imagine it's some combination of IBM having no experience marketing to home users and wanting to be able to have a low "starting price".
- There may be some to this.
But I'm not entirely convinced that IBM just didn't know how to do this. E.g., there's the Aquarius concept (1977), which had progressed to working production prototypes, which would have come attractively packaged and with an app store based on bubble memory cards. (Apparently, this was canceled over concerns regarding the reliability of those bubble memory cards.) As a marketing concept, this would have been about 25–30 years ahead of its time – and it would have separated this neatly from any other IBM business. However, any such elaborate concept would probably have struggled in an organisation like this, where any move may endanger what has already been secured.
Maybe, the remarkable lack of context of the IBM 5150 was its internal selling point?
(Imaginary internal sales pitch: "See, this machine has no specs. We won't even say what it's for. We'll just tell them, the Little Tramp likes it, so you like it, too. No, it won't eat into mainframes.")
*) More about the IBM Aquarius (including photos) can be found in Paul Atkinson's book "Delete. A Design History of Computer Vapourware", Bloomsbury, 2013.
- Small world. A LOL for you - I used a PS/2 Model 50 for RT data aquisition in the late 80s - doing RT DSP of signal analysis off a bio-amp. Northgate and Gateway had non conforming DMA that the IBM implemented correctly.
- I think what Jerry Pournelle always said in his Chaos Manner column was true then and is still true today: “The computer you want always costs $5000.”
RPi I think lives this ethos today (not by cost) but you can get a SBC which is just a basic compute unit and add on custom stuff to get to a solution - wifi, nvme storage, solder and smoke and wiring goodness. Despite the linux complexity - its about as close to a retro experience as you can get today.
- I'm still curious, what this machine was meant to be. One version is that it was about something that would enable small local tasks, like data entry, editing, etc., but would require some kind of IBM mainframe for any serious task, like actually processing or managing this data. Much like the IBM 3270 PC. (So, really a front door to renting out mid-sized machines?) But in this conception, the PC would have soon been superceded by the XT running Lotus 1-2-3 and its storage capabilities, and finally dead by the advent of the 386 machines, which were perfectly able to run all of this locally. Are the latter even PCs, conceptionally, or were they something new, but still something, people could envision in the original PC (and maybe had expected from it, all along)?
PS: One of the things, I kind of don't get, is this entire approach to acquiring an office PC, of going around, like, "no this person doesn't need a floppy drive, this person doesn't need a printer either, no parallel port for them, this person may need 256 KB more, so give them at least 128 KB, well, this one requires at least a screen, etc." I don't think that this was what customers expected deploying PCs to the office would look like, involving an entire requirements committee, fearful of spending either too little or too much. It would have been much easier and probably also cheaper (for all parties involved) and certainly more attractive to come up with just a few standard configurations and load this off onto everybody's desks, like an actual product. (Much like it was with the PS/2. But, then, IBM wasn't really into selling products.) – On the other hand, admittedly, it made the IBM PC specs-wise a moving target, when it came to any competition.
- > "Tandy has developed a sleeping giant of a local area network system."
Actually, ARCNET was developed at Datapoint by John Murphy in 1976 and released in 1977, especially for the Datapoint 2200. It became available for a lot of systems and rivalled other LAN standards, like Token Ring or Novell's NetWare (and, apparently, in rare cases, it's still in use for process control.) In its day it was a giant to be aware of.
Tandy was just one of the many adopters of ARCNET.
- On the other hand, there are probably about as many references to BASIC not being just BASIC, but rather referring to a variety of dialects, as there are digitized listings. Moreover, about every of those listings is accompanied by a reference to the specific dialect it applies to. If there was a world model, it should be clear that these are not the same identical reference and those rather refer to a complex set of is-a / has-a relations. The actual outcome illustrates a serious limitation of LLMs with regard to real-world tasks.
(It also seems to hint at a general issue with intersecting partitions and, I guess, the same would apply to JS in the era of the "browser wars", say, something that runs on both Netscape 4.0x and the various incarnations of IE4.x, to make it easy.)
- This is much more like I would have expected this. – Thanks for risking your sanity in the name of sicence!
- While it worked out better than I would have thought, it also points out some crucial problems.
The problem being, if you don't know the answers already, the LLM doesn't fill any gaps in knowledge, you may have. E.g, I don't know Atari BASIC (just that pesky – or is it petcii? – MS BASIC). Accordingly, I have no idea about PRINT #6 or LOCATE, and ChatGPT apparently neither, so the duo of us won't arrive anywhere.
On a slight tangent, I'm kind of surprised and impressed to learn that Atari BASIC lets you use a keyword as a name with LET, something MS BASIC won't do, tokenizing it anyways, LET or not, as there is no such thing as context awareness.
- My suggestion: it's the "mode change" code/character found in various IBM punchcard encodings, punch 11-8-7, represented by an upper-case delta.
Rendering this slightly differently from the regular Greek letter, would make sense, I guess. This may also explain the varying representations in the manuals: some would represent this like in common EBCDIC charts, as a delta, while others would refer to it as represented in the actual on-screen character set.
(There is also the rather common problem with special characters in manuals, where the font used for the chart doesn't comprehend the particular glyph, giving rise to alternative, often more abstract representations, as these symbols were drawn in later.)
- BTW, there are now a few new debugging options.
(Bracketed address ranges additionally to breakpoints, which trigger either as PC enters or exits, optional trap for "illegal instructions", and a continuous CPU log, so you may find out how you wound up in a trap, regardless wat the regular trace was set to. — In essence, all you may need to trace some run away code.)
- BTW, here's a link to a more compact overview of the various blog posts:
- It's even better: the crucial parts of the source code are in the article, in plain sight! :-)
- More
The Atari art style is equally unmistakeable. I have a coffee table book devoted to their art...
art of atari book - i have the hardback and iTunes digital : https://a.co/d/3X4mHWX