When did PCs stop being PCs?

[Keatah]

When did PCs stop being PCs? A simple question 2BSHUR, but full of subtleties and nebulous levels. Somewhere along its evolutionary track the PC began drifting away from what we knew as PCs in the 80's and 90's.

 

I think of the PC as a product range that spanned from the original IBM 5150 to everything that came before the (PCIe, UEFI BIOS, Windows7, Core i3/5/7/9) age. Anything after this seems to be an ever-increasingly remote descendant of the original 4.77MHz ISA bus machine. Seems like current PC's are PCs in name only. One reason PC moniker sticks because no one mfg can coin a term that everyone else would agree on. Not even Mighty Microsoft. Or maybe we simply don't need a replacement name.

 

I also wonder if graphing the performance of any one sub-system would yield an inflection point rather than the almost-arbitrary criteria I set above? Would a large jump in performance lead the PC to start evolving into something else? Has it already?

[zzip]

I think there's a few points that radically changed the PC

1. The 286 - showed that the platform could jump to a new CPU generation, add features and performance and still maintain backwards compatibility

2. The 386 and 32-bit Operating Systems - was able to get rid of the legacy memory management issues and feel like an entirely new platform.

3. PC98 standard - USB started appearing, and many legacy ports began to disappear from PCs

4. Changes to the BUS, and reduction in slots.   First ISA disappeared, then PCI slots started to disappear.   We used to have a pile of cards we put in our PC,  now most only have a video card, if that.  Most other functions are integrated on the MOBO.     One of the things that made PCs  PCs has been slowly disappearing.

[MrMaddog]

PC means "personal computer" and that could be any micro-computer used for personal use, not just the ones made by IBM.

 

The IBM PC is IBM's own personal computer and that became it's brand name, and then other companies started to make clones of the IBM PC instead of original designs (like Apple, Atari & Commodore).  So now we have IBM PC clones which eventually became the PC standard (Intel CPU, MS operating system...)

 

Nowadays it's just easier to say a PC is any computer that runs Windows on an Intel or AMD chip... *

 

 

Edited November 28, 2022 by MrMaddog
*(or you can install Linux on Windows PCs except now people prefer RPis for desktop Linux...)

[Hwlngmad]

So, I would say that PCs in terms of being "personal computers" started to transition to being PCs in reference to the IBM PC legacy machines around 1984 / 1985 when you started to have lots of PC clones come out.  This continued until the early 1990s until Atari, Tandy, and Commodore left the market leaving only Apple to be any kind of an alternative.

[Flojomojo]

For me, a PC is a laptop or desktop computer that runs any operating system. We're getting closer to the sci-fi idealized "computer everywhere" which is a good thing. RIP beige boxes. 

 

cute old commercial:

 

[CatPix]

Last time I tried, I could run Freedos and play games (like Alleycat from 1984 which doesn't freak out with massive processor speed and RAM) on a modern PC.

So at core, current PC are still inheriting from the original IBM PC, since you can still run legacy software on them.

The real changer will probably be the arrival of ARM-based computers. Windows run on them and apparently does the work of running x68-64 software on them, but I guess that older OSes and software won't, which will be the "true" end of the IBM-PC standard.

[BydoEmpire]

On 11/28/2022 at 3:53 PM, Keatah said:

When did PCs stop being PCs? A simple question 2BSHUR, but full of subtleties and nebulous levels. Somewhere along its evolutionary track the PC began drifting away from what we knew as PCs in the 80's and 90's.

To me it's not really about hardware or manufacturer or how "PC" is defined, it's about perception and how we used the machines day to day. "What we knew as PCs" being the operative word.  I'd probably say the introduction of Win95 was a clear separation between old and new.  The shift from primarily command-line applications and OS to more standard, modern and generally very functional windows-based OS was big.

 

For PC games specifically there's a clear dividing line between VGA standards and 3d graphics cards.  That earlier period of competing 3d cards was a mess, imho, but it kind of settled down (along w/ DirectX's evolution)...

Edited November 30, 2022 by BydoEmpire

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, BydoEmpire said:

To me it's not really about hardware or manufacturer or how "PC" is defined, it's about perception and how we used the machines day to day.

I seem to recall Apple calling the Apple II "The Most Personal Computer" in a few printed ads. I always thought so because at the time I was into modding and customizing BASIC programs. And modding up BBS software. So it had real meaning to me.

 

9 hours ago, CatPix said:

The real changer will probably be the arrival of ARM-based computers. Windows run on them and apparently does the work of running x68-64 software on them, but I guess that older OSes and software won't, which will be the "true" end of the IBM-PC standard.

I'm not a fan of ARM on the desktop. And certainly not a fan of it replacing x86. I know there's some pressure to go in that direction. But I hope it remains confined to portable devices where energy efficiency is paramount. X86 simply has so much software available!

 

In thinking about the GHz race, which manufacturers want to reignite, I'm like meh. We have enough performance and I'm not impressed by .3 GHZ faster specs. I *am* impressed by more IPC and efficiency - contrary to having said that I don't want ARM on the desktop.

 

2 hours ago, BydoEmpire said:

I'd probably say the introduction of Win95 was a clear separation between old and new.

For a while in the mid-90's Windows 95 was a common dinner table topic. Even people that didn't know or care much about computers were asking about it.

 

2 hours ago, BydoEmpire said:

For PC games specifically there's a clear dividing line between VGA standards and 3d graphics cards.  That earlier period of competing 3d cards was a mess, imho, but it kind of settled down (along w/ DirectX's evolution)...

At the time when 3D graphics was new, the industry was throwing shit at the wall to see stuck. Thankfully most dribbled into the sewer. The more exotic and crazy a chip became, the faster it went bye-bye. Think BitBoys Oy Glaze3D. Talk about vaporware. Or Nvidia's NV1 with quadratic/curved surfaces. Ridiculously niche!

 

I felt 3D arrived when chips were both 2D/3D capable on one die. Not that craziness of 3DFx passthrough and SLI. Thankfully passtrough went passe and SLI slithered away. SLI is not favored by gamers anymore. Took forever for it die off. My only regret is not being more level-headed back in those times.

 

Actually I was content and pleased with even generic mainstream 2D chips. And had I not been suckered into those early 3D wars I would have only done 1 or perhaps 2 upgrades from the standard Cirrus Logic chips of the day. I didn't even know much about them other than color depth and resolution and maybe memory size (1MB - 4MB), that's all I needed to know.. Just those three parameters. Complete and total opposite of the maddening array of 3D chips.

 

It's good to be away from all the tedious minutiae and rabbit holing! Away from agonizing over 3 FPS in synthetic benchmarks which meant nothing in the real world of usability.

 

Today the only characteristics of a graphics card I look at are price, series number, and memory amount. Perhaps bus width if I'm in the techie mood.

 

Nothing else matters. Not core clocks, shaders, memory clocks, tensor units, internal caches, ROPS, FLOPS, fill rates, transfer rates, polygons per second, drivers, supported APIs, benchmarks, especially benchmarks, texels per second, streaming multiprocessors, DLSS units, the different levels of anti-aliasing.. None of that shit matters or means anything anymore because it's way beyond excess.

 

As far as APIs go. Hey man whatever works with Windows and my applications! And the less I play the specmanship game the more I enjoy using the machines. The best PC memories surround the novelty of new software in the 90's. Like one of the planetarium programs I had (still have). Predicting an eclipse and planet positions, then using real telescopes to go out and see for myself. Did that before on the Apple II, but not in the kind of fidelity a 90's computer could do compared to a mid-70's one. That's the good times. Not the spec chasing.

Edited November 30, 2022 by Keatah

[BydoEmpire]

7 hours ago, Keatah said:

I felt 3D arrived when chips were both 2D/3D capable on one die. Not that craziness of 3DFx passthrough and SLI. Thankfully passtrough went passe and SLI slithered away. SLI is not favored by gamers anymore. Took forever for it die off. My only regret is not being more level-headed back in those times.

Yeah, that's a good point, totally agree.

[Hwlngmad]

Also, for what's worth, my son likes to say that he is a "PC Gamer", which when he references it that comes out to being a gamer that uses a x86 based machine running Windows with a graphics card. 

[zzip]

12 hours ago, Keatah said:

I seem to recall Apple calling the Apple II "The Most Personal Computer" in a few printed ads. I always thought so because at the time I was into modding and customizing BASIC programs. And modding up BBS software. So it had real meaning to me.

I always kind of took issue with the name "Personal Computer".   In the 80s you had $100-$1000 machines called "Home Computers" and a $4000 IBM computer was a "personal" computer?    seemed like it should be the other way around!

 

Of course the IBM PC was business focused, not home-focused.  Employees could now have their own computer on their desk rather than using a dumb terminal.   So in that context personal makes sense

[Keatah]

5 hours ago, Hwlngmad said:

Also, for what's worth, my son likes to say that he is a "PC Gamer", which when he references it that comes out to being a gamer that uses a x86 based machine running Windows with a graphics card. 

Many computer professionals in the real world IT industry define a gaming machine as having a graphics card. If it's got a discrete GPU it's lumped into either ContentCreation & Editing, or Gaming. Nothing else.

 

Ever since slightly after Nvidia and ATI/AMD solidified their branding, the term "PC Gamer" became popular. Quake and Unreal were in the thick of it. The nascent marketing campaigns began grooming the consumer for this new classification of PC.

 

For clarification, Doom, Doom II, and Duke 3D were prior phenomenons and not part of the making of the "PC Gamer". And most definitely anything prior to 3D hardware wasn't really gaming. MS-DOS gaming you may mention? Nope. MS-DOS gaming is a more recent term referring to pre-windows games. People playing games on PCs prior to Win95 didn't really seek out specialty hardware - there was little being marketed as such except for, maybe, SoundBlaster.

 

Anyhow.. Once branding of "PC Gamer" hit we've seen gaming keyboards, gaming mice, monitors, cases, chairs, desks, headsets, game-specific merch, motherboards, watercooling, DRAM, gussied up graphics cards with special shrouds and fan arrangements, specialized energy drinks. Shit..man.. There's even gamer optimized SSDs! And of course the quintessentially de'rigueur RGB nonsense.

 

I try real hard to avoid that. And as a result my PC is cool, quiet, stable, reliable, and moderately energy efficient. Everything is mainstream including OOPPS, the graphics card. Now suddenly it's a gamer's rig!

 

Industry Trend: Air cooling is making a huge comeback among the hobbyist. With efficient conservative designs nowadays - air coolers are proving more desirable over the watercooling mess.

[+5-11under]

26 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Industry Trend: Air cooling is making a huge comeback among the hobbyist. With efficient conservative designs nowadays - air coolers are proving more desirable over the watercooling mess.

Water and electricity. One of my favorite combinations.

[zzip]

28 minutes ago, Keatah said:

For clarification, Doom, Doom II, and Duke 3D were prior phenomenons and not part of the making of the "PC Gamer". And most definitely anything prior to 3D hardware wasn't really gaming. MS-DOS gaming you may mention? Nope. MS-DOS gaming is a more recent term referring to pre-windows games. People playing games on PCs prior to Win95 didn't really seek out specialty hardware - there was little being marketed as such except for, maybe, SoundBlaster.

True-  you needed Windows to take advantage of higher resolutions,  games stuck with the VGA/SVGA standards which I think went up to 640x480@16 color?   Many DOS games ran at 320x240.   Eventually Scitech Display Doctor tried to help DOS games achieve higher resolutions.

 

Soundcards-   I remember one of the advantages of the Gravis Ultrasound was that it could play more simultaneous audio channels than a SB16, so it needed less CPU for sound mixing and more available for the game to use.

[Krebizfan]

5 hours ago, zzip said:

I always kind of took issue with the name "Personal Computer".   In the 80s you had $100-$1000 machines called "Home Computers" and a $4000 IBM computer was a "personal" computer?    seemed like it should be the other way around!

 

Of course the IBM PC was business focused, not home-focused.  Employees could now have their own computer on their desk rather than using a dumb terminal.   So in that context personal makes sense

The IBM PC pricing with two floppy drives was roughly equivalent to the Apple and Tandy pricing of a dual floppy system, especially if one looked for a seller willing to split IBM's discounts with the purchaser. IBM did not make many changes to the PC design, simply swapping in different drives and 64Kbit RAM chips. Two or three cycles of Moore's Law helped out competitors.

 

The IBM cost reduced PC was the Jr which weighed in at $1,200 with plenty of RAM and a floppy drive. It would have added 5% to the cost of the Jr if IBM installed a DMA chip and 32K of dedicated video memory fixing most of the Jr's problems. Clones quickly dropped to about $1,000 with the oddball Advance-86 diskless machine showing up in 1984 at a base price of 400 pounds. (Computers had a 25% VAT so the US price would have been about the same number of dollars as pounds.) 

[MrMaddog]

58 minutes ago, Keatah said:

Anyhow.. Once branding of "PC Gamer" hit we've seen gaming keyboards, gaming mice, monitors, cases, chairs, desks, headsets, game-specific merch, motherboards, watercooling, DRAM, gussied up graphics cards with special shrouds and fan arrangements, specialized energy drinks. Shit..man.. There's even gamer optimized SSDs! And of course the quintessentially de'rigueur RGB nonsense.

 

I try real hard to avoid that. And as a result my PC is cool, quiet, stable, reliable, and moderately energy efficient. Everything is mainstream including OOPPS, the graphics card. Now suddenly it's a gamer's rig!

 

 

 

Do you know how hard it is to find a decent mechanical keyboard that does not light up?  I miss my IBM Model M keyboard but it just doesn't go well with a black PC case and black bezel flatscreens.  I ended up with a Razor keyboard that not only requires "two" USB ports but also a cloud account just to change the light settings...a cloud account for a friggin' keyboard!?

 

And then there's my RPi setup in my bedroom, Best Buy refused to sell cheap wired keyboards & mice so I only found them at a dollar store (Pis don't work well with Bluetooth devices I'm afraid).  Guess what?  They're "gaming" keyboards that light up in rainbow colors and if I turn them off I can't see the keys on them.  Not to mention I needed small speakers for my Pi and got some from Amazon for $5...and they flash in crazy colors everytime I plug them in.

 

I didn't ask for this for my work at home setup, but screw it at least my cat gets amused from the flashing lights which keeps her from bugging me.

 

Quote

Industry Trend: Air cooling is making a huge comeback among the hobbyist. With efficient conservative designs nowadays - air coolers are proving more desirable over the watercooling mess.

 

Good, it's all you need when you have a proper ventalation setup.  There's too much risk of leakage when people don't install watercooled PC's right....

[Keatah]

34 minutes ago, zzip said:

True-  you needed Windows to take advantage of higher resolutions,  games stuck with the VGA/SVGA standards which I think went up to 640x480@16 color?

VGA went to 640x480@16. SVGA went higher to 1280x1024 with a 24-bit palette.

 

Duke 3D let me play at 800x600@256 as did Microsoft Space Simulator. This without UniVBE or other tools, just the BIOS on the videocard. A Cirrus Logic GD5422 with 1MB RAM. Pretty sure I remember seeing something at 1024x768@16, can't recall what. But yes most DOS games stuck with the lower resolutions.

[+OLD CS1]

2 hours ago, Keatah said:

If it's got a discrete GPU it's lumped into either ContentCreation & Editing, or Gaming. Nothing else.

In my industry, we might call this a CADD workstation, CADD rendering station, an engineering simulation machine, or a multi-VDI host.

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, MrMaddog said:

I ended up with a Razor keyboard that not only requires "two" USB ports but also a cloud account just to change the light settings...a cloud account for a friggin' keyboard!?

1 hour ago, MrMaddog said:

They're "gaming" keyboards that light up in rainbow colors and if I turn them off I can't see the keys on them.  Not to mention I needed small speakers for my Pi and got some from Amazon for $5...and they flash in crazy colors everytime I plug them in.

This RGB and cloud connectivity has become a sickness in Silicon Valley.

 

A buddy has this Dell laptop that's got a coppery/silvery keyboard with clear/white transparent letters on the keyboard. It is completely unusable unless the lighting is on. And then it's not as nice and contrasty as traditional black keys with white printed lettering. Or white keys with black printing.

 

I don't know why they feel compelled to make crap like that. Isn't winning any points in my part of town.

[Keatah]

Another point of contention I may be experiencing is monitors. I noticed that like CostCo has a moderate selection of regular monitors. They don't have remotes. They have limited connectivity like 2 HDMI ports and that's it. And they're built as cheap as possible - they wobble if you touch them the wrong way. And they have no controls, gotta install software for that. And these are at the $179 - $300 price point.

 

I looked at some of the television sets at Target recently. And they had about 10 or 15 on display nopunintended. And I discovered that they all have remotes. They have physical controls (shoved off to the side and out of sight), they have 3 HDMI ports, composite, antenna, audio-in, and a few had RGB in addition to all that. 4K too. All are like that Quantum Dot stuff and 1ms and 100,000:1 contrast with localized dimming and all those specialty features everything seems to have nowadays. Whatever.. All in the same price point!

 

I'm beginning to think that televisions are the better alternative. If just for the remote control capability and extra HDMI port alone.

Edited December 1, 2022 by Keatah

[Zolaerla]

1 hour ago, Keatah said:

VGA went to 640x480@16. SVGA went higher to 1280x1024 with a 24-bit palette.

 

Duke 3D let me play at 800x600@256 as did Microsoft Space Simulator. This without UniVBE or other tools, just the BIOS on the videocard. A Cirrus Logic GD5422 with 1MB RAM. Pretty sure I remember seeing something at 1024x768@16, can't recall what. But yes most DOS games stuck with the lower resolutions.

Wow, a topic I know way too much about, having coded far too much display code for DOS. 95-99% of the games that came out from 1990ish to 1996ish for DOS used VGA's 256 color mode at 320x200 with mildly stretched vertical pixels to the same aspect ratio as a real 320x240 or 640x480 with square pixels would display. This allowed the 64KB video window to have the entire screen in it (64,000 bytes for 320x200). They kept calling it MCGA, so that's kinda the name that stuck for it. If you think about almost anything from that era, you're probably thinking about it in "MCGA", from Ultima VI and Might and Magic III in the earlier years, to games like Descent II, Duke Nukem 3D, and Daggerfall in later years. Yes, some games here and there dabbled in other modes (remember the Moraff games with all its weird modes?), and some fast games like Duke Nukem 3D even supported VESA/VBE modes (and some device specific ones in some cases).

 

Very few games ran in ModeX, which is what 320x240 256 colors was named. This allowed using the (honestly, really awful) VGA page manipulation to move around the 64KB window to access the whole screen. You could even tweak the VGA variables a bit to get some really weird modes like 400x300, but almost nothing used those.

 

Anyways, the VESA/VBE modes standardized things a bit with: 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x960, 1280x1024, and even 1600x1200, in 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit (with a dead byte but *4 is easier than *3 so some cards used it), based on what the video card could hold in memory. It was esp. nice if you had full flat memory support (generally only in VESA 2.0) when you switched to 32-bit mode using a DOS extender.

 

Do you know what I freakin' love about coding for the Atari 8-bits in comparison? ANY hardware acceleration, because none of it existed for almost everything in DOS. DMA for even the really simple sprites is so nice... not to mention "graphics" modes with font support. Heck, interrupts for vertical blanking! In all my DOS code, we had to just loop polling port 03DAh waiting for a vertical blank to copy a screen up to avoid tearing.

[+OLD CS1]

30 minutes ago, Keatah said:

And they have no controls, gotta install software for that.

I was thinking, "the monitors I sell do not have remotes," but then I saw this.  No, the controls on monitors with buttons are bad enough, but to require software to control the monitor?  Stupid.  When will you need a cloud account to make color adjustments?  Want to change the volume on your HDMI monitor?  Get bent, the cloud servers are not available right now.  I can imagine that content producers (MPAA, production networks, &c.) would be VERY happy to have Internet-connected monitors so they can monitor and control what you can watch.  Revoking BluRay drive certificates is ominous enough, but imagine if your HDCP stops working on your cheap Costco or Walmart monitor because its certificate has been revoked.

 

Also, far too many people think that a monitor is a monitor is a monitor.  Even CRTs had their issues with things like dot pitch and viewable area.  But LCDs can have lower bit-depths than what they accept (10-bit display with a 24-bit input, for instance.)  That is the scourge of consumer model and low-end business monitors.

[Keatah]

22 minutes ago, OLD CS1 said:

But LCDs can have lower bit-depths than what they accept (10-bit display with a 24-bit input, for instance.)  That is the scourge of consumer model and low-end business monitors.

When LCDs were first getting going back the early 2000's I ended up with one of those monitors. It was (still is) 6-bit panel on an 8-bit input. It simulates being 8-bits through temporal dithering. It was either go with that model or spend another additional $250. The $250 was enough to make or break the sale. They must have gotten it right because while it sounds fatiguing to use it's not and I still use it today as my goto 4:3 display.

[Zolaerla]

8 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

Do you know how hard it is to find a decent mechanical keyboard that does not light up?  I miss my IBM Model M keyboard but it just doesn't go well with a black PC case and black bezel flatscreens.  I ended up with a Razor keyboard that not only requires "two" USB ports but also a cloud account just to change the light settings...a cloud account for a friggin' keyboard!?

I've been using Das Keyboards which only have light up CAPS/SCROLL/NUM lock. No software needed, and even have a little USB hub if you need it. They're nice and last a very long time, esp. coming from someone that hammers on his all day and night:
https://www.daskeyboard.com/model-s-professional/

[The Usotsuki]

I have a WASD.

 

Unicomp has the NEW Model M...