On Thu, 1 Oct 2015 12:23:55 -0600, Tony Hwang
wrote:

Robert Green wrote:
wrote in message
...
On Wed, 30 Sep 2015 05:48:01 -0400, "Robert Green"
wrote:

stuff snipped

I am not sure that the PC revolution would have been as remarkable as it
was
without the clones. They enabled a lot more people access to personal
computing than an IBM-only world would have.

I worked for 5 years for a small high-end clone mfg here in Canada -
the first PCs to be sold with a 3 year warranty.
They were really good machines, at a very competetive price, until a
beancounter took over the company with the help of a socalled "Harvard
MBA" - between the 2 they killed the quality and bled the company into
backrupsy within about 3 years. (I was gone in about 1 1/2)

Those same bean counters ran through my old employer's company destroying
value while alleging to make us more efficient. I think they're soon to
collapse with the coming changes in government contracting.

Compatibility-wise, I think the clones (good ones, anyway) really helped
move the PC revolution along. My first *real* IBM PC cost over $5,000 (this
is when full height diskette drives were also about $600). The clones
helped force prices of all peripherals out of the IBM stratosphere and into
the real world. Eventually I was buying the surplus IBM half-height
diskette drives (from the botched PC JR) for $40 - quite a drop from $600.

Some of the clones offered options that even IBM didn't. One board I bought
had 8 sockets for BIOS chips. That really fascinated my friend who liked to
program in assembler.

Another AT clone had a CPU that wasn't artificially prevented from running
at 8MHz like the IBM AT was for a while.

IIRC, the ultimate test of a PC's compatibility was:

"Can it run flight simulator?"

--
Bobby G.


Side note, any one wired up an old Imsai box?
Did not play with Z80 cpu? At very early stage
we could assemble Apple II clone. Apples big thing
was using GUI(point and click) on thier OS pretty early.


My first imprssion of both Mac and Wiindoze was :
"Anything that takes that much memory and runs that slow has something
wrong with it"

Back when 4K was a lot of ram.