Ars Technica ofrece diez páginas sobre los años del desarrollo del ordenador personal. Desde los días de una gran variedad de sistemas, hasta el presente, con el dominio casi total de la combinación de PC/Windows. Viene acompañado de gráficas con las ventas de los sistemas en su momento. Como ésta:
El presente queda más o menos así:
El artículo da como primer ordenador personal al Altair, omitiendo el Micral de André Thi Truong que es al menos un año anterior.
Sobre el origen del PC, dan una historia curiosa:
At first, IBM thought about rebranding an existing computer, and had selected the Atari 800. However, after a visit to Atari headquarters, where IBM businessmen were literally put in a box and run through the assembly line by unorthodox and sometimes stoned Atari employees, the computing giant decided they would rather build their own computer.
Y uno se pregunta cómo sería hoy el panorama del ordenador personal si algunas personas hubiesen tomado otras decisiones. Por ejemplo, si Steve Jobs hubiese permitido en serio los clones de Mac.
Una de las conclusiones:
The only person who predicted the Attack of the Clones was Bill Gates, who recalled that many mainframe computers had spawned work-alike clones in the past. It was this foresight that enabled him to get IBM to agree to a contract whereby Microsoft could license MS-DOS to third parties. IBM, thinking in mainframe timelines and assuming that clones would be perpetually years behind the originals, thought nothing of this stipulation. They were only concerned with getting the lowest possible flat rate for MS-DOS (which they mistakenly called PC-DOS) in the first place.
(vía Guardian Unlimited: Technology)
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