Comments on: Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes

By: carfan

carfan — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:36:03 +0000

Steve Job’s insistence on fanless computers sounds similar to Soichiro Honda’s insistence on air-cooled engines in the 60s. The Honda engineers had to build an air-cooled formula-one racing engine! Without water, cooling was never enough, so they bored a hole in the clunk case to let air in. But, then the engine spilled oil from the hole, so they installed a centrifugal separator at the whole to separate oil from air. A formula-one car with such an engine actually ran in a race (or the qualifying session of it)!

By: Barc

Barc — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:57:58 +0000

When I started here at my current employer 20+ years ago, they had just got started with personal computers. Just not PCs. Since they were already using a Burroughs mainframe, they used the Burroughs B26, then B28, machines, mentioned by Scott Marlowe above. Burroughs supplied (though I don’t know if they charged for) mainframe emulator software. This architecture used what the article calls “sidecar expansion”. Burroughs called the extensions “slices”. A brother-in-law in the CG Reserve reported seeing a room full of metal shelving at his base whereon each machine was augmented with slices to the limit of the shelf length (file servers? Never found out). (We never had any that large here.) They ran on CTOS (Convergent Technology OS) until Burroughs acquired Convergent. After that, they just changed the name to BTOS.

The text-based system, lacking a mouse, had an interesting feature in the word processor. (To be fair, I never really used any other text-based word processor; by the time we moved to PCs, they were GUI. I imagine other WPs worked similarly.) To copy a block of text, you moved the cursor with the arrow keys to the beginning of the text, pressed a key (I think it was a soft key) to “mark” the starting point, then moved the cursor to the end and pressed another key to “bound” your selection. Then you could copy the highlighted selection.

By: Joe Cassara

Joe Cassara — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:03:05 +0000

#16: Commodore PET 2001 chicklet keyboard: Even a genius like Chuck Peddle is allowed to goof-up now and then.

By: Enrique

Enrique — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 09:52:11 +0000

For those who want to know why the 1541 drive was sooo slow with the C-64, here’s an old post from the guru Jim Brain.

http://www.geocities.com/rmelick/6522f.txt

> We early PET/CBM freaks knew, from playing music, that there was
> something wrong with the 6522’s shift register…

So it was a bug in the VIA 6522 shift register which caused the data transfer to be handled in software rather than hardware, slowing down all the system.

By: Fallos en el diseño de computadoras | IdentidadGeek

Fallos en el diseño de computadoras | IdentidadGeek — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 05:37:21 +0000

[...] Tecnologizer, 15 classic PC Design Mistakes AKPC_IDS += [...]

By: samuel

samuel — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 18:59:57 +0000

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By: Algunos Errores de diseño en ordenadores clásicos | CyberHades

Algunos Errores de diseño en ordenadores clásicos | CyberHades — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 15:55:13 +0000

[...] Technologizer [...]

By: user

user — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:18:42 +0000

For a modern one, a graphic card: EVGA Geforce 8600 GTS. It adjusted the fan speed in accordance with the temperature, but for some reason reason it would slow down when it would heat up, causing it to run at 85 C and feel blistering hot to the touch. Using software to control the fan would fix this, or installing an aftermarket cooler.

Blue & White Power Mac G3, early G4 – Had a cooling system that made no sense. Big fan blows in through the side of the case hitting the expansion cards, CPU got indirect air because it really didn’t get that hot. Only problem was the hot air had no where to go (the power supply fan wasn’t enough), so this bad design caused turbulence, resulting in had been an exhaust fan on top of the unit.

What else.. I have a Compaq Deskpro that won’t boot unless it has a Compaq CDROM drive installed, but other than that it’s a reliable solid computer.

By: dholm.com » Blog Archive » Tumblelog 090706

dholm.com » Blog Archive » Tumblelog 090706 — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 09:03:25 +0000

[...] Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes, Technologizer has made a great list of the ten worst PC design mistakes. [...]

By: Patrick Lajko

Patrick Lajko — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 18:06:09 +0000

I had forgotten about the mistake in the CGA colors of the PC: cyan, magenta and yellow — not red, blue and green. They used printing colors rather than video colors. So you could never get real color images or graphics. They improved with the alternate color set: red, yellow and blue. Still not right as these are the colors for mixing paint (remember grade school and mixing colors with watercolors?). How could all the IBM brains not know the difference between CMY and RGB?