[nabla9]

Classic example of Worse is Better.

All competing architectures were better than IBM PC architecture, PC BIOS was bad, chosen processor instruction set was the worst, MS-DOS operating system was bad. Only the keyboard was good.

What made it winner was open architecture, 80-column screen and IBM name.

[forinti]

I did some historical research to understand why the PC caught on (it made no sense to my 1980s teenage mind).

A PC with 80 columns card, 64KB of RAM and a floppy drive cost about the same as an Apple II Plus with the same specs (US$2,700).

A BBC Micro would set you back about US$1,500 (£900). It didn't offer slots, but did have 80 columns standard. It also had a lot of ports.

You couldn't even argue that the 8088 was much faster than the 6502. BASIC ran a lot faster on the 2MHz Beeb than on the PC.

The only thing that makes sense to me is that the people who bought it on launch were planning to use more than 64KB of RAM (which was rather expensive then).

[surfingdino]

It was an open platform. In those days, you were getting a set of printed manuals including schematics of the machine when you bought one. It created an ecosystem of clones and expansion hardware. PC-DOS/MS-DOS provided an easy path to port CP-M software.

[doubloon]

its the soft power of the IBM name. it's not possible to describe it now or for people nowdays to understand what that name meant.

you went to a big company they ran IBM. you want to get the same kind of computer 'that they use at work'. and what they have at work is IBM.

like this concept just makes no sense whatsoever in todays culture. computers used to be secret. they were tools of the priesthood. you wanted to join the priesthood. thats why you got IBM.

its like coming to America, you want to learn to speak English. not Esperanto.

[pinebox]

It was the 80's equivalent of green text messages vs. blue text messages.

[kragen]

not that many people did buy the ibm pc on launch, because you're right. it was released in mid-01981, and sold less than 200'000 in 01982. the commodore 64 sold 360'000 in 01982, and it wasn't even released until halfway through it. apple was selling a billion dollars a year that year, entirely from the apple ][ line; it wouldn't introduce the lisa until the next year. so that's on the order of half a million apple pcs shipped in 01982

i think ibm's reputation was a pretty important factor, not so much for making people buy it (though it did do that) but for convincing them that other people would buy it. it's easy to forget in 02024 just how dominant, and how malignant, that ibm was in the computing world at the time. they'd built aiken's first computer at harvard, they'd introduced ascii (then spent decades battling it—the pc was their first ascii product), they'd invented fortran, they'd invented relational databases (but kept pushing ims), they'd provided the hardware lisp and timesharing were developed on, and they utterly owned business computing, more thoroughly than microsoft does today

pretty quickly there was a lot of software out there for it. partly this was because programmers were convinced that users would buy it, but also, it was easy to port cp/m software to it. at a time when 'serious' pc software was almost entirely in assembly, you couldn't do that with the apple ][+ (unless you bought another computer from microsoft to plug into one of its slots to run cp/m). also, it was easy to make peripherals for it (though this was just as easy for the apple). and microsoft licensed ms-dos to other vendors like tandy and zenith, resulting in not-quite-compatibles like the z-100 (01982), the dec rainbow (01982), the tandy 2000 (01983), and the sharp pc-5000 laptop (01983). the software written for those machines was also usually easily ported to the ibm pc

you know how ebay and airbnb are utterly dominant because they own a two-sided market? if you want a place to stay, you go on airbnb because that's where the listings are, and if you want to rent out a place to travelers, you list it on airbnb because that's where the travelers are? the ibm pc owned a three-sided market: users, software vendors, and peripheral vendors. not at first, of course, but pretty soon; the s-100 systems weren't that dominant in a market fragmented between apple, commodore, atari, osborne, kaypro, etc.

then, once compaq came out with their ibm-compatible portable computer in 01983, ibm didn't own the market anymore. even less once phoenix started selling their bios in 01984. and that was what really made the ibm pc catch on: no single company's missteps could sink the platform the way commodore did with the amiga and the way apple did with the iigs's successors. ibm did in fact try to avoid introducing an 80386-based ibm compatible in order to avoid cannibalizing their minicomputer and mainframe lines, just as apple did with the iigs, so compaq beat ibm to market in 01986. by like a year!

there are also technical questions. the 8088 is a lot faster than the 6502 at running compiled c, especially with the crappy compilers of the time. it's also noticeably faster at numerical code. and the apple ][+ was running its 6502 at 1 megahertz, not 2. the beeb not having slots was a fatal flaw for much of the market; it turns out there are really a lot of peripherals that work badly over a serial port

and once ram prices came down a bit, 640k of ram became standard; the macintosh shipped with 128k in 01984 and quickly changed that to 512k. using 640k of ram on the 8088 was a lot easier than using it on a 6502, although intel's braindamaged segmentation scheme (avoided on the iigs's 65816) forced you to use 'garbage kludges' like lim ems (01985) to use more than a megabyte at all. that there was so much pressure to be able to use more than a megabyte as early as 01985 should tell you something about how far memory prices had come down and how important it was that the 6502 and 8085 couldn't handle more ram

[mixmastamyk]

Besides their name, they chose their market correctly, i.e. where the money/momentum was—small business. Third-party support was great.

Most people in the early 80s had no idea what to do with a computer at home, that's why they mostly were bought by enthusiasts, tinkerers, and gamers. I remember one of the main uses listed on the boxes was "keeping track of recipes." Haha, imagine spending thousands of dollars for a giant clunky thing to organize recipes when a box of index cards would do.

[garius]

keyboard wasn't great either, to begin with!

[nabla9]

Model M keyboards are ridiculously good. They are consistent for every key, have great tactile feedback and are extremely durable.

[shiroiushi]

The Model M came with the IBM PC/AT, years after the original PC and subsequent PC/XT. Those came with the Model F keyboard which had a terrible layout.

[cgh]

The Model M did not appear until 1985, nearly four years after the original IBM PC.

[nikau]

Model F came out in 81 with same bucking springs

[shiroiushi]

The Model F sucked. The key mechanism was fantastic, but the layout was utter trash. The weird return key that's long vertically but has a one-key-sized raised section in the middle is the worst part of it.

You can buy brand-new keyboards with this mechanism now from some small business (sorry, don't have a link handy), but even they offer Model M-like layouts because the original Model F layout is so awful.

The only good thing I can say about the Model F layout is that almost all microcomputers at that time had terrible keyboards, though the reasons they were terrible varied. Compared to junk like the Atari computer keyboards, it probably seemed great, though of course the IBM PC was far more expensive. For really great keyboards, at that time, you had to look at the business-level terminal keyboards and such.

[bdowling]

Probably this company: https://www.modelfkeyboards.com