Talk:IBM Personal Computer

real cause for IBM PC designed to Open Standards

According to my memory of events 36 years ago, the actual reason IBM designed the PC to open standards was the antitrust lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission regarding IBM's business practices and resulting monopoly of the mainframe market. They didn't want to take a chance on being accused of trying to corner the microcomputer market, or scaring the stockholders. Take a gander at this cite. As you all can see, this suit was not dismissed until 1982, whereas the PC design activity took place 1980-81 for its 1981 rollout.

I strongly suggest someone further investigate this and make the appropriate edit(s). (sorry, I'm busy) I never bought this BS story about some Apple longhairs steering the business decisions of a bureaucratic behemoth like IBM. An extremely staid behemoth such as IBM was. Thank you for your consideration.Wikkileaker (talk) 20:18, 23 August 2017 (UTC)

References

I concur, although it's four years later, and I'm still not sure why Wikkileaker has no time to do this, "too busy" yet put citations here. If you aren't willing to do the work, don't bother here! Compaq was one of the first to encourage "Open Standards" as described in "Open: How Compaq Ended IBM's PC Domination and Helped Invent Modern Computing" by Rod Canion 2013. It was announced in September 1988 by a consortium of PC clone vendors (the Gang of Nine) as an alternative to IBM's proprietary Micro Channel architecture]] (MCA) in its IBM PS/2 series. The Gang of Nine was the informal name given to the consortium of personal computer manufacturing companies that together created the EISA bus. Rival members generally acknowledged Compaq's leadership..." The members were: AST Research, Inc., Compaq Computer Corporation, Seiko Epson Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, NEC Corporation, Olivetti, Tandy Corporation, WYSE Zenith Data Systems. In comparison with the AT bus, which the Gang of Nine retroactively renamed to the ISA bus to avoid infringing IBM's trademark on its AT Personal Computer. The above is mostly from other Wikipedia articles, which I specifically linked. I'm not "too busy" to check those references. I'm going to leave this unsigned because "too busy", and trolls might find time to retort with snarky comments, and I have no time for that particular type of exchange

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History of interrupt selection

Does anyone happen to know why the DOS designers ignored Intel's comment "The next 27 interrupt vectors are reserved by Intel" and started using interrupts at 8? It's slightly before my time. See also Talk:Intel_8259 Number774 (talk) 19:22, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

This article should use SI units

I changed all of the memory units to KiB and they were reverted. However, saying that the early PC was sold with 16KB is just wrong. It wasn't. It was sold with 16KiB. Yes, the early marketing literature said it was sold with 16KB, and that's because *KiB wasn't invented when the early PC was sold.

Nevertheless, it is *wrong* to say that the machine was sold with 16KB, because it was sold with 16,384 bytes of memory, not 16,000. This is simply confusing for people reading this article today. We are not writing Wikipedia for people in 1981, we are writing it for people today. I think that the article should use proper SI units. What do others think? Simsong (talk) 05:25, 24 February 2020 (UTC)

Kibibibytes aren't particularly helpful; none of the literature at the time used "kibibytes". It's solving a problem that doesn't exist. --Wtshymanski (talk) 20:59, 26 February 2020 (UTC)

This is covered by the editing manual of style. Per WP:COMPUNITS: kibibytes should not be used in Wikipedia in this context as they are not universally recognised. None of the provided exceptions apply here. Oh: and kibibyte is not an SI unit. But then neither is kilobyte. 86.181.0.182 (talk) 13:15, 27 February 2020 (UTC)

changed to KB per WP:COMPUNITS, kB = 1000 bytes which not what is being referenced ShadyCrack (talk) 02:49, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Total rewrite

With all due respect to past editors, who I'm sure did their best within the constraints of the time and energy they had available, this article desperately needs a total nuke and pave.

The article can't decide if it's about the IBM PC or the entire PC series, and consequently if you want to know how the PC - the IBM 5150 - is designed or what role it played, it's nearly useless since you have to filter out acres of chaff about other computers. We have articles about PC clones and about all the other IBM PCs that we can link instead of putting it all here.

The entire history section, while extremely well sourced - perhaps *over*sourced - is not at all encyclopedic. It reads partly like a romantic editorial about IBM's come-up in the industry, but mostly like a book about this specific subject, including every name of every player, major or minor, that anyone could find, tons of punchy quotes, and so on.

Everything is far too verbose. Commentary on the long tail of the PC de facto standard can be reduced to a mention since we have multiple whole articles on that topic and the greater PC compatible concept. I am working on a rewrite.Gravislizard (talk) 06:56, 3 October 2020 (UTC)

I have completed a rewrite. It is an absolute hatchet job from any perspective, which I think is unavoidable here. Trying to whittle *down* this article is extremely hard given just how much is here and how much of it depends on everything else, so I rewrote it nearly from scratch, pulling elements and refs from the current version. I'll cop to this version having fewer citations, but everything in here is provable, it just requires more time and effort to get fully sourced which I will try to do soon.

I deleted 90% of the history section, nearly all of the names except for the biggest players, all of the suspenseful dramatization, and cut it down to just the bullet points. It's possible at this point that some of the info is not supported by the references - I copied over what I could, but the visual editor chokes on many of these refs making copying them over tedious, so I picked what looked juiciest for each assertion. Also, there were so, so, so, so, so many refs, far more than I think we needed - four or sometimes as many as six to support a single minor event.Gravislizard (talk) 00:44, 4 October 2020 (UTC)

As the author of the bulk of the former History section, I don't disagree with the appropriateness of the abridgement. I do think that the former text is appropriate in a new History of the IBM PC article.

I do disagree with your pejorative description of it as "romantic" and "suspenseful dramatization". Rather, I disagree with your claim that well-written text is inherently unencyclopedic; please feel free to cite examples that broke WP:TONE. If there are too many citations remove some, but this is a better problem to have than the opposite. You have not yet restored all appropriate and necessary cites for the text. Ylee (talk) 03:55, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

I'll say first that I apologize for being dismissive of your work, which I'm sure was in good faith. I frankly assumed it was the work of many separate people adding bits here and there until it became what it was, not the intentional work of one person with a specific goal. Either way I simply should not have said it like I did. I'm still adjusting to the experience of editing the work of other people I don't know, and that made me nervous about whether I *was* stepping on someone's careful efforts, even though I felt it was justified, and I blurted out some uncalled-for comments. Next, I feel like this is largely a subjective issue, so my strongest argument is that when I read the article as it was, I didn't feel like I was reading a neutral statement of facts. That said, I've reviewed WP:TONE and I believe I'm on the right track, if indirectly.

I read that we should "avoid bombastic wording [..] pull quotes, journalese, and headlinese [and] persuasive writing," and WP:QUOTE makes a point that using many quotes can quietly undermine NPOV. The issue I saw was sort of a combination of these - each division of the history section starting out with a pull quote felt like a book or featured magazine article to me, setting an emotional tone for the next section, and the heavy use of quotations containing "bombastic" verbiage seemed to me to overwhelm the encyclopedic tone of the article. While the quotes themselves were not inherently invalid, nor was there necessarily a problem with the original writing in between them, I felt it just leaned too heavily on unfiltered individual opinions.

For instance: "Some IBM employees opposed IBM entering the market. One said, "Why on earth would you care about the personal computer? It has nothing at all to do with office automation"." MOS:QUOTE says to use quotes for, "emotive opinions that cannot be expressed in Wikipedia's own voice," but I think this could have been paraphrased, e.g. "Some IBM employees opposed IBM entering a market outside of office automation." It can still cite the same source, but the tone would not carry the feeling of anger that the quote did. We could say that this *is* a uniquely emotive opinion, but I think this requires some consideration of cultural context - 1980s businessmen probably spoke very emphatically about almost every topic, and I would wager that this man's opinion can be safely condensed to "opposed" without losing the gist of it.

The same goes for a lot of magazines, which tended to level either vitriol or outrageous praise at business decisions, because they were paid to have strong, firm opinions that made their readers feel reassured that they were getting a conclusive opinion on a subject. "IBM has devoured competitors like a cloud of locusts" is an exciting way to say that the market had swung heavily in their favor, but we can just say that, instead of quoting someone saying it in a more bombastic way. Magazine writing is certainly essential as a measure of the general public opinion, but I think using much of it verbatim can tend to make what was probably a fairly tame series of business decisions and market reactions feel like a fireworks show.

Finally there's quotes that perhaps look like facts at a glance, but might not have been. "Cary agreed about the culture, observing that IBM would need "four years and three hundred people" to develop its own personal computer; Lowe promised one in a year if done without traditional IBM methods." Was the quoted individual exaggerating for effect, or making a realistic estimate? It's a third-hand quote, so I'm not sure, and my take is that it's a safer bet to decouple from the individual statement, that was maybe expressed in a moment of frustration, and say e.g. "a typical development cycle for IBM could last several years and require a large team," which is still generally supported by the thrust of the quote without presenting it as a likely fact. This is a judgment call based on how you read the tone of the source, but like I said, I'm erring on the side of caution.

I hope my point of view looks more reasonable now. Regarding the missing cites, I was having some trouble validating them because the visual editor broke a bunch of refs, and now that I've figured out how to fix those I'll go back through and correct the damage ASAP.Gravislizard (talk) 07:13, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

WP:QUOTE does not recommend what you claim. Its advice against overuse of quotes is primarily for possible violation of fair use. It does say "Using too many quotations is incompatible with the encyclopedic writing style", but should be read in context with the next point, "Quotations shouldn't replace plain, concise text. Intersperse quotations with original prose that comments on those quotations instead of constructing articles using quotations with little or no original prose"; in other words, intersperse short quotations with original text. The previous text does this.

Your paraphrase of the "office automation" quote is flawed. The point of the author who quoted the IBM employee was that to claim that a personal computer has nothing to do with office automation is completely wrongheaded. This was already apparent by 1982-1983.

"IBM has devoured competitors like a cloud of locusts" is an appropriate way to convey the Apple magazine's author's purpose in using such language: Stating how quickly and efficiently the PC had taken over the market, *and* to warn to other people in the Apple ecosystem of this. MOS:QUOTE advises that "Quotation should be used, with attribution, to present emotive opinions that cannot be expressed in Wikipedia's own voice". Your paraphrase does not adequately communicate the author's warning or sense of urgency, and uses an unwanted metaphor (How can market share "swing"?).

You ask regarding the Cary-Lowe exchange, "Was the quoted individual exaggerating for effect, or making a realistic estimate?" *We don't know*. We do know that that's what Cary said at the time. Putting his statement in quotes makes clear that we are representing Cary's own words, as opposed to introvertible fact; nevertheless, the viewpoint of IBM's Chairman and CEO is relevant and important. To try to "decouple" this because it was "maybe expressed in a moment of frustration" is OR.

To reiterate, there is nothing in WP:TONE discouraging compelling text if the text is representative of the citations and does not engage in OR. There is nothing in WP:QUOTES or MOS:QUOTES discouraging use of quotations that are succinct, interspersed with the editor's own text, and accurately communicate the tone and intent of the cite. Ylee (talk) 19:37, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Clarification: As stated, I have no objection to abridging a section of a long article into a stub and pointing people to a longer article on the topic of the section. I've done this myself, and some time ago gave some advice to a new editor who took a portion of the History section and moved it to History of IBM where, I agreed, it made more sense. Most of your "stubbing" is accurate and relevant, and the missing citations can be restored. But I think you are working under a misunderstanding of what makes an article "encyclopedic", and what the MOS advises on the topic. Ylee (talk) 19:43, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

Looking over your edits in IBM PCjr further causes me to think that you fundamentally misunderstand the MOS. There you have basically removed almost every quotation in the History section without doing much other abridging (even the current IBM PC#History needs more cutting down if a separate History of the IBM PC article is created). The one subsection you really abridged, on the keyboard, is the subject that people still best remember the PCjr today for; for example, you removed the entire discussion of even privileged third-party developers like Sierra being amazed by the keyboard because they were never shown it before the debut. The article now has WP:COMPNOW issues where it didn't before, and language like "pain point" violate WP:TONE and is unencyclopedic more than anything in the previous version of that article, or this one. Ylee (talk) 20:13, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

More on the PCjr keyboard subsection. IBM wasn't the first to release a poor-quality keyboard; that goes back to the original Commodore PET 2001's calculator keyboard. But Commodore in 1977, Atari in 1978 with the 400, and Radio Shack in 1980 with the original Color Computer a) didn't have as many good and bad precedents to work off of, and b) had zero privileged third-party developers working on software before the computers' release. IBM in 1983 had a history of excellent keyboards going back to the Selecric in the early 1960s, the existence of rivals' poor-quality keyboards, and third-party developers like Sierra that, had their prototypes included the chiclet keyboard, would surely have warned Boca Raton of it being a terrible mistake. Your abridgement of the section communicates none, zip, zero of any of this.

Your user page preemptively explaining why you remove so much text from old tech history articles mentions lack of citations as an issue. You cannot claim that with these articles or sections. Ylee (talk) 22:56, 7 October 2020 (UTC)

A problem I feel here is that your responses seem to violate WP:SYN, which is, oddly, not a problem I saw in the article to begin with. You're describing conclusions that would be synthesis if they were written, but they weren't actually written, and they're apparently obvious to you but - I can attest - they are not obvious to everyone. Sierra would have told IBM not to make the PCjr chiclet keyboard? Probably, but do you have a reference for that? I checked the refs surrounding Sierra's reception of the keyboard, and I don't see it. Did I miss one? We aren't allowed to draw this conclusion unless it's in a citation, however interesting and accurate I think it is.

I don't understand "IBM wasn't the first to release a poor-quality keyboard[...]" Was that in the PCjr article? I just reviewed the current and old revisions and I can't find anything like that. I don't know what you're getting at.

I also do not understand what you're saying here: "The point of the author who quoted the IBM employee was that to claim that a personal computer has nothing to do with office automation is completely wrongheaded" - I'm having trouble parsing the grammar of this, but I think you're saying that the employee was upset about personal computers not being useful for office automation even though they were. Is that on a later page of the book? I couldn't find it. The author did not seem to comment on the employee at all, besides stating that he opposed the entry into the personal computer market. And again, you didn't actually state this in the article - there was nothing along the lines of, "Some IBM employees opposed entry into this market[...] based on the belief that the PC would not be useful as an office automation machine." That would be WP:SYN or OR if you had written it, but you didn't even write it, so I don't understand why you're saying it now.

Overall the point I'm trying to make is that I feel you're going way out of scope on these subjects in a way that works great in a book, but is inappropriate in an encyclopedia - and no, I do not think that I misunderstand encyclopedic tone. The MOS and WP guidelines do not describe literally everything, they expect us to apply judgment and read the room. Articles like Nintendo Entertainment System and Macintosh depend far less on both literal quotes and detailed context for virtually every point made, and overall read in a much less bombastic fashion. An understanding of these products and their role in culture is enhanced by including a certain amount of context and literal quotations, but when we get to the point of stating that IBM did not permit salespeople to drink during lunch, or reporting the specific enraged reactions of person after person after person, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that it's going a bit too far. I do not see this level of dependence on explicit quotes or verbatim descriptions of reactions or opinions in almost any article that I read on here. Gravislizard (talk) 00:37, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Why are you expecting me to provide citations in a Talk article? I agree that any text depends to some degree on expecting the reader to understand what he is reading based on the context. The problem is that you are removing the context. If the article says that the PCjr has a poor quality keyboard that surprises everyone in the industry and the media, including third-party developers like Sierra, the implication is that if Sierra or another such company had been aware of the chiclet keyboard before the debut it might have persuaded IBM of its mistake. There is no need to state this; rather, let the reader come to such a conclusion on its own. (In any case, this is all stated in the Jimmy Maher article that is cited in this instance; that Sierra, so important to the PCjr's pre-debut software development, was completely excluded from key aspects of the PCjr hardware.)

When you write "I don't understand 'IBM wasn't the first to release a poor-quality keyboard[...]' Was that in the PCjr article? I just reviewed the current and old revisions and I can't find anything like that. I don't know what you're getting at" you are overlooking the Dvorak "$99 el cheapo computers" quote and the Tandy executive quote (specifically citing the Color Computer's keyboard).

Regarding "I think you're saying that the employee was upset about personal computers not being useful for office automation even though they were. Is that on a later page of the book? I couldn't find it. The author did not seem to comment on the employee at all, besides stating that he opposed the entry into the personal computer market": Oh, come now. When, in an article discussing the great success of the IBM PC and recounting how it got there, the author quotes an IBM employee opposing the company entering the PC market because "a PC has nothing to do with office automation", there is no need for the author (or Wikipedia article) to say "Boy, what an idiot!" It is obvious to any reader at the time the citation was published, or any Wikipedia user reading the quote today, that the IBM employee was the one who was laughably wrong. Again, you have removed the entire context, while claiming that I a) violated WP:SYN in a Talk section and b) this somehow taints the article itself.

I have no problem with you removing things like the IBM ban on employee drinking if you think that that is extraneous/excessive. But your mass removal of almost all quotations—again, 100% cited, in context, and relevant—and other text based on a tendentious reading of the MOS is unwarranted. Ylee (talk) 01:01, 8 October 2020 (UTC)

Requested move 3 June 2021

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) -- Calidum 20:20, 24 June 2021 (UTC)

---

IBM Personal Computer → IBM PC – IBM PC is the WP:COMMONNAME for this subject, and is more consistent with IBM PC compatible. PhotographyEdits (talk) 15:45, 2 June 2021 (UTC)

This is a contested technical request (permalink). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 09:20, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

• @PhotographyEdits and Elli: queried move request Anthony Appleyard (talk) 09:21, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
• Not clear what naming scheme we should use here - would be a pretty contentious move to do undiscussed. Should go through an RM. Elli (talk | contribs) 04:52, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
• Opppose - pointless Wiki-diddling. This is not an obscure initialism. --Wtshymanski (talk) 22:00, 8 June 2021 (UTC)
• Oppose. They are the same name anyway, and the current name sound more formal. enjoyer -- talk 22:03, 12 June 2021 (UTC)
• Comment I don't get why it is opposed. Per WP:COMMONNAME the most common name is preferred, not the name that sounds the most formal. Per WP:CRITERIA, IBM PC is recognizable, natural, precise, concise, and *more* consistent, per IBM PC compatible. IMO the page should be moved. PhotographyEdits (talk)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Printer compatibility

IBM provided two different options for connecting Centronics-compatible parallel printers. One was the IBM Printer Adapter, and the other was integrated into the MDA as the IBM Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter.

The parallel port of the original IBM PC was not Centronics compatible. It had extra interface signals that prevented printing to anything other than an IBM-badged printer, which was an Epson unit. IBM had Epson bastardize the interface for this purpose. Third-party manufacturers quickly responded by adding the necessary signals, without losing true Centronics compatibility.

216.152.18.132 (talk) 20:44, 2 September 2022 (UTC)