130-645: The Atari Portfolio ( Atari PC Folio ) is an IBM PC-compatible palmtop PC , released by Atari Corporation in June 1989. It was the first palmtop computer compatible with the IBM PC ever released. DIP Research Ltd. based in Guildford , Surrey , UK released a product in the UK called the DIP Pocket PC in 1989. Soon after its release, DIP licensed this product to Atari for sale as
260-457: A Bee Card expansion port for removable memory (aka Credit Card Memory or CCM), which is not compatible with PC card as it predated that standard. Expansion cards were available in sizes of 32 KB (HPC-201), 64 KB (HPC-202), and 128 KB (HPC-203) initially, and later were available in capacities up to 4 MB. The expansion cards were backed up by a replaceable battery, which last approximately two years. Built-in applications include
390-409: A front panel to input or display bits and had to be connected to a terminal to print or input text through a keyboard. Teleprinters were used as early-day hard-copy terminals and predated the use of a computer screen by decades. The computer would typically transmit a line of data which would be printed on paper, and accept a line of data from a keyboard over a serial or other interface. Starting in
520-469: A text editor , spreadsheet ( Lotus 1-2-3 compatible), phone book and time manager. Expansion cards contain programs such as a chess game (HPC-750), a file manager (HPC-704), and a finance manager (HPC-702). Most text-based DOS applications can run on the Portfolio as long as they did not directly access the hardware and could fit into the small memory. Other expansion modules include a floppy drive , and
650-532: A 32-bit operating system released during the 2000s can still operate many of the simpler programs written for the OS of the early 1980s without needing an emulator , though an emulator like DOSBox now has near-native functionality at full speed (and is necessary for certain games which may run too fast on modern processors). Additionally, many modern PCs can still run DOS directly, although special options such as USB legacy mode and SATA-to-PATA emulation may need to be set in
780-478: A built-in keyboard and display for the console. Some Unix-like operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD have virtual consoles to provide several text terminals on a single computer. The fundamental type of application running on a text terminal is a command-line interpreter or shell , which prompts for commands from the user and executes each command after a press of Return . This includes Unix shells and some interactive programming environments. In
910-751: A commercial venture. Experience had shown that even if an operating system was technically superior to Windows, it would be a failure in the market ( BeOS and OS/2 for example). In 1989, Steve Jobs said of his new NeXT system, "It will either be the last new hardware platform to succeed, or the first to fail." Four years later in 1993, NeXT announced it was ending production of the NeXTcube and porting NeXTSTEP to Intel processors. Very early on in PC history, some companies introduced their own XT-compatible chipsets . For example, Chips and Technologies introduced their 82C100 XT Controller which integrated and replaced six of
1040-491: A computer capable of running programs that are managed by MS-DOS". The main reason why an IBM standard is not worrying is that it can help competition to flourish. IBM will soon be as much a prisoner of its standards as its competitors are. Once enough IBM machines have been bought, IBM cannot make sudden changes in their basic design; what might be useful for shedding competitors would shake off even more customers. In February 1984 Byte wrote that "IBM's burgeoning influence in
1170-551: A consumer PC manufacturer during April 2005, when it sold its laptop and desktop PC divisions ( ThinkPad / ThinkCentre ) to Lenovo for US$ 1.75 billion . As of October 2007, Hewlett-Packard and Dell had the largest shares of the PC market in North America. They were also successful overseas, with Acer , Lenovo , and Toshiba also notable. Worldwide, a huge number of PCs are " white box " systems assembled by myriad local systems builders. Despite advances of computer technology,
1300-411: A desktop PC to read and write to the expansion cards. The kit contains an ISA card , a special cable, the card reader, and software distributed on floppy disk. A modem expansion module converts the portfolio into a miniature computer terminal . The modem is powered from the portfolio and came with an acoustic coupler consisting of two round shells that could be mounted over both ends of a handset with
1430-523: A few percentage points of market share was Apple Inc. 's Macintosh . The Mac started out billed as "the computer for the rest of us", but high prices and closed architecture drove the Macintosh into an education and desktop publishing niche, from which it only emerged in the mid-2000s. By the mid-1990s the Mac's market share had dwindled to around 5% and introducing a new rival operating system had become too risky
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#17330854861171560-430: A field that may have previously required a full screen-full of characters to be re-sent from the computer, possibly over a slow modem line. Around the mid-1980s most intelligent terminals, costing less than most dumb terminals would have a few years earlier, could provide enough user-friendly local editing of data and send the completed form to the main computer. Providing even more processing possibilities, workstations like
1690-530: A green or amber screen. Typically terminals communicate with the computer via a serial port via a null modem cable, often using an EIA RS-232 or RS-422 or RS-423 or a current loop serial interface. IBM systems typically communicated over a Bus and Tag channel, a coaxial cable using a proprietary protocol, a communications link using Binary Synchronous Communications or IBM's SNA protocol, but for many DEC, Data General and NCR (and so on) computers there were many visual display suppliers competing against
1820-610: A keyboard in 1941, as did the Z4 in 1942–1945. However, these consoles could only be used to enter numeric inputs and were thus analogous to those of calculating machines; programs, commands, and other data were entered via paper tape. Both machines had a row of display lamps for results. In 1956, the Whirlwind Mark ;I computer became the first computer equipped with a keyboard-printer combination with which to support direct input of data and commands and output of results. That device
1950-457: A library such as ncurses . For more complex operations, the programs can use terminal specific ioctl system calls. For an application, the simplest way to use a terminal is to simply write and read text strings to and from it sequentially. The output text is scrolled, so that only the last several lines (typically 24) are visible. Unix systems typically buffer the input text until the Enter key
2080-415: A memory expansion unit (HPC-104). The memory expansion unit gives the Portfolio an additional 256 KB of RAM, which can be partitioned into several drives. It also features a pass-through expansion connector, allowing the use of more than one expansion unit. In theory, multiple memory expanders can be attached, increasing the available storage to over 640 KB . A card reader (HPC-301) connects to
2210-607: A microprocessor is built in, but not all terminals with microprocessors did any real processing of input: the main computer to which it was attached would have to respond quickly to each keystroke. The term "intelligent" in this context dates from 1969. Notable examples include the IBM 2250 , predecessor to the IBM 3250 and IBM 5080, and IBM 2260 , predecessor to the IBM 3270 , introduced with System/360 in 1964. Most terminals were connected to minicomputers or mainframe computers and often had
2340-498: A minor player with its own technology". The Economist predicted in 1983 that "IBM will soon be as much a prisoner of its standards as its competitors are", because "Once enough IBM machines have been bought, IBM cannot make sudden changes in their basic design; what might be useful for shedding competitors would shake off even more customers". After the Compaq Deskpro 386 became the first 80386-based PC, PC wrote that owners of
2470-524: A proprietary operating system : "Who cares? If IBM does it, they will most likely just isolate themselves from the largest marketplace, in which they really can't compete anymore anyway". He predicted that in 1987 the market "will complete its transition from an IBM standard to an Intel/MS-DOS/expansion bus standard ... Folks aren't so much concerned about IBM compatibility as they are about Lotus 1-2-3 compatibility". By 1992, Macworld stated that because of clones, "IBM lost control of its own market and became
2600-421: A range of machines from different vendors that had widely varying hardware. Those customers who needed other applications than the starter programs could reasonably expect publishers to offer their products for a variety of computers, on suitable media for each. Microsoft's competing OS was intended initially to operate on a similar varied spectrum of hardware, although all based on the 8086 processor. Thus, MS-DOS
2730-594: A real-world terminal, sometimes allowing concurrent use of local programs and access to a distant terminal host system, either over a direct serial connection or over a network using, e.g., SSH . Today few if any dedicated computer terminals are being manufactured, as time sharing on large computers has been replaced by personal computers, handheld devices and workstations with graphical user interfaces. User interactions with servers use either software such as Web browsers , or terminal emulators, with connections over high-speed networks. The console of Konrad Zuse 's Z3 had
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#17330854861172860-593: A sequence of codes were sent to the terminal to try to read the cursor's position or the 25th line's contents using a sequence of different manufacturer's control code sequences, and the terminal-generated response would determine a single-digit number (such as 6 for Data General Dasher terminals, 4 for ADM 3A/5/11/12 terminals, 0 or 2 for TTYs with no special features) that would be available to programs to say which set of codes to use. The great majority of terminals were monochrome, manufacturers variously offering green, white or amber and sometimes blue screen phosphors. (Amber
2990-472: A shell, most of the commands are small applications themselves. Another important application type is that of the text editor . A text editor typically occupies the full area of display, displays one or more text documents, and allows the user to edit the documents. The text editor has, for many uses, been replaced by the word processor , which usually provides rich formatting features that the text editor lacks. The first word processors used text to communicate
3120-455: A standard, AlphaWindows , that would allow a single CRT screen to implement multiple windows, each of which was to behave as a distinct terminal. Unfortunately, like I2O , this suffered from being run as a closed standard: non-members were unable to obtain even minimal information and there was no realistic way a small company or independent developer could join the consortium. An intelligent terminal does its own processing, usually implying
3250-446: A terminal as "intelligent" was its ability to process user-input within the terminal—not interrupting the main computer at each keystroke—and send a block of data at a time (for example: when the user has finished a whole field or form). Most terminals in the early 1980s, such as ADM-3A, TVI912, Data General D2, DEC VT52 , despite the introduction of ANSI terminals in 1978, were essentially "dumb" terminals, although some of them (such as
3380-456: A typical application the host sends the terminal a preformatted panel containing both static data and fields into which data may be entered. The terminal operator keys data, such as updates in a database entry, into the appropriate fields. When entry is complete (or ENTER or PF key pressed on 3270s), a block of data, usually just the data entered by the operator (modified data), is sent to the host in one transmission. The 3270 terminal buffer (at
3510-402: Is " thin client ". A thin client typically uses a protocol like X11 for Unix terminals, or RDP for Microsoft Windows. The bandwidth needed depends on the protocol used, the resolution, and the color depth . Modern graphic terminals allow display of images in color, and of text in varying sizes, colors, and fonts (type faces). In the early 1990s, an industry consortium attempted to define
3640-633: Is a legacy of that period; other non-clone machines, while subject to a limit, could exceed 640 KB. Rumors of "lookalike," compatible computers, created without IBM's approval, began almost immediately after the IBM PC's release. InfoWorld wrote on the first anniversary of the IBM PC that The dark side of an open system is its imitators. If the specs are clear enough for you to design peripherals, they are clear enough for you to design imitations. Apple ... has patents on two important components of its systems ... IBM, which reportedly has no special patents on
3770-406: Is a serial computer interface for text entry and display. Information is presented as an array of pre-selected formed characters . When such devices use a video display such as a cathode-ray tube , they are called a " video display unit " or "visual display unit" (VDU) or "video display terminal" (VDT). The system console is often a text terminal used to operate a computer. Modern computers have
3900-522: Is a type of computer terminal that communicates with its host in blocks of data, as opposed to a character-oriented terminal that communicates with its host one character at a time. A block-oriented terminal may be card-oriented, display-oriented, keyboard-display, keyboard-printer, printer or some combination. The IBM 3270 is perhaps the most familiar implementation of a block-oriented display terminal, but most mainframe computer manufacturers and several other companies produced them. The description below
4030-495: Is achieved via RS-232 serial links, Ethernet or other proprietary protocols . Character-oriented terminals can be "dumb" or "smart". Dumb terminals are those that can interpret a limited number of control codes (CR, LF, etc.) but do not have the ability to process special escape sequences that perform functions such as clearing a line, clearing the screen, or controlling cursor position. In this context dumb terminals are sometimes dubbed glass Teletypes , for they essentially have
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4160-466: Is becoming a misnomer, as Intel has lost absolute control over the direction of x86 hardware development with AMD 's AMD64 . Additionally, non-Windows operating systems like macOS and Linux have established a presence on the x86 architecture. Although the IBM PC was designed for expandability, the designers could not anticipate the hardware developments of the 1980s, nor the size of the industry they would engender. To make things worse, IBM's choice of
4290-462: Is in terms of the 3270, but similar considerations apply to other types. Block-oriented terminals typically incorporate a buffer which stores one screen or more of data, and also stores data attributes, not only indicating appearance (color, brightness, blinking, etc.) but also marking the data as being enterable by the terminal operator vs. protected against entry, as allowing the entry of only numeric information vs. allowing any characters, etc. In
4420-400: Is limited, the number of concurrent lines that can be displayed at one time is limited. Vector-mode displays were historically important but are no longer used. Practically all modern graphic displays are raster-mode, descended from the picture scanning techniques used for television , in which the visual elements are a rectangular array of pixels . Since the raster image is only perceptible to
4550-444: Is pressed, so the application receives a ready string of text. In this mode, the application need not know much about the terminal. For many interactive applications this is not sufficient. One of the common enhancements is command-line editing (assisted with such libraries as readline ); it also may give access to command history. This is very helpful for various interactive command-line interpreters. Even more advanced interactivity
4680-428: Is provided with full-screen applications. Those applications completely control the screen layout; also they respond to key-pressing immediately. This mode is very useful for text editors, file managers and web browsers . In addition, such programs control the color and brightness of text on the screen, and decorate it with underline, blinking and special characters (e.g. box-drawing characters ). To achieve all this,
4810-571: The Amiga , have been relegated to niche, enthusiast markets. In the past, the most successful exception was Apple 's Macintosh platform, which used non-Intel processors from its inception. Although Macintosh was initially based on the Motorola 68000 series , then transitioned to the PowerPC architecture, Macintosh computers transitioned to Intel processors beginning in 2006. Until 2020 Macintosh computers shared
4940-500: The IBM 2741 (1965) and the DECwriter (1970). Respective top speeds of teletypes, IBM 2741 and the LA30 (an early DECwriter) were 10, 15 and 30 characters per second. Although at that time "paper was king" the speed of interaction was relatively limited. The DECwriter was the last major printing-terminal product. It faded away after 1980 under pressure from video display units (VDUs), with
5070-613: The IBM PS/2 computer that overcame many of the technical limits of the XT/AT bus, but this was rarely used as the basis for IBM-compatible computers since it required license payments to IBM both for the PS/2 bus and any prior AT-bus designs produced by the company seeking a license. This was unpopular with hardware manufacturers and several competing bus standards were developed by consortiums, with more agreeable license terms. Various attempts to standardize
5200-742: The Intel 8080 . This made them inexpensive and they quickly became extremely popular input-output devices on many types of computer system, often replacing earlier and more expensive printing terminals. After 1970 several suppliers gravitated to a set of common standards: The experimental era of serial VDUs culminated with the VT100 in 1978. By the early 1980s, there were dozens of manufacturers of terminals, including Lear-Siegler , ADDS , Data General, DEC , Hazeltine Corporation , Heath/Zenith , Hewlett-Packard , IBM, TeleVideo , Volker-Craig, and Wyse , many of which had incompatible command sequences (although many used
5330-479: The Intel 8088 for the CPU introduced several limitations for developing software for the PC compatible platform. For example, the 8088 processor only had a 20-bit memory addressing space . To expand PC s beyond one megabyte, Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft jointly created expanded memory (EMS), a bank-switching scheme to allow more memory provided by add-in hardware, and accessed by a set of four 16- kilobyte "windows" inside
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5460-626: The Macintosh computers offered by Apple Inc. and used mainly for desktop publishing at the time, the aging 8-bit Commodore 64 which was selling for $ 150 by this time and became the world's bestselling computer, the 32-bit Commodore Amiga line used for television and video production and the 32-bit Atari ST used by the music industry. However, IBM itself lost the main role in the market for IBM PC compatibles by 1990. A few events in retrospect are important: Despite popularity of its ThinkPad set of laptop PC's, IBM finally relinquished its role as
5590-597: The Multimedia PC (MPC) standard was set during 1990. A PC that met the minimum MPC standard could be marketed with the MPC logo, giving consumers an easy-to-understand specification to look for. Software that could operate on the most minimally MPC-compliant PC would be guaranteed to operate on any MPC. The MPC level 2 and MPC level 3 standards were set later, but the term "MPC compliant" never became popular. After MPC level 3 during 1996, no further MPC standards were established. By
5720-502: The PC-98 ). The IBM PC was sold in high enough volumes to justify writing software specifically for it, and this encouraged other manufacturers to produce machines that could use the same programs, expansion cards , and peripherals as the PC. The x86 computer marketplace rapidly excluded all machines which were not hardware-compatible or software-compatible with the PC. The 640 KB barrier on "conventional" system memory available to MS-DOS
5850-474: The Portfolio in the UK and US. In Italy, Spain and Germany, it was originally marketed as PC Folio instead. DIP officially stood for "Distributed Information Processing", although secretly it actually stood for "David, Ian and Peter", the three founding members of the company who were former employees of Psion . The original founder of the company (first called "Crushproof Software") was Ian H. S. Cullimore , and
5980-533: The VESA Local Bus (VLB), Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI), and the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP). Descendants of the x86 IBM PC compatibles, namely 64-bit computers based on " x86-64 /AMD64" chips comprise the majority of desktop computers on the market as of 2021, with the dominant operating system being Microsoft Windows . Interoperability with the bus structure and peripherals of
6110-498: The VT220 terminal strongly influenced the Model M shipped on IBM PCs from 1985, and through it all later computer keyboards. Although flat-panel displays were available since the 1950s, cathode-ray tubes continued to dominate the market until the personal computer had made serious inroads into the display terminal market. By the time cathode-ray tubes on PCs were replaced by flatscreens after
6240-413: The 1981 IBM PC and subsequent XT and AT models from computer giant IBM . Like the original IBM PC, they use an Intel x86 central processing unit and are capable of using interchangeable commodity hardware , such as expansion cards . Initially such computers were referred to as PC clones , IBM clones or IBM PC clones , but the term "IBM PC compatible" is now a historical description only, as
6370-528: The 20-bit addressing. Later, Intel CPUs had larger address spaces and could directly address 16 MB (80286) or more, causing Microsoft to develop extended memory (XMS) which did not require additional hardware. "Expanded" and "extended" memory have incompatible interfaces, so anyone writing software that used more than one megabyte had to provide for both systems for the greatest compatibility until MS-DOS began including EMM386, which simulated EMS memory using XMS memory. A protected mode OS can also be written for
6500-432: The 80286, but DOS application compatibility was more difficult than expected, not only because most DOS applications accessed the hardware directly, bypassing BIOS routines intended to ensure compatibility, but also that most BIOS requests were made by the first 32 interrupt vectors, which were marked as "reserved" for protected mode processor exceptions by Intel. Video cards suffered from their own incompatibilities. There
6630-573: The ASR Teletype models, included a paper tape reader and punch which could record output such as a program listing. The data on the tape could be re-entered into the computer using the tape reader on the teletype, or printed to paper. Teletypes used the current loop interface that was already used in telegraphy. A less expensive Read Only (RO) configuration was available for the Teletype. Custom-designs keyboard/printer terminals that came later included
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#17330854861176760-570: The BIOS setup utility. Computers using the UEFI might need to be set at legacy BIOS mode to be able to boot DOS. However, the BIOS/UEFI options in most mass-produced consumer-grade computers are very limited and cannot be configured to truly handle OSes such as the original variants of DOS. The spread of the x86-64 architecture has further distanced current computers' and operating systems' internal similarity with
6890-479: The Handwell Corporation were threatened with legal action by IBM, who settled with them. Soon after in 1982, Compaq released the very successful Compaq Portable , also with a clean-room reverse-engineered BIOS, and also not challenged legally by IBM. Early IBM PC compatibles used the same computer buses as their IBM counterparts, switching from the 8-bit IBM PC and XT bus to the 16-bit IBM AT bus with
7020-621: The IBM BIOS and then write its own BIOS using clean room design . Note this was over a year after Compaq released the Portable. The money and research put into reverse-engineering the BIOS was a calculated risk. At the same time, many manufacturers such as Tandy / RadioShack , Xerox , Hewlett-Packard , Digital Equipment Corporation , Sanyo , Texas Instruments , Tulip , Wang and Olivetti introduced personal computers that supported MS-DOS, but were not completely software- or hardware-compatible with
7150-454: The IBM PC compatibles remained very much compatible with the original IBM PC computers, although most of the components implement the compatibility in special backward compatibility modes used only during a system boot . It was often more practical to run old software on a modern system using an emulator rather than relying on these features. In 2014 Lenovo acquired IBM's x86-based server ( System x ) business for US$ 2.1 billion . One of
7280-644: The IBM PC compatibles: try the package you want to use before you buy the computer." Companies modified their computers' BIOS to work with newly discovered incompatible applications, and reviewers and users developed stress tests to measure compatibility; by 1984 the ability to operate Lotus 1-2-3 and Flight Simulator became the standard, with compatibles specifically designed to run them. IBM believed that some companies such as Eagle, Corona, and Handwell infringed on its copyright, and after Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. successfully forced
7410-463: The IBM PC. Tandy described the Tandy 2000 , for example, as having a "'next generation' true 16-bit CPU", and with "More speed. More disk storage. More expansion" than the IBM PC or "other MS-DOS computers". While admitting in 1984 that many PC DOS programs did not work on the computer, the company stated that "the most popular, sophisticated software on the market" was available, either immediately or "over
7540-1258: The IBM PC. At first, few clones other than Compaq's offered truly full compatibility. Jerry Pournelle purchased an IBM PC in mid-1983, " rotten keyboard and all", because he had "four cubic feet of unevaluated software, much of which won't run on anything but an IBM PC. Although a lot of machines claim to be 100 percent IBM PC compatible, I've yet to have one arrive ... Alas, a lot of stuff doesn't run with Eagle, Z-100, Compupro , or anything else we have around here". Columbia Data Products's November 1983 sales brochure stated that during tests with retail-purchased computers in October 1983, its own and Compaq's products were compatible with all tested PC software, while Corona and Eagle's were less compatible. Columbia University reported in January 1984 that Kermit ran without modification on Compaq and Columbia Data Products clones, but not on those from Eagle or Seequa. Other MS-DOS computers also required custom code. By December 1983 Future Computing stated that companies like Compaq, Columbia Data Products, and Corona that emphasized IBM PC compatibility had been successful, while non-compatible computers had hurt
7670-432: The IBM PC. Many companies were reluctant to have their products' PC compatibility tested. When PC Magazine requested samples from computer manufacturers that claimed to produce compatibles for an April 1984 review, 14 of 31 declined. Corona specified that "Our systems run all software that conforms to IBM PC programming standards. And the most popular software does." When a BYTE journalist asked to test Peachtext at
7800-589: The OEM versions of MS-DOS were virtually identical, except perhaps for the provision of a few utility programs. MS-DOS provided adequate functionality for character-oriented applications such as those that could have been implemented on a text-only terminal . Had the bulk of commercially important software been of this nature, low-level hardware compatibility might not have mattered. However, in order to provide maximum performance and leverage hardware features (or work around hardware bugs), PC applications quickly developed beyond
7930-451: The OS and built-in applications. The on-board RAM is divided between system memory and local storage (the C: drive ). The LCD is monochrome without backlight and has 240 × 64 pixels or 40 characters × 8 lines. The sound is handled by a small Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency speaker capable of outputting tones between 622 and 2,489Hz, the same range as touch-tone telephones, so users could not only use
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#17330854861178060-450: The PC community is stifling innovation because so many other companies are mimicking Big Blue", but The Economist stated in November 1983, "The main reason why an IBM standard is not worrying is that it can help competition to flourish". By 1983, IBM had about 25% of sales of personal computers between $ 1,000 and $ 10,000 , and computers with some PC compatibility were another 25%. As
8190-463: The PC, is even more vulnerable. Numerous PC-compatible machines—the grapevine says 60 or more—have begun to appear in the marketplace. By June 1983 PC Magazine defined "PC 'clone ' " as "a computer [that can] accommodate the user who takes a disk home from an IBM PC, walks across the room, and plugs it into the 'foreign' machine". Because of a shortage of IBM PCs that year, many customers purchased clones instead. Columbia Data Products produced
8320-544: The Spring 1983 COMDEX , Corona representatives "hemmed and hawed a bit, but they finally led me ... off in the corner where no one would see it should it fail". The magazine reported that "Their hesitancy was unnecessary. The disk booted up without a problem". Zenith Data Systems was bolder, bragging that its Z-150 ran all applications people brought to test with at the 1984 West Coast Computer Faire . Creative Computing in 1985 stated, "we reiterate our standard line regarding
8450-488: The address book app to store phone numbers, but actually speed-dial them too by holding the device up to a telephone handset. Power is supplied by three AA size removable alkaline batteries . The computer's memory is preserved during battery changes. There is also an optional AC adapter (120 V: HPC-401, 230 V: HPC-402). There is an expansion port on the right side of the computer for parallel (HPC-101), serial (HPC-102), modem or MIDI expansion modules. It uses
8580-446: The advent of time-sharing systems, terminals slowly pushed these older forms of interaction from the industry. Related developments were the improvement of terminal technology and the introduction of inexpensive video displays . Early Teletypes only printed out with a communications speed of only 75 baud or 10 5-bit characters per second, and by the 1970s speeds of video terminals had improved to 2400 or 9600 2400 bit/s . Similarly,
8710-419: The aid of velcro strips. A direct connection to a telephone with a standard telephone lead is also possible. The complete terminal and coupler are portable, weighing only a few hundred grams. Also, using the parallel port expansion module (HPC-101), a standard parallel cable and the software supplied (DOS-based), the Portfolio can be connected to a PC for transferring files to and from the unit. Credits for
8840-642: The application must deal not only with plain text strings, but also with control characters and escape sequences, which allow moving the cursor to an arbitrary position, clearing portions of the screen, changing colors and displaying special characters, and also responding to function keys. The great problem here is that there are many different terminals and terminal emulators, each with its own set of escape sequences. In order to overcome this, special libraries (such as curses ) have been created, together with terminal description databases, such as Termcap and Terminfo. A block-oriented terminal or block mode terminal
8970-467: The clone makers to stop using the BIOS. The Phoenix BIOS in 1984, however, and similar products such as AMI BIOS , permitted computer makers to legally build essentially 100%-compatible clones without having to reverse-engineer the PC BIOS themselves. A September 1985 InfoWorld chart listed seven compatibles with 256 KB RAM, two disk drives, and monochrome monitors for $ 1,495 to $ 2,320 , while
9100-556: The computer manufacturer for terminals to expand the systems. In fact, the instruction design for the Intel 8008 was originally conceived at Computer Terminal Corporation as the processor for the Datapoint 2200 . From the introduction of the IBM 3270 , and the DEC VT100 (1978), the user and programmer could notice significant advantages in VDU technology improvements, yet not all programmers used
9230-423: The computer marketplace of the time. Until then Microsoft's business was based primarily on computer languages such as BASIC . The established small system operating software was CP/M from Digital Research which was in use both at the hobbyist level and by the more professional of those using microcomputers. To achieve such widespread use, and thus make the product viable economically, the OS had to operate across
9360-457: The computer's hardware directly and to instead make standard calls to BIOS functions that carried out hardware-dependent operations. This software would run on any machine using MS-DOS or PC DOS. Software that directly addressed the hardware instead of making standard calls was faster, however; this was particularly relevant to games. Software addressing IBM PC hardware in this way would not run on MS-DOS machines with different hardware (for example,
9490-588: The development of the VDU were the Univac Uniscope and the IBM 2260 , both in 1964. These were block-mode terminals designed to display a page at a time, using proprietary protocols; in contrast to character-mode devices, they enter data from the keyboard into a display buffer rather than transmitting them immediately. In contrast to later character-mode devices, the Uniscope used synchronous serial communication over an EIA RS-232 interface to communicate between
9620-429: The development of the product can be found in an easter egg if one selects Setup, then Help, and then presses Alt + [ ("Alt" plus "left square bracket"). The Atari Portfolio was used by the character John Connor to crack PINs in two scenes in the 1991 film Terminator 2: Judgment Day . IBM PC-compatible " IBM PC–compatible " refers to a class of computers that are technically compatible with
9750-473: The device) could be updated on a single character basis, if necessary, because of the existence of a "set buffer address order" (SBA), that usually preceded any data to be written/overwritten within the buffer. A complete buffer could also be read or replaced using the READ BUFFER command or WRITE command (unformatted or formatted in the case of the 3270). Block-oriented terminals cause less system load on
9880-423: The display, as well as the ability to switch emulation modes to mimic competitor's models, that became increasingly important selling features during the 1980s especially, when buyers could mix and match different suppliers' equipment to a greater extent than before. The advance in microprocessors and lower memory costs made it possible for the terminal to handle editing operations such as inserting characters within
10010-549: The dominant market player only to be virtually wiped out by Intel a year later. Intel has been the uncontested leader ever since. As the "Wintel" platform gained dominance Intel gradually abandoned the practice of licensing its technologies to other chipset makers; in 2010 Intel was involved in litigation related to their refusal to license their processor bus and related technologies to other companies like Nvidia . Companies such as AMD and Cyrix developed alternative x86 CPUs that were functionally compatible with Intel's. Towards
10140-554: The early ADM-3 as a starting point). The great variations in the control codes between makers gave rise to software that identified and grouped terminal types so the system software would correctly display input forms using the appropriate control codes; In Unix-like systems the termcap or terminfo files, the stty utility, and the TERM environment variable would be used; in Data General's Business BASIC software, for example, at login-time
10270-570: The end of the 1990s, AMD was taking an increasing share of the CPU market for PCs. AMD even ended up playing a significant role in directing the development of the x86 platform when its Athlon line of processors continued to develop the classic x86 architecture as Intel deviated with its NetBurst architecture for the Pentium 4 CPUs and the IA-64 architecture for the Itanium set of server CPUs. AMD developed AMD64,
10400-465: The equivalent IBM PC cost $ 2,820 . The inexpensive Leading Edge Model D is even compatible with IBM proprietary diagnostic software, unlike the Compaq Portable. By 1986 Compute! stated that "clones are generally reliable and about 99 percent compatible", and a 1987 survey in the magazine of the clone industry did not mention software compatibility, stating that "PC by now has come to stand for
10530-620: The exception rather than the rule. Instead of placing importance on compatibility with the IBM PC, vendors began to emphasize compatibility with Windows . In 1993, a version of Windows NT was released that could operate on processors other than the x86 set. While it required that applications be recompiled, which most developers did not do, its hardware independence was used for Silicon Graphics (SGI) x86 workstations–thanks to NT's Hardware abstraction layer (HAL), they could operate NT (and its vast application library) . No mass-market personal computer hardware vendor dared to be incompatible with
10660-615: The fact that early character-mode terminals were often deployed to replace teletype machines as a way to reduce operating costs. The next generation of VDUs went beyond teletype emulation with an addressable cursor that gave them the ability to paint two-dimensional displays on the screen. Very early VDUs with cursor addressibility included the VT05 and the Hazeltine 2000 operating in character mode, both from 1970. Despite this capability, early devices of this type were often called "Glass TTYs". Later,
10790-456: The features of the new terminals ( backward compatibility in the VT100 and later TeleVideo terminals, for example, with "dumb terminals" allowed programmers to continue to use older software). Some dumb terminals had been able to respond to a few escape sequences without needing microprocessors: they used multiple printed circuit boards with many integrated circuits ; the single factor that classed
10920-511: The first IBM PC went on sale. There were three operating systems (OS) available for it. The least expensive and most popular was PC DOS made by Microsoft . In a crucial concession, IBM's agreement allowed Microsoft to sell its own version, MS-DOS , for non-IBM computers. The only component of the original PC architecture exclusive to IBM was the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). IBM at first asked developers to avoid writing software that addressed
11050-557: The first computer more or less compatible with the IBM PC standard during June 1982, soon followed by Eagle Computer . Compaq announced its first product, an IBM PC compatible in November 1982, the Compaq Portable . The Compaq was the first sewing machine-sized portable computer that was essentially 100% PC-compatible. The court decision in Apple v. Franklin , was that BIOS code was protected by copyright law, but it could reverse-engineer
11180-424: The first major extension not created by Intel, which Intel later adopted as x86-64 . During 2006 Intel began abandoning NetBurst with the release of their set of "Core" processors that represented a development of the earlier Pentium III. A major alternative to Wintel domination is the rise of alternative operating systems since the early 2000s, which marked as the start of the post-PC era . This would include both
11310-462: The hardware, for a variety of reasons: The first thing to think about when considering an IBM-compatible computer is, "How compatible is it?" In May 1983, Future Computing defined four levels of compatibility: During development, Compaq engineers found that Microsoft Flight Simulator would not run because of what subLOGIC 's Bruce Artwick described as "a bug in one of Intel's chips", forcing them to make their new computer bug compatible with
11440-548: The host and less network traffic than character-oriented terminals. They also appear more responsive to the user, especially over slow connections, since editing within a field is done locally rather than depending on echoing from the host system. Early terminals had limited editing capabilities – 3270 terminals, for example, only could check entries as valid numerics. Subsequent "smart" or "intelligent" terminals incorporated microprocessors and supported more local processing. Programmers of block-oriented terminals often used
11570-505: The host computer for its processing power is called a " dumb terminal " or a thin client . In the era of serial ( RS-232 ) terminals there was a conflicting usage of the term "smart terminal" as a dumb terminal with no user-accessible local computing power but a particularly rich set of control codes for manipulating the display; this conflict was not resolved before hardware serial terminals became obsolete. A personal computer can run terminal emulator software that replicates functions of
11700-429: The human eye as a whole for a very short time, the raster must be refreshed many times per second to give the appearance of a persistent display. The electronic demands of refreshing display memory meant that graphic terminals were developed much later than text terminals, and initially cost much more. Most terminals today are graphical; that is, they can show images on the screen. The modern term for graphical terminal
11830-496: The interfaces were made, but in practice, many of these attempts were either flawed or ignored. Even so, there were many expansion options, and despite the confusion of its users, the PC compatible design advanced much faster than other competing designs of the time, even if only because of its market dominance. During the 1990s, IBM's influence on PC architecture started to decline. "IBM PC compatible" becomes "Standard PC" in 1990s, and later " ACPI PC" in 2000s. An IBM-brand PC became
11960-806: The last revision (the DECwriter IV of 1982) abandoning the classic teletypewriter form for one more resembling a desktop printer. A video display unit (VDU) displays information on a screen rather than printing text to paper and typically uses a cathode-ray tube (CRT). VDUs in the 1950s were typically designed for displaying graphical data rather than text and were used in, e.g., experimental computers at institutions like MIT ; computers used in academia, government and business, sold under brand names like DEC , ERA , IBM and UNIVAC ; military computers supporting specific defence applications such as ballistic missile warning systems and radar/air defence coordination systems like BUIC and SAGE . Two early landmarks in
12090-467: The late 1990s, the success of Microsoft Windows had driven rival commercial operating systems into near-extinction, and had ensured that the "IBM PC compatible" computer was the dominant computing platform . This meant that if a developer made their software only for the Wintel platform, they would still be able to reach the vast majority of computer users. The only major competitor to Windows with more than
12220-431: The later ADM and TVI models) did have a primitive block-send capability. Common early uses of local processing power included features that had little to do with off-loading data processing from the host computer but added useful features such as printing to a local printer, buffered serial data transmission and serial handshaking (to accommodate higher serial transfer speeds), and more sophisticated character attributes for
12350-428: The latest version of Windows, and Microsoft's annual WinHEC conferences provided a setting in which Microsoft could lobby for—and in some cases dictate—the pace and direction of the hardware of the PC industry. Microsoft and Intel had become so important to the ongoing development of PC hardware that industry writers began using the word Wintel to refer to the combined hardware-software system. This terminology itself
12480-487: The latter becoming the most popular. Because of the great number of third-party adapters and no standard for them, programming the PC could be difficult. Professional developers would operate a large test-suite of various known-to-be-popular hardware combinations. Meanwhile, consumers were overwhelmed by the competing, incompatible standards and many different combinations of hardware on offer. To give them some idea of what sort of PC they would need to operate their software,
12610-521: The market and competition grew IBM's influence diminished. In November 1985 PC Magazine stated "Now that it has created the [PC] market, the market doesn't necessarily need IBM for the machines. It may depend on IBM to set standards and to develop higher-performance machines, but IBM had better conform to existing standards so as to not hurt users". In January 1987, Bruce Webster wrote in Byte of rumors that IBM would introduce proprietary personal computers with
12740-555: The mid-1970s with microcomputers such as the Sphere 1 , Sol-20 , and Apple I , display circuitry and keyboards began to be integrated into personal and workstation computer systems, with the computer handling character generation and outputting to a CRT display such as a computer monitor or, sometimes, a consumer TV, but most larger computers continued to require terminals. Early terminals were inexpensive devices but very slow compared to punched cards or paper tape for input; with
12870-404: The multiplexer and the host, while the 2260 used either a channel connection or asynchronous serial communication between the 2848 and the host. The 2265, related to the 2260, also used asynchronous serial communication. The Datapoint 3300 from Computer Terminal Corporation , announced in 1967 and shipped in 1969, was a character-mode device that emulated a Model 33 Teletype . This reflects
13000-514: The new computer did not need to fear that future IBM products would be incompatible with the Compaq, because such changes would also affect millions of real IBM PCs: "In sticking it to the competition, IBM would be doing the same to its own people". After IBM announced the OS/2 -oriented PS/2 line in early 1987, sales of existing DOS-compatible PC compatibles rose, in part because the proprietary operating system
13130-582: The next six months". Like IBM, Microsoft's apparent intention was that application writers would write to the application programming interfaces in MS-DOS or the firmware BIOS, and that this would form what would now be termed a hardware abstraction layer . Each computer would have its own Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) version of MS-DOS, customized to its hardware. Any software written for MS-DOS would operate on any MS-DOS computer, despite variations in hardware design. This expectation seemed reasonable in
13260-525: The old BIOS-based firmware interface, or have their CSMs disabled, cannot natively run MS-DOS since MS-DOS depends on a BIOS interface to boot. Only the Macintosh had kept significant market share without having compatibility with the IBM PC, although that changed during the Intel Macs era running Mac OS X , often dual-booting Windows with Boot Camp . IBM decided in 1980 to market a low-cost single-user computer as quickly as possible. On August 12, 1981,
13390-407: The operator attempted to enter more data into the field than allowed. A graphical terminal can display images as well as text. Graphical terminals are divided into vector-mode terminals, and raster mode . A vector-mode display directly draws lines on the face of a cathode-ray tube under control of the host computer system. The lines are continuously formed, but since the speed of electronics
13520-435: The original IBM PC by introducing yet another processor mode with an instruction set modified for 64-bit addressing, but x86-64 capable processors also retain standard x86 compatibility. Computer terminal A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. Most early computers only had
13650-419: The original PC architecture may be limited or non-existent. Many modern computers are unable to use old software or hardware that depends on portions of the IBM PC compatible architecture which are missing or do not have equivalents in modern computers. For example, computers which boot using Unified Extensible Firmware Interface -based firmware that lack a Compatibility Support Module, or CSM, required to emulate
13780-514: The original XT circuits: one 8237 DMA controller, one 8253 interrupt timer, one 8255 parallel interface controller, one 8259 interrupt controller, one 8284 clock generator, and one 8288 bus controller. Similar non-Intel chipsets appeared for the AT-compatibles, for example OPTi's 82C206 or 82C495XLC which were found in many 486 and early Pentium systems. The x86 chipset market was very volatile though. In 1993, VLSI Technology had become
13910-723: The other two David Frodsham and Peter Baldwin. Cullimore was involved in designing the early Organiser products at Psion before the DIP Pocket PC project. The technologic successor of the Portfolio was the also DIP-developed Sharp PC-3000 / 3100 . DIP Research was later acquired by Phoenix Technologies in 1994. The Portfolio uses an Intel 80C88 CPU running at 4.9152 MHz and runs "DIP Operating System 2.11" (DIP DOS), an operating system mostly compatible to MS-DOS 2.11 , but with some DOS 2.xx functionality lacking and some internal data structures more compatible with DOS 3.xx. It has 128 KB of RAM and 256 KB of ROM which contains
14040-509: The rapid growth of the smartphones (using Android or iOS) as an alternative to the personal computer; and the increasing prevalence of Linux and Unix-like operating systems in the server farms of large corporations such as Google or Amazon. The term "IBM PC compatible" is not commonly used presently because many current mainstream desktop and laptop computers are based on the PC architecture, and IBM no longer makes PCs. The competing hardware architectures have either been discontinued or, like
14170-656: The release of the AT. IBM's introduction of the proprietary Micro Channel architecture (MCA) in its PS/2 series resulted in the establishment of the Extended Industry Standard Architecture bus open standard by a consortium of IBM PC compatible vendors, redefining the 16-bit IBM AT bus as the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) bus. Additional bus standards were subsequently adopted to improve compatibility between IBM PC compatibles, including
14300-529: The reputations of others like TI and DEC despite superior technology. At a San Francisco meeting it warned 200 attendees, from many American and foreign computer companies as well as IBM itself, to "Jump on the IBM PC-compatible bandwagon—quickly, and as compatibly as possible". Future Computing said in February 1984 that some computers were "press-release compatible", exaggerating their actual compatibility with
14430-539: The same effect, but this did not easily extend to the greater color depths and higher resolutions offered by SVGA adapters. An attempt at creating a standard named VESA BIOS Extensions (VBE) was made, but not all manufacturers used it. When the 386 was introduced, again a protected mode OS could be written for it. This time, DOS compatibility was much easier because of virtual 8086 mode . Unfortunately programs could not switch directly between them, so eventually, some new memory-model APIs were developed, VCPI and DPMI ,
14560-468: The same limited functionality as does a mechanical Teletype. This type of dumb terminal is still supported on modern Unix-like systems by setting the environment variable TERM to dumb . Smart or intelligent terminals are those that also have the ability to process escape sequences, in particular the VT52, VT100 or ANSI escape sequences. A text terminal , or often just terminal (sometimes text console )
14690-488: The same software that a contemporary IBM or Lenovo PC could. The term was initially in contrast to the variety of home computer systems available in the early 1980s, such as the Apple II , TRS-80 , and Commodore 64 . Later, the term was primarily used in contrast to Commodore 's Amiga and Apple 's Macintosh computers. These "clones" duplicated almost all the significant features of the original IBM PC architectures. This
14820-481: The same system architecture as their Wintel counterparts and could boot Microsoft Windows without a DOS Compatibility Card . However, with the transition to the internally developed ARM -based Apple silicon , they are again the exception to IBM compatibility. The processor speed and memory capacity of modern PCs are many orders of magnitude greater than they were for the original IBM PC and yet backwards compatibility has been largely maintained –
14950-413: The screen usually causes the terminal to scroll down one line, entering data into the last screen position on a block-oriented terminal usually causes the cursor to wrap — move to the start of the first enterable field. Programmers might "protect" the last screen position to prevent inadvertent wrap. Likewise a protected field following an enterable field might lock the keyboard and sound an audible alarm if
15080-431: The simple terminal applications that MS-DOS supported directly. Spreadsheets , WYSIWYG word processors , presentation software and remote communication software established new markets that exploited the PC's strengths, but required capabilities beyond what MS-DOS provided. Thus, from very early in the development of the MS-DOS software environment, many significant commercial software products were written directly to
15210-415: The simplest form, a text terminal is like a file. Writing to the file displays the text and reading from the file produces what the user enters. In Unix-like operating systems, there are several character special files that correspond to available text terminals. For other operations, there are special escape sequences , control characters and termios functions that a program can use, most easily via
15340-441: The speed of remote batch terminals had improved to 4800 bit/s at the beginning of the decade and 19.6 kbps by the end of the decade, with higher speeds possible on more expensive terminals. The function of a terminal is typically confined to transcription and input of data; a device with significant local, programmable data-processing capability may be called a "smart terminal" or fat client . A terminal that depends on
15470-562: The strengths of the PC-compatible design is its modular hardware design. End-users could readily upgrade peripherals and, to some degree, processor and memory without modifying the computer's motherboard or replacing the whole computer, as was the case with many of the microcomputers of the time. However, as processor speed and memory width increased, the limits of the original XT/AT bus design were soon reached, particularly when driving graphics video cards. IBM did introduce an upgraded bus in
15600-489: The structure of the document, but later word processors operate in a graphical environment and provide a WYSIWYG simulation of the formatted output. However, text editors are still used for documents containing markup such as DocBook or LaTeX . Programs such as Telix and Minicom control a modem and the local terminal to let the user interact with remote servers. On the Internet , telnet and ssh work similarly. In
15730-504: The technique of storing context information for the transaction in progress on the screen, possibly in a hidden field, rather than depending on a running program to keep track of status. This was the precursor of the HTML technique of storing context in the URL as data to be passed as arguments to a CGI program. Unlike a character-oriented terminal, where typing a character into the last position of
15860-470: The term "glass TTY" tended to be restrospectively narrowed to devices without full cursor addressibility. The classic era of the VDU began in the early 1970s and was closely intertwined with the rise of time sharing computers . Important early products were the ADM-3A , VT52 , and VT100 . These devices used no complicated CPU , instead relying on individual logic gates , LSI chips, or microprocessors such as
15990-426: The vast majority of microcomputers produced since the 1990s are IBM compatible. IBM itself no longer sells personal computers, having sold its division to Lenovo in 2005. " Wintel " is a similar description that is more commonly used for modern computers. The designation "PC", as used in much of personal computer history , has not meant "personal computer" generally, but rather an x86 computer capable of running
16120-417: The year 2000, the hardware computer terminal was nearly obsolete. A character-oriented terminal is a type of computer terminal that communicates with its host one character at a time, as opposed to a block-oriented terminal that communicates in blocks of data. It is the most common type of data terminal, because it is easy to implement and program. Connection to the mainframe computer or terminal server
16250-588: Was a Friden Flexowriter , which would continue to serve this purpose on many other early computers well into the 1960s. Early user terminals connected to computers were, like the Flexowriter, electromechanical teleprinters /teletypewriters (TeleTYpewriter, TTY), such as the Teletype Model ;33 , originally used for telegraphy ; early Teletypes were typically configured as Keyboard Send-Receive (KSR) or Automatic Send-Receive (ASR). Some terminals, such as
16380-495: Was claimed to reduce eye strain). Terminals with modest color capability were also available but not widely used; for example, a color version of the popular Wyse WY50, the WY350, offered 64 shades on each character cell. VDUs were eventually displaced from most applications by networked personal computers, at first slowly after 1985 and with increasing speed in the 1990s. However, they had a lasting influence on PCs. The keyboard layout of
16510-432: Was facilitated by IBM's choice of commodity hardware components , which were cheap, and by various manufacturers' ability to reverse-engineer the BIOS firmware using a " clean room design " technique. Columbia Data Products built the first clone of the IBM personal computer , the MPC 1600 by a clean-room reverse-engineered implementation of its BIOS. Other rival companies, Corona Data Systems , Eagle Computer , and
16640-438: Was for several years sold only as an OEM product. There was no Microsoft-branded MS-DOS: MS-DOS could not be purchased directly from Microsoft, and each OEM release was packaged with the trade dress of the given PC vendor. Malfunctions were to be reported to the OEM, not to Microsoft. However, as machines that were compatible with IBM hardware—thus supporting direct calls to the hardware—became widespread, it soon became clear that
16770-474: Was no standard interface for using higher-resolution SVGA graphics modes supported by later video cards. Each manufacturer developed their own methods of accessing the screen memory, including different mode numberings and different bank switching arrangements. The latter were used to address large images within a single 64 KB segment of memory. Previously, the VGA standard had used planar video memory arrangements to
16900-465: Was not available. In 1988, Gartner Group estimated that the public purchased 1.5 clones for every IBM PC. By 1989 Compaq was so influential that industry executives spoke of "Compaq compatible", with observers stating that customers saw the company as IBM's equal or superior. After 1987, IBM PC compatibles dominated both the home and business markets of commodity computers, with other notable alternative architectures being used in niche markets, like
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