Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ho_schi | Hacker News Reader

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PC != Windows

And was never. The Personal-Computer is an original product of International Business Machines (IBM) and not Microsoft. Contrary to most products shipped today it's architecture is open for industry standards and other companies. A huge success for IBM.

Microsoft shipped the pre-installed and required operating-system. You can order desktops and laptops without an operating-sytem or Linux from Lenovo (former IBM), Dell, System76, Purism, Tuxedo and many more. Vendors which aim for cheap distribution to private customers usually only ship Personal Computers with Windows. Most of these are crap and come with questionable pre-installed software - and I don't refer to Windows.

That IBM sold the PC subsidiary was the worst mistake the could ever have done, both Apple and Lenovo show how much money you can earn with long lasting high quality products. IBM lost the contact point to many customers. They need to succeed with Red Hat now. Irony, IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.

If you say "it runs on PC" you're actually saying your software is compatible to an Intel 286 CPU or higher. Well, if it is portable?

>PC != Windows

Technically, yes, that is correct, however, looking at the over 90% marketshare Windows has on the IBM/PC space, Windows is pretty much the synonym for the PC OS. Most laptops and PC's sold with an OS by retailers or OEMs, are shipped with Windows by default. It's basically a monopoly.

Sure, on tech boards like this one the proportion of people running some GNU/Linux based OS on their PC is much higher than the statistics, but the average joe consumer is 99% surely gonna have Windows on their PC which is where the assumption that "PC automatically equals Windows by default" comes from.

I likely use often also incorrect or misleading terms.

Yes. The mass market works (thinks) like that. Like you said, we're here on a tech board and therefore I refer to the actual definitions. Depends on situation when correct terms must be used or not.

don't let it stop you correcting people calling their desktop PC a hard drive. We're technically on a tech board so the correction is _correct_.

Nah, the box on your desktop is the CPU. Just like "Adobe isn't working" means there's an issue opening/editing PDFs.

Extremely pedantic.

When people say "PC" as in "PC or Mac?" they do mean computers running Microsoft windows

I agree, but it is also correct. Somehow similar to asking "github or subversion?". It also a bit confusing once you introduce Linux into the mix. I will stick to Windows or Mac instead (oranges to oranges comparison).

Pedantic? Yes. But the difference is significant between "remove" and "delete" and there is a difference between "while" and "if". Regarding APIs I'm hopefully pedantic.

And even before that, they meant MS-DOS. Microsoft's DOS!

> That IBM sold the PC subsidiary was the worst mistake the could ever have done

That was years and years after they had already committed "the worst mistake they could have done", which was not buying Microsoft early on when they had the chance. This should be immediately obvious, as you're here complaining about people confusing Windows with PCs. After that, their failure to secure exclusive rights to Intel's x86 chips, their inability to keep up with all the clones on the market, and the missteps of the PCjr and OS/2, the eventual sell off the PC hardware business was inevitable.

Wasn't IBM's philosophy to have always two vendors for each component, therefore a clone from AMD and later an own chip? Probably manufacturing everything exclusively would've counteracted the idea of exclusive rights. They had a plan but not probably not expected the success in this way. On the other than, luckily they didn't planned for "vendor lock-in with eco-system" :)

> not buying Microsoft early on when they had the chance.

That would likely have led to closing down the clones, not allowing others to use DOS, they would have became an also-ran.

lol in their heyday it was virtually impossible to find a computer you didn't build yourself that didn't include a Windows license. Regardless of whether you ran Windows on it Microsoft got their tax.

I can't remember if they actually did this or were just trying to but I recall they wanted Intel and AMD to charge a license fee for every processor they sold.

Lenovo is not high quality compared to mac except at the top of the range. Which is very expensive. Trying to compete in a commodity consumer market where nobody (other than Apple) made money for well over a decade would be a business disaster.

> IBM use and prefer (again) ThinkPads, preinstalled with Linux.

Citation required. They had ~300K apple devices several years ago.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-cio-mac-users-perform-bett...

> A huge success for IBM.

A huge success for users because it created the clone market. IBM was never a big player in the PC market after the clones came out.

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