Within months, the PC was an unstoppable force, and so was PC Magazine. Its springy, clicky keyboard, taken from the 95-pound System/23 Datamaster all-in-one word and data processing station, remains to this day an industry legend.īig Blue's decision to publish specs for the system bus, memory map, and expansion slots created a thriving ecosystem of third-party products. A second socket accommodated an 8087 coprocessor for better floating-point performance.
But it looked forward with five expansion slots for graphics, floppy drive controller, parallel and serial port, sound, modem, networking, and other cards.
The 5150's design made several compromises-its Intel 8088 CPU had 16-bit registers but an 8-bit external data bus allowing cheaper support and peripheral chips. A loaded system with 64K of memory, one floppy drive, and a monochrome monitor cost about $3,000.
But PCs weren't commodities in 1981-buyers of the Model 5150 paid $1,565 for a unit with 16K of RAM, no monitor (you connected a TV set), and no disk drives (it used TRS-80-style cassette tape storage). IBM doesn't make low-profit-margin commodity products, which is why it sold its PC business to Lenovo in 2005 after losing nearly a billion dollars on it in the four years preceding. What was the most influential PC in your history? Let us know in the comment section below. Read on to celebrate our shared history and see what else makes the list. Nonetheless, we owe our existence to that first IBM PC, so it's only natural for us to start there. PC Magazine didn't cover 8-bit platforms, which is why you also won't find the Commodore 64 in this list. We also know the IBM PC was no more the first personal computer than ours was the first computer magazine-the MITS Altair 8800 kit reached hobbyists in 1975, with the Apple II narrowly beating the Radio Shack TRS-80 to market in 1977. Yes, we know: The first entry in this list is a cheat, as the IBM PC (released in August 1981) predates our first issue (February/March 1982). So to commemorate our 40th anniversary, we couldn't resist looking back at the PCs that had the greatest impact-and to be honest, narrowing the list down to a mere 20 was no small feat. Bad or incompatible memory are most likely here.In 1982, PC Magazine was born at a crucial time in the history of computing: right as microprocessors were expanding from 8-bit to 16-bit architecture, and as computers were changing from consumer novelties to business essentials. If the Kingston memory is rated for 1600MHz, then either this memory is not working properly, is incompatible, or the Logic Board is bad. The 1333MHz RAM is for the older 2011 models. The memory speed for the 2012 model is 1600MHz (or a PC3-12800 rating). In the non-Apple PC world some motherboards tend to favor some brands of RAM over others - and these are well known & respected major brands of memory on well known & respected motherboards. Other brands can work fine, but getting the exact memory modules which are compatible is the tricky part. Buying Crucial memory from third party resellers is tricky since you must make sure the part numbers the tools on Crucial's website suggest are what the reseller is selling to Jones is absolutely correct regarding Kingston RAM. When buying memory from Crucial, the packaging should say "Mac Compatible".
I purchased the exact memory Crucial listed on their website for our Macs, and I've never had any compatibility issue with any Mac I've upgraded for our organization. The memory had compatibility problems, but the memory worked perfectly fine in another brand of Intel based computer (non-Apple). Years ago I bought memory from Crucial based solely on the bus speed and what I knew of the other critical timings. If you order anything but those specific part numbers, then you are likely to have issues. As the others have mentioned, using memory from Crucial or OWC is best for compatibility since both vendors provide tools on their websites to easily identify the exact part numbers which are compatible with your system.
Unfortunately Apple does not post those other timings so you cannot just buy any memory which meets Apple's published specs.
There are a lot of other critical memory timings that need to be just right for each system. There is more to compatible memory than just the main speed.