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What have been less than optimal design choices, that are now (almost) immutable features of the modern PC system, and what constraints led to these choices?

There have been a great many of these. For example the qwerty keyboard is widespread although the Dvorak keyboard might be a better choice. I guess this is something to do with the teletypes that were used as early computer keyboards, which had originally been modified from typewriters.

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Should be CW (15 chars) – fretje Nov 4 '09 at 23:21
+1 good question, but please check the community wiki box. – quack quixote Nov 5 '09 at 4:06
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9 Answers

up vote 9 down vote accepted

The x86 instruction set.

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Do you have some details? – Rob Kam Nov 4 '09 at 23:39
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eHpl mI rtpaepde ni na xi68 ? – Martin Beckett Nov 5 '09 at 0:22
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Am I selfish for wanting 128 registers? Spilling onto the stack is for chumps. – Andrew Keeton Nov 5 '09 at 3:03
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+1 my first thought as well. – quack quixote Nov 5 '09 at 3:21
I used to agree, but register renaming and micro-op translation has mostly made the original x86 ISA just a compression scheme for the latest and greatest internally-maybe-kinda-RISC cpu. – DigitalRoss Nov 5 '09 at 4:25
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up vote 8 down vote

My vote would be for BIOS, it's served it's purpose, but EFI is the future

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Amen. Now if only a manufacturer were to break-away and build some sort of system specifically designed around its components... – Alistair Knock Nov 5 '09 at 0:48
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First thought in my mind. Also, would it be so hard for BIOSes to utilize graphics mode and * gasp * the mouse? – zildjohn01 Nov 5 '09 at 3:59
Its been done - old SGIs had that – Journeyman Geek Mar 19 '10 at 5:40
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up vote 4 down vote

USB.

(The Universal Serial aBomination.)

  • Terrific for input devices. Mouse? Keyboard? Game controller? Great!

  • Decent for ad-hoc, low-bandwidth network devices, printers, scanners. Might be OK for telephony headsets that don't need tons of bandwidth.

  • Works-but-less-than-optimal for storage devices, basic audio/video playback peripherals. Sure, it gets the job done. Just don't depend on it for any real performance. Especially on busy buses.

  • Absolutely horrible for any use or device that requires lots of data transfer as fast as possible with very low latency.

If your device has the misfortune to get stuck on the USB bus and needs low latency, do yourself a favor and unplug anything else on the USB bus.

Seriously. Multi-track audio recording/processing? High-def video input?

You can do it with USB, but if you want to do it right, use something else.

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I hate how every keyboard and mouse I see is USB now. I'm using up basically all my USB ports while I still have two lonely ports that I can't plug anything into but a keyboard and mouse (PS/2). – Travis Nov 5 '09 at 18:30
T Pops: There's an adapter you can buy for that. They used to come with every Microsoft peripheral. I've got about 20 of them... – DannySmurf Nov 5 '09 at 18:50
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T Pops: that's why USB hubs exist. which is great, again, for input devices. of course, usb mouse -> ps/2 adapter works great. but i've actually never seen a usb keyboard -> ps/2 adapter setup that works. – quack quixote Nov 5 '09 at 22:44
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up vote 1 down vote

Dvorak's superiority is a debunked myth.

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There's some interesting observations about using the Dvorak keyboard at superuser.com/questions/1255/… – Rob Kam Nov 4 '09 at 23:50
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Thank you for pointing out the article but this does not answer the question in any way. It would be much better as a comment. – Travis Nov 5 '09 at 18:32
The article doesn't take into consideration that the Dvorak keyboard is more comfortable to use than the standard qwerty one. – Rob Kam Nov 9 '09 at 17:12
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up vote 1 down vote

The mouse.
The "desktop metaphor"
The graphical user interface

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Well, that all seems a little silly. What about each of these are less than optimal, CLIfish? – Alistair Knock Nov 5 '09 at 0:46
Well I have to agree to some point that we haven't had a real revolution in the user interface, we had some nice improvements, but that's about it (as goes for all the other answers) – Ivo Flipse♦ Nov 5 '09 at 7:49
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+1 for the desktop metaphor. The real desktop is handy since it is always in sight. The PC desktop is horrible since every OS is specifically built to obscure the desktop with applications. In a way, the desktop is the only folder that is almost certainly never in sight. I could go on about this at some length... – Paperflyer Nov 5 '09 at 8:32
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up vote 0 down vote

Modern PC architecture can be traced to the original IBM PC and many of the less than desirable problem we inherited come from the original IBM decision to make an open architecture system using off-the-shelf parts. I would say things like the original BIOS, the choice of cabling instead of slots for things like the floppy drives, hard drives, power supplies... came out of the OTS mentality. Single user/single tasking/single processor are all decisions that also were set back then. Windows is still not a multi user/ OS while it allows preemptive multitasking, isn't designed for true concurrency. We may have multicore, but the system/OS still isn't designed to seperate functions between different CPU's.

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Windows (workstation only) isn't mulituser, but it's certainly multitasking: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… – Matthew Lock Nov 5 '09 at 0:45
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up vote 0 down vote

Here is some information on the topic you may find useful: PC architecture

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Von Neumann architecture

The biggest legacy is probably Von Neumann computer architecture because it introduced us to bottlenecks at the very beginning. And we still have them now. Most advances in computer architectures have been made to mitigate this problem. There must be some alternatives to this architecture that would solve at least some of the problems introduced...

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we use a hybrid arch nowadays (and have since forever -- CPU cache is a Harvard feature, not Von Neumann). i think if we went with Harvard all the way, we'd still be bragging about how many megabytes of RAM our new system has. – quack quixote Nov 5 '09 at 10:16
I'm not saying we're using Von Neumann ONLY. I'm just saying since we do use its architecture (as well) we still have the same bottlenecks we did. – Robert Koritnik Nov 5 '09 at 11:17
i hear ya. just pointing out the alternative is to put the bottleneck elsewhere -- like hardware cost. think how expensive it would be to wire up multiple gigs of RAM direct-to-CPU as in Harvard. – quack quixote Nov 5 '09 at 11:24
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up vote 0 down vote

The QWERTY keyboard

Designed to minimize typewriter malfunctions, and not to optimize writing speed, this layout is definitely a legacy of the nineteenth century!

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