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Reorganization of 'Genres' Category

I think this is a good step in the right direction, but would suggest a few other changes.

1.) Add a note to the "IBM PC, Clones and Descendants" category description directing non-PC IBM users to the Companies category. I didn't immediately see the new forum at first.

2.) While we are creating better defined categories, I think it would be good to have a general "PC/MS-DOS and clone OSs" forum like we have the "CPM and MP/M" forum. Often people are making a general post about DOS in one of the IBM PC subcategories and this might "hide" the post from some users who would normally be interested in it but aren't interested in the particular subcategory the post was made in.

3.) Could a Kaypro forum be added to the Companies category similar to the new non-PC IBM category? Often, posts to CP/M and MP/M are for specific machines instead of just CP/M in general. Kaypro specific threads are made there and it would be nice if they weren't spread out among all the other machines.
 
acgs said:
While we are creating better defined categories, I think it would be good to have a general "PC/MS-DOS and clone OSs" forum like we have the "CPM and MP/M" forum. Often people are making a general post about DOS in one of the IBM PC subcategories and this might "hide" the post from some users who would normally be interested in it but aren't interested in the particular subcategory the post was made in.
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You could probably argue this problem is even bigger than that, because in addition to this problem of "which PC subforum do I put this in?" question there's also completely separate "Vintage Computer Software" and Vintage Computer Programming" sections under the "Technical Support" section which could be perfectly valid places to put a topic but lack any genre tagging. Combined with:

acgs said:
3.) Could a Kaypro forum be added to the Companies category similar to the new non-PC IBM category? Often, posts to CP/M and MP/M are for specific machines instead of just CP/M in general. Kaypro specific threads are made there and it would be nice if they weren't spread out among all the other machines.
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This basically makes the argument that it might make sense to have "genre" reorganized so each "type", however defined, had "hardware" and "software" categories? I'm not quite sure exactly how this would look, though. Would it make sense, for instance, to have companies mostly known for CP/M systems listed *inside* the CP/M bubble? Would "S-100" belong there as a "company", since *most* S-100 computers run some flavor of CP/M?

Anyway. I guess looking at the current layout I'm a little put off by how IBM and Apple get a pile of subcategories while other vendor that had very diverse lines of computers (Commodore, Tandy, etc) seem minimized, but I would also grant that the level of traffic most of the things in the "Companies" pile don't really get enough traffic to justify being extensively subdivided. (But on the flip side... I guess there have already been extensive non-conclusive arguments about how much sense the subdivisions under the PC section really make.)
 
Just my 2 cents, but one thing about the organization of things I've always found confusing is the specific company forums (Tandy/Radio Shack, etc...) vs. Handhelds/Portables. If one has a Tandy laptop, where is the better place to post, the company forum, or the general portables forum? It seems that many topics that are specific to a particular model of a company that has their own forum end up in Handhelds/Portables, and many discussions that would probably be better off in Handhelds/Portables end up in a given company forum when that forum is mostly about desktop systems (the Tandy/Radio Shack forum being a good example of this). I think it leads to a fragmentation of topics that really belong in one location.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Anyway. I guess looking at the current layout I'm a little put off by how IBM and Apple get a pile of subcategories while other vendor that had very diverse lines of computers (Commodore, Tandy, etc) seem minimized....
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Count your blessings. :-) There are several major manufacturers that released dozens of different models over a decade or more and sold in the hundreds of thousands to millions of units overall that are simply not present at all here. (NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp are the first three that come to mind.)
 
cjs said:
Count your blessings. :-) There are several major manufacturers that released dozens of different models over a decade or more and sold in the hundreds of thousands to millions of units overall that are simply not present at all here. (NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp are the first three that come to mind.)
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I thought the idea was to have topics of roughly equal posting rate. If a company doesn't get much attention here, then combining it with many other companies that don't inspire interest makes sense. The genres list already has numerous virtual ghost towns.
 
Sorry for this mess. It seems I opened Pandora's Box, but had my reasons and was to benefit very rare but important computers:
1- They are not "other" systems as IBM exist as category
2- They are not "minis/mainframes" as they are small systems
3- They are not PCs as their architecture differ from it (only the DisplayWriter has the 8086 processor, but that doesn't make it a PC)

These few systems in the group while not abundant or with that amount of traffic are historically rellevant as the logic steps to the creation of the IBM PC, of which the world is crowded. You know the owners and information are scarce but if at the same time there is not a place for them the few threads that belong to them are dispersed to those three. This leads to a huge dispersion problem for a few systems which may be related.

In my humble opinion I think it has also the benefit of attracting potential users of this system because as far as I know there is no such dedicated place in any forums.

I didn't expect a full reorganization, only a place under IBM just as the same Apple I has with its relatives under Apple.
 
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Beeing a laptop collector ; laptops shouldn’t be sent in a category of their own ; imho ; as this is redundant with their cpu platform
 
I think the existing portables category has more 80s-era luggable systems in mind, which range across architectures. Most people seem to post about those there, and newer laptops in the IBM PC and Apple categories.
 
I've been dismayed once or twice that SS-50 systems don't really fit any of the existing genres. Threads for them usually end up in the S-100 forum I think? Maybe that could be made official in some way?
 
btb said:
I've been dismayed once or twice that SS-50 systems don't really fit any of the existing genres. Threads for them usually end up in the S-100 forum I think? Maybe that could be made official in some way?
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We have "S-100" and "Pre-Altair Microcomputers", maybe we need a more inclusive "Early kit and homebrew" category. There's a pretty wide variety of stuff from the latter half of the 70's that doesn't necessarily fit elsewhere. The problem with "Other" is it lacks any kind of age bracketing.

cjs said:
That is my guess, too, and I think it's a reasonable aim. I'm not asking for new topics for any of those manufacturers to be created.
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Broadly speaking I wonder if maybe a halfway step would be to have some kind of "other 8 bits" category to cover the really obscure stuff?

I don't know if it's a possibility to easily implement on this forum, and there are downsides to it, but I kind of wish it were possible to have a hashtag field that would allow posts in a category like "Tandy/Radio Shack" that has at least five different separate computer lines in it (I/III/4, CoCo, 2/12/16/6000, MS-DOS, various proprietary portables) to be more easily searched/filtered without, yeah, having to end up with literally hundreds of subforums that each get one thread a year.

(Ideally the hashtag field could offer buttons for popular tags in that subforum, to encourage threads to get tagged reasonably consistently.)

ClassicHasClass said:
Does the new IBM non-PC category also include things like POWER systems?
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Unless those go in Unix/Xenix/Linux Workstations. (I mean, I guess what makes more sense, mixing them with Sun Workstations and HP Precisions, or lumping them in with 5100s and System/23 Datamasters? Not sure there's a good answer to that) ;)
 
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lowen said:
IMHO if the most popular 8 bit computer of all time, the Commodore 64, gets moved into Companies then IBM PC and Apple should, too.
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Why do you look at the popularity of 8-bit computers but not 16-bit computers?

And in the end, it's not about popularity at the time, or sales, or anything like that. It's about how many messages get posted about these things. If you have to search through five or ten times as many messages in an Apple sub-form than a C64 sub-forum, to the point where it becomes difficult for the former when it isn't for the latter, the Apple sub-forum needs to be split up into several sub-forums.

That's what happened with the Apple and IBM PC sub-forums. And those get to be on the top level with "Companies" because that avoids having yet another level in the tree.
 
We organize based on how much the forums are used, here, not based on sales numbers.

If folks have suggestions, please feel free to post them.

- Alex
 
ClassicHasClass said:
Does the new IBM non-PC category also include things like POWER systems?
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My original thoughts went to the pre-PC computers that didn't fit elsewhere.

ajacocks said:
We organize based on how much the forums are used, here, not based on sales numbers.

If folks have suggestions, please feel free to post them.

- Alex
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What about the following?

> IBM small systems, clones and descendants
>> Pre-PC and other IBM Systems
>> IBM PC, PC XT and early AT
>> 386 and 486 systems
>> Early Pentium systems
>> Pentium-II and later systems

> Restore the members inside "Companies" where they were, as it might incorrectly denote preference.

>Operating Systems
>>CP/M and MP/M
>>MS-DOS
>>Other operating Systems

>Early microcomputers
>>Pre-Altair systems
>>S-100 systems
>>SS-50 systems

>Other
>>1970s timeframe
>>1980s timeframe
>>1990s timeframe
>>Unknown timeframe

I took the freedom to take in account some suggestions already in this thread.
 
ajacocks said:
We organize based on how much the forums are used, here, not based on sales numbers.

If folks have suggestions, please feel free to post them.
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So, first of all thanks for the explanation of the reasoning; that is appreciated. The folks who put in the work should make the decisions, and I thank you for being open to comments.

It is still a bit annoying to me, though, that the reorg was a fait accompli and the users are being asked to comment ex post facto. And there are some people in one of the vintage groups outside this forum that I frequent who are annoyed enough that they're either cutting way back here or not coming back here at all.

If it's about post numbers, fine. You'll may very well see post numbers go down in the now 'marginalized' Companies who will simply find other fora and avenues to share information.

cjs said:
Why do you look at the popularity of 8-bit computers but not 16-bit computers?
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Seriously?

I mention the biggest competitor to my own favorite genre (Z80 TRS-80's) and I'm 'not looking at' other systems? Go look where I've posted. Bittedness is irrelevant. I could just as easily say "the Commodore 64, the most popular single model of vintage computer ever," and that would very likely be true, even including the original IBM PC and each individual clone model, at least up until the 286/386 years, and maybe longer.

As to your example of popularity of forums to trigger splitting them up into subs, I agree, but that's not what happened here. Full forums were consolidated into sub forums of Companies, giving the distinct impression that those forums and their users are considered less important and so they now will need to navigate to a deeper level to get to their system, buried under Companies (yes, I'm intentionally engaging in a bit of hyperbole there, but then again, I'm replying to a message about why I exclude 16-bit systems from my reasoning.... :) )...
 
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I'm not sure exactly how this re-organization makes the "companies" subforums harder to access? They're all still right at the top and if anything it makes them easier to all break down visually at once than if they're in a big long list you have to scroll through. Apple and IBM having their own "main" heading categories makes sense anyway given that they all have their own sub-categories.
I feel like at most a complaint should be about this would be that you preferred it in a list rather than as sub-categories for purely visual/organizational means - I don't quite understand thinking this will cause activity in those categories to drop?
 
lowen said:
Seriously?
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Yes, seriously. Restricting your comparisons to 8-bit computers looked to me like a strategy to make the C64 stand out as "hugely popular" when it was far from that in the overall computer market.

In the twelve or so years from 1982 to 1994, Commodore sold around 12.2 - 17 million units. In a single year in 1990 IBM PCs and compatibles sold more than 15 million units. By the time the C64 was discontinued in 1994 (a year in which 35 million PCs were sold, BTW), its total sales were a tiny fraction of the total computer market over its lifespan.

So if we did go by sales and contemporary popularity, rather than the number of messages posted, the Commodore 64 would still be in the same place, under "Companies" rather than having its own top-level section.

(And please don't suggest that we split up sales by manufacturer, unless you're also suggesting that, e.g., IBM, Compaq, Dell, HP and so on should all have separate sections for their PCs and clones.)
 
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