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Happy Birthday PC Did you know that it’s twenty years ago this week that IBM launched the PC? David Dorn actually remembers it, sad old man that he is. Of course, what IBM launched and what you’re using today are two very different things. To start with, the PC had no disk drives of any kind – it did have a cassette interface, though. Neither did it have the megabytes of fancy Random Access Memory (RAM) that we have these days. If memory serves me correctly, it had 256k of RAM way back then – and that would cost you an arm and a leg. At launch, the IBM PC cost the sum of £3500 over here in the UK (and an awful lot less over there in the US) – can you imagine what you could buy these days for that amount of money? And that’s without doing the sums to say that, in today’s terms, that three and a half grand is closer to twenty grand. What you got then. Now, anyone who has just bought their first PC will probably have paid under a grand for it. They’ve probably got something close to 1000MHz of processing power. They’ve more than likely got at least 20GB of hard disk, and a graphics processor capable of rendering millions of texels per second, clocked at a rate of at least 260MHz and with 32MB of RAM on the card. That’s to say nothing of 17 and 19 inch monitors, screen resolutions of 1600x1200 and recordable CDs. Back then, you got a monochrome display at 14 inches (except it wasn’t – it was closer to 12 inches diagonally) that would, if you left it at the same point every day, burn out the phosphor coating to leave a permanent image of the program’s output on the screen. And that program would be text only, with maybe some ANSI graphics thrown in to make lines and corners. There was no such thing as a graphics adapter – that came a little later when Hercules got in on the act – and yes, they’re still around, only these days they’re producing kit based on graphics processors that have more oomph than a whole lorryload of original IBM PCs. Back in those days, a keyboard would have cost you well over £100, and mice… what were they other than little grey rodents that snaffled your mars bars? Twenty years on, the IBM PC has made millionaires (BILLionnaires) of lots of folk, most notably one William Gates III who, legend has it, grabbed the contract to produce an operating system for the new machine from right under Gary Kildall’s nose, as Gary was out playing in his light aircraft when IBM came a-calling. I bet Mr. Kildall wishes it had been raining that day now. Suffice it to say that Gates’ company, Microsoft, is now one of the best known companies in the world, although IBM will tell you that it still isn’t worth as much as Big Blue itself. What you get now. So, from no floppies, to no floppies! These days, the IT industry is railing against the floppy disk drive. They’re too small to be useful. Where you could once load up a 5.25” floppy (maximum capacity at launch 180k) that would have both MSDOS and your choice of word processor on it, you can hardly fit a word processed document onto a floppy now. I remember my first ever hard disk – it was a 5MB job (that’s megabytes, by the way), and was external. It had enough capacity to keep me going for ever, it seemed at the time. I was over the moon when I upgraded to a 20MB hard card (that’s right, a hard disk on an add-in card) that cost me nearly £500. I’ve got more permanent storage in an £80 digital camera now. You also get enormous boot times now. I just timed a restart on my 1000MHz Pentium II machine with 512MB of RAM and twin 40GB hard disks, USB everything, network card(s), 3D Surround Sound Dolby wotsit five point cinematic experience and twin CD writers. Five minutes. In 1982, a scan year after the IBM PC was launched, I could boot up and be tapping away into WordStar in just on a minute – and that was booting from a slow floppy disk that really was floppy. My, how things have changed.
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