The relentless crawl of the PC.
Wednesday, 12. August 2009, 22:11:51
According to Wikipedia, "On this day in 1981 – The IBM Personal Computer, the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform was introduced.”
1981?? That was the year I bought my first Micro Computer. It doesn't seem possible. Still, as we all know, the IBMpc was just a market gap-filler whilst IBM worked on the microcomputer to outshine all microcomputers so it was cobbled together out of easily obtained parts and they didn't even bother trying to patent it.
Someone should have guessed the rest. Bosses who were reluctant to introduce micros saw the name IBM and declared 'this is the one we want', and there was nothing we could do to dissuade them. Then someone noticed that the design was in the public domain and started making cheap clones. You could almost picture the bosses watching and waiting to see if anyone else would buy one so they could see if it was any good.
They were, naturally, identical inside.
Then the genie left the bottle and refused to get back in. It set the world of personal computing back by about ten years and made Bill Gates a very rich man.
You wanna know where I got that estimate of ten years from?
Around 1990/1 I bought, at great expense, an Acorn RiscPC because it was really (really) fast. Fast enough to play back sheet music in real time. It could also do other clever stuff like playback movies and had extraordinarily high screen resolutions in its armoury, but none of that was of any interest to me, I just wanted to hear what my music was going to sound like before I handed it to the actual musicians. The Mac was right behind it of course, but it took the PC quite a while to catch up, and in speed terms it took a jump to another century for the PC to catch up.
It had a 233 chip.
What've you got in your PC?
1981?? That was the year I bought my first Micro Computer. It doesn't seem possible. Still, as we all know, the IBMpc was just a market gap-filler whilst IBM worked on the microcomputer to outshine all microcomputers so it was cobbled together out of easily obtained parts and they didn't even bother trying to patent it.
Someone should have guessed the rest. Bosses who were reluctant to introduce micros saw the name IBM and declared 'this is the one we want', and there was nothing we could do to dissuade them. Then someone noticed that the design was in the public domain and started making cheap clones. You could almost picture the bosses watching and waiting to see if anyone else would buy one so they could see if it was any good.
They were, naturally, identical inside.
Then the genie left the bottle and refused to get back in. It set the world of personal computing back by about ten years and made Bill Gates a very rich man.
You wanna know where I got that estimate of ten years from?
Around 1990/1 I bought, at great expense, an Acorn RiscPC because it was really (really) fast. Fast enough to play back sheet music in real time. It could also do other clever stuff like playback movies and had extraordinarily high screen resolutions in its armoury, but none of that was of any interest to me, I just wanted to hear what my music was going to sound like before I handed it to the actual musicians. The Mac was right behind it of course, but it took the PC quite a while to catch up, and in speed terms it took a jump to another century for the PC to catch up.
It had a 233 chip.
What've you got in your PC?
WIDGETIZE