PC Evolution
RIVER BENDER - May 2012
The history of personal computers began in the mid 1970s. Around that time I was using a teletypewriter or a CRT display terminal to dial into time-shared computers either in-house at AT&T or external at GE. The first 'personal' computer that caught my attention was in 1975 called the Altair 8800. The designers expected to sell only a few hundred kits to hobbyists but ended up with orders for thousands in the first month. The Altair 8800 is now recognized as the spark that led to the microprocessor revolution. I thought about buying one but the basic kit was $439 and programming was tedious by having to operate toggle switches. Instead, I got a KIM 1 board that came with a course on microprocessors. It had 1024 bytes of memory and I had to build a power supply for it. I programmed it using the hexadecimal keypad and display on the board. It was pretty primitive stuff back then but I got an education in hexadecimal programming, barely a step above ones and zeros.
Personal computers really began in earnest with Apple 1 & II, Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet in 1977-78 each with their own operating system and version of Basic programming language. I decided on the Apple because it had a spreadsheet called VisiCalc designed by Dan Bricklin in his Harvard dorm room. This led the way to Lotus 123 and later to Microsoft's Excel that everyone uses today.
The next major milestone was the late introduction of the IBM personal computer or 'PC' as they called it in 1981. It had a disk operating system called DOS and 65 Kbytes of RAM. Unlike Apple which had a proprietary operating system, IBM was smart and licensed its DOS operating system to other manufacturers. Immediately PC clones, called PC compatibles, appeared and were generally less expensive than IBM PCs.
A big step forward was taken in 1983 with Apple's introduction of Lisa, the first personal computer with a graphical interface and mouse. I was impressed with Lisa's beautiful white screen and mouse demo at a computer show since computer displays were all text based at that time. But Lisa cost $10K and never became popular until Macintosh was introduced in 1984. It did, however, spawn Microsoft's Windows I.0, 2.0 in 1985-87 but none were very successful until Windows 3.0 came along in 1990.
In the meantime Intel, the dominant CPU chip maker, continued coming out with faster chips. In 1991, after using my Apple II+ for 10 years, I purchased a custom made IBM compatible PC that used the Intel 80386 chip. It clocked at 25 MHz compared to 1 MHz of my Apple and had 4 Mbytes of RAM plus a 130 Mbyte hard drive. Friends kidded me about the need for such a huge hard drive.
Microsoft continued to dominate the operating system software market over the years by introducing Windows 95 in 1995, Windows 98 in 1998, Windows 2000 and ME in 2000, Windows XP in 2001, Windows Vista in 2005 and Windows 7 in 2009. The most popular of these systems was Windows XP. Windows 8 is now the latest version and was just released in preview form by Microsoft for folks to download for free. Several NBCUG members have done this and conclude it is the most radical Windows change ever.
All past articles since 1998 are posted at http://pages.suddenlink.net/davew/dwindex.htm