A Brief
History Of The "PC"
How the PC came to be
In August of 1981 IBM officially announced the Personal Computer
(PC). At the time, many disagreed on the success of IBM selling
computers to the public through IBM's stores and distributors.
It was also predicted by some staff at IBM that because of the
questionable and unreliable design of the PC, and the fact that
it had not undergone any of IBM's quality tests and design procedures,
no one would want to buy the computer.
One of the best things about IBM's personal computer was the
Open System attitude of the designers, who guessed that by making
a full listing of the system BIOS and internal design and specification
schematics readily available, third party manufacturers and
designers would/could build expansion cards, peripheral devices
and even clone systems. This would make the PC a much more viable
tool in a field already swamped with 8 bit computers.
IBM took measures to ensure that the hardware design remained
theirs, and patented the ROM BIOS and other hardware. The PC
was shipped with an operating system called PC DOS, ported to
the PC from QDOS, purchased from Seattle Computer Products by
Microsoft (then Bill Gates and Paul Allen).
The first PCs were shipped in desktop cases, housing full sized
motherboards with Intel 8088 processors, 1 MB of surface mounted
memory, a BIOS but no real time clock (RTC) or battery backed
CMOS, an expansion card for output to a monitor (usually monochrome,
green or amber although colour was supported), a keyboard controller
and keyboard but no numeric keypad, a single sided double density
5.25" floppy drive and floppy disk controller, a parallel
port and two serial ports and a copy of DOS. The motherboard
offered in total eight expansion slots for input/output devices
although some would already be in use.
Printers where also available, the most common were daisy
wheel which struck against a typewriter ribbon to leave an impression
on the paper which was feed through a roller by sprockets which
aligned with holes along the edge of the printer paper and known
as fanfold.
Everything about the PC was focused mainly on an office environment
and mimicked the `functions and procedures of tasks carried
out by the workforce. Tasks such as typing letters (word processing),
keeping records and files (database) and working with tables
or charts (spreadsheets and graphics). Systems analysts and/or
programmers would create a logical representation of the flow,
inputs, processes or functions and outputs of the business and
build a logical working computerised model of the business.
As the PC and software gained popularity more software and hardware
manufacturers produced for it. Some of the most useful expansion
cards for the original PC were the real time clock and the hard
disk controller. The real time clock allowed the computer to
keep track of the date and time once booted to the operating
system and hard disk drives originally built by western digital
and controller cards to operate the device which enables operating
systems, applications and data to be stored on one disk. Once
the hard disk appeared for the PC software houses supplied software
that could be installed to the hard disk instead of running
from floppy drive, no more floppy disk swapping.
The first breakthrough to make a difference to users was more
RAM from 1 MB to a possible 16 MB of system RAM. Two main standards
competed to become de facto, extended memory and expanded memory,
both incompatible with the other and, in the beginning, could
not operate at the same time in the same system. Software houses
supplied versions of programs that utilised this extra memory,
often as data workspace, and so the PC was able to run more
powerful applications and use more data, quicker in the process,
because there was no need to sort or fetch it from disk.
Keyboards started to appear with numeric keypads and shortly
after the release of Microsoft Windows pointing devices such
as track balls, joy pads and mice became very popular. Earlier
versions of Windows were not as useful as the enhanced mode
offered by Windows version 3.0 which allowed the processor to
switch to a mode that would allow multiple applications to execute
simultaneously sharing system devices and resources and eventually
data. This meant that a word processor could be started and
also a database application etc., as long as there was enough
resources. Also, RAM was not restricted to physical quantity
as the hard disk could be used to page (move) working data to
and from the drive as required.
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One of the best features of the Microsoft Windows front end
was allowing hardware manufacturers to supply a driver that
only needed to work in one program, namely windows, which software
writers could access from within applications, without needing
to know how to actually program that devices low level functions.
As long as a programmer could tell windows what to print or
display then the driver would know how to instruct the hardware.
No more loading drivers into every application that accessed
a piece of hardware.
Soundcards soon appeared, as the next useful addition that
would take up a free slot and an IRQ. Adding multimedia capability
to the PC literally made it all singing and all dancing. Around
the same time higher resolution and deeper colour depth, graphics
cards and monitors where appearing. The expansion slots and
the cards that populated them advanced from 8 bit cards to 32
bit bus mastering devices capable of talking to any other device,
the system RAM, or operating system without the need for the
CPU's intervention.
A pattern emerged, where the hardware demands of software was
pushing advances in designs, manufacturing and obviously boosting
sales of computer hardware. Every computer manufacturer in all
sectors was striving to be the company to emerge with the next
mind blowing, got to have it, voted to be, industry standard
computer upgrade (The same went for software houses).
As a result of all the new technology changes, consumers became
paranoid when purchasing for fear of being sold "old technology",
and when Microsoft changed the naming convention of all their
software from version xyz, to 95 (the year released), it drove
home the true meaning of "out of date."
Another problem to emerge from the rapid advances was dead
end systems, which had no, or limited upgradeability. Every
time Intel released a new processor, then a new motherboard
and various support components were necessary, causing frustration
to system up-graders. Purchasing a new motherboard also meant
buying new RAM, graphics card, etc., if the new technology
was to be fully implemented (Some manufacturers maintained more
backward compatibility than others, based on the market they
were trying to sell to).
The original message from IBM, "that your personal computer
will never be obsolete", is based on the fundamental principle
of backward compatibility (but not necessarily forward compatibility).
A good thing and a bad thing? New technological advances sometimes
mean breaking away from the way things are normally done and
thus end the backward compatibility, unless some careful thought
is put into the planning and implementation.
Backward compatibility is a good thing if newer personal computers
can use old hardware, however this hinders ideas for breakthrough's
if no choice can be found to upgrade and implement the original
IBM PC design. Manufacturers have been caught out in the past,
trying to lead the way only to be bowled over or left behind
by rapid advances. Designs were out of date before they were
even completed. It was traditional to follow Intel and for a
long time. They determined the speed and direction of the personal
computer, but all along, in the background was the consumer,
who could make or break upgrades.
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Being the first to release to the consumers also meant oldest
technology, design, features and more important components used
in the manufacturing were old. Some designs chose to use the
latest, riskier, untested components and others stuck with what
they knew. Success became more dependent on how many people
used the product. A new trend appeared, manufacturers were releasing
products into the consumer market that had neither been properly
tested nor rigorously used with existing designs, in their rush
to release products (again the same went for software houses),
now you see the way things can go wrong with the best of intentions.
In More Recent Times hard drive capacities have increased
along with speed and reliability, allowing more business critical
applications and data to be implemented on the PC. Software
houses added more functionality to their programs and installing
them on to computer often meant feeding dozens of floppy disks
in to the drive, an incentive to utilise the CD-ROM technology
utilised by the music recording industry.
Bigger and better software products soon emerged. Some merely
included massive movies and rolling intros, but who could blame
them given all that space. It was not long before CD writers
became popular and soon everyone was copying there own data
to CD. Distributing data on this form of media became the standard
adopted by most publishers.
Flatbed scanners also drastically advanced in design and as
a result, are more cheaply and readily available as a useful
upgrade to import data from the physical world in to electronic
representation. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) became commonplace
and all of a sudden, you had the capability to edit a scanned
image from a book into your own words.
Printer designs changed from impact designs to inkjet and laser
technology. Sound cards have added three dimensional sound and
a realism to multimedia that is startlin. The AGP graphics card
has once again put the PC in front of the games playing consoles
(and always will, if manufacturers strive to maintain backward
compatibility with every addition of new design).
Today, the present memory technology and design can not
supply processors fast enough and is, the major bottleneck in
the PC system.
What is next? Who can really say. Consumers are striving for
"future-proofing" which just isn't possible. Who can
say what is going to be the industry standard speed/performance/capacity
of say a hard disk drive in 2 or 3 years time?
The future isn't written yet. Consumers are steering the entire
industry from behind it. At present the future looks like being
in the futuristic world of wireless connections, bluetooth,
blu-ray, skype and the like.
People want the future, now. Video conversations at real-time
speeds are now possible with the use of high speed broadband
internet connections. They are about to hit 24 meg per second!
What does the consumer want next year? Figure that one out and
you could make a lot of money, just like IBM did when they guessed
at the future over twenty five years ago.
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