In computer news this week, 01/05/2000

Looking back on the revolution that changed the world ...

As we enter the new millenium, personal computers and the internet are part of our daily business and personal life. We can't imagine functioning without them. A generation of children has now grown up with personal computers. The personal computer is beginning to become many other things as well; an entertainment device, a music device, an information device. Its role is growing in our worldwide society.

The pc revolution has truly changed the world we live in, and impacted the global economy. It's hard to believe that mankind has only been using electronic computers as we know them for the past 50 years or so, and personal computers as we know them for 25 years.

The pc revolution started, oddly enough, with an American company designing a product for a Japanese calculator company, which the Japanese company later decided not to buy. The Intel corporation invented the world's first microprocessor - the 4004 - in 1971. A year later they released a more powerful microprocessor, the 8008. These chips were the basic engine. Then in 1974 a tiny company in Albequerque, NM; on the brink of bankruptcy, decided to release a personal computer kit using an even newer Intel chip for those few hundred crazy people in American who might want their own computer. This was the marketing force for the engine. A story about this computer, the Altair 8800, appeared on the cover of the January, 1975 Popular Electronics magazine, and the revolution began. The rest, as they say, is history.

I first began working with PC's in 1977 and learned how to program in Basic. If you wanted to use one, of course you had to know how to program one. I have a lot of fond memories about the early days of the pc revolution; many of which might be hard to believe today.

The first pc I worked with had 2K of ram; compare that to the standard 128Mb of ram today. This pc had no permanent storage like a floppy disk or a hard disk. When you turned the power off, you lost everything and hard to start over again. Later a storage media became available, a cheap cassette tape recorder. You would hook this up to the computer, and then load the program in from cassette tape, carefully adjusting the volume and treble and bass controls. A lot of times you had to do several loads to get it to work. Then it was possible to buy more memory, an unheard of 16K of ram; what could you possibly do with all that memory?

Things started moving even faster. The early Apple II computer came with as much as 64K of RAM, a floppy disk drive was available, and it even had color and sound. You would hook it up to your color tv set. The cost - maybe around $ 4000 in 1980 dollars.

There wasn't much software in those days. Software companies would send their software out in baggies - yes, sandwich bags, and there would be a disk and a minimal description of the program or game. Often you would be able to modify it by programming. Computer enthusiasts would come in every day to see if anything new had come in.

For a business system, you could buy one for maybe $ 20,000, with 64K of Ram, 2 8" floppy disks, and business software that would of course have to be customized. At the time, there were no hard disks invented. Then the first hard disk, called the winchester, arrived, 5 Mb, then 10, then 20Mb. Who could possible use all that storage?

These were the early days of the revolution, 1975 to 1981. On August 12th, 1981, the Ibm corporation introduced their first personal computer, and changed the world again. Amazingly they had designed it to run off a cassette tape, although floppy disk drives were available.

There are too many heros of the microcomputer revolution to mention. If you are interested in learning about the history of the microcomputer revolution, the series I produced starting in January 1995 - the 20th anniversary - is available on many places on the internet - key word search microcomputer revolution, and also on my website, which is listed in your program guide.

And looking at the pc world today, the only thing I can say is "You've come a long way, baby !"

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

3414 E. 30th

Spokane, WA 99223

(509) 245-3736

fdspokane@aol.com