Most of today's PC Users do not know or not care about the history of PC computing. While there are several books and online materials which cover exhaustively in different ways, I took a simple approach of writing this short blog. These are not taken from any book or any online material, but, they are the ones I experienced in my software career. I apologize in advance, if something is mis-represented. Please feel free to comment on my blog and I swear to correct this and enhance. This is for sheer pleasure of reading.
1982 IBM PC with two 5 1/4" Floppy Drive to hold 512 KB Floppies
Spec : 8088 with 64 KB RAM (No Hard Drive)
Operating System : MS DOS 3.1
Applications : BASICA, FORTRAN IV, COBOL,
LOTUS 1-2-3
Games : PacMan, Prince, Digger, Paratroopers
1986 The advent of Hard Disk
IBM PC XT (Extended Technology) with 10-20 MB Hard Disk
1989 Faster Processors
IBM PC AT
Spec : 80286 (PC AT-286)
80386 (PC AT-386) with 80387 Math co-processor)
Applications : GW-BASIC, FORTRAN 77
FOXBASE
CLIPPER (To produce .EXE from dbase/foxbase code)
TURBO-C (For 'C' Programming)
TURBO-PASCAL (for 'Pascal' Programming)
Connectivity (LAN) : Novell NetWare 3.12 ( 'F' Drive)
1991 IBM PC AT Unleashed!
Spec: 80486 (PC AT-486) with in-built co-processor)
Better capacity hard disks with more than 80 MB are available
The advent of 3 1/2" floppy Disks with 1.2 MB Capacity.
The bane : Advent of Viruses and vaccines
"Your PC is Stoned!"
"Marijuana"
(More and more people in India started buying PCs and we started feeding Bill Gates with more cash!)
We started bidding adieu to manual type writters (Godrejs, Remingtons became history)
1993 'C' Compiler reaches PC-Programmers
Also the era of desktop publishing with Ventura and Pagemaker from XEROX Corporation. Banks and educational insitutions adopted more Novell NetWare 4.1. More and more students started learning C-Programming but they struggled with the concept of pointers in C. Recruiters took advantage of this asking more and more twisted questions in pointers and used them as key criteria for recruitment.
Real computer science knowledge was brushed aside.
Yashwant Kanitkar - a young man from Nagpur took advantage of this situation and released books such as "Pointers in C", "Let us C" which sold like hot cakes.
The exciting world of Windows came into existence with WINDOWS 3.1. Clever move from Microsoft.
The following were revolutionized
a. People learnt to click, drag, copy and paste
b. The need of mouse arose and sold like hot cakes.
c. True multi-tasking with the capability to run multiple programs simultneously.
Several applications were developed using Windows SDK on Windows 3.1
But the adoption was not rapid. People still continued to use MS DOS 3.3.
Windows 3.1 needed MS DOS 3.3 and hence people were confused to whether to adopt Windows 3.1or stay with MS DOS.
This challenged Microsoft to completely move to GUI-based OS...........so they started working on it more vigorously. They hardly had 12-18 months of time to break this ambiguity.
1995 Windows 95 was born!
The news spread like wild fire with people pre-booking their copies. Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1 in a jiffy. It not only replaced it on the machine but also inside people's minds. With that, there came a whole big revolution in the software industry for the common man.
Most noticeable ones were
-> Microsoft Office
-> Visual C++
-> Media Player or MPlayer
-> Paint Brush or MSPaint
->Notepad and Wordpad
However, the 'START BUTTON', "WINDOWS TASK BAR' and 'EXPLORER' became the integral part of Operating System. The word 'Directory' got renamed to 'Folder' and slowly the DOS command prompt began to disaappear although Microsoft preferred to ship it with all its versions till Windows 7. That's something that I would like to ask the experts.
However, the concept of PC-Networking was still alien to Microsoft although I believe the company was secretly working on internal networking project Like Microsoft File Sharing and the NetBIOS Protocol. Novell continued to dominate the PC-Networking world. The most admiring thing that caught everybody's attention were the screen savers and wall papers. For the first time in the history of personal computing, one could customize the desktop with flashy wall papers. I believe this is a truely a revolutionary concept which made Windows and PC inseparable.
1996 thru 1998 Windows 95 to Windows 98
Millions of home users and enterprise desktops adopted Windows 95. When I joined Novell in 1997, they gave me a Windows 95 desktop which I saw for the first time in my life. With Windows 95 filling every desktop space, there was no looking back for Micosoft. It became the highly acclaimed company with enormous trust with its share holders giving them deep pockets.
Microsoft was unstoppable. Bill Gates's reputation shot leaps and bounds and he probably became a virtual member of a few American families.
I think the concept of Multimedia became prevalent during this generation with Windows Media Player (MPalyer) playing wav and VCD files. MPEGs were probably unheard in those days.
The advent of ithe Internet with Netscape Navigator became ubiqutous and took the PC to the next level. With limited network bandwidth, for the first time in the history of computing, the internet (till them only accessible to NASA, Military and Scientific research) became accessible to the common man. The PC User was able to access the World Wide Web and enter into the information super highway. I would say, this is probably the greatest revolution in the history of mankind.
1982 IBM PC with two 5 1/4" Floppy Drive to hold 512 KB Floppies
Spec : 8088 with 64 KB RAM (No Hard Drive)
Operating System : MS DOS 3.1
Applications : BASICA, FORTRAN IV, COBOL,
WORDSTAR
DBASE IIILOTUS 1-2-3
Games : PacMan, Prince, Digger, Paratroopers
1986 The advent of Hard Disk
IBM PC XT (Extended Technology) with 10-20 MB Hard Disk
1989 Faster Processors
IBM PC AT
Spec : 80286 (PC AT-286)
80386 (PC AT-386) with 80387 Math co-processor)
Applications : GW-BASIC, FORTRAN 77
FOXBASE
CLIPPER (To produce .EXE from dbase/foxbase code)
TURBO-C (For 'C' Programming)
TURBO-PASCAL (for 'Pascal' Programming)
Connectivity (LAN) : Novell NetWare 3.12 ( 'F' Drive)
1991 IBM PC AT Unleashed!
Spec: 80486 (PC AT-486) with in-built co-processor)
Better capacity hard disks with more than 80 MB are available
The advent of 3 1/2" floppy Disks with 1.2 MB Capacity.
The bane : Advent of Viruses and vaccines
"Your PC is Stoned!"
"Marijuana"
(More and more people in India started buying PCs and we started feeding Bill Gates with more cash!)
We started bidding adieu to manual type writters (Godrejs, Remingtons became history)
1993 'C' Compiler reaches PC-Programmers
Also the era of desktop publishing with Ventura and Pagemaker from XEROX Corporation. Banks and educational insitutions adopted more Novell NetWare 4.1. More and more students started learning C-Programming but they struggled with the concept of pointers in C. Recruiters took advantage of this asking more and more twisted questions in pointers and used them as key criteria for recruitment.
Real computer science knowledge was brushed aside.
Yashwant Kanitkar - a young man from Nagpur took advantage of this situation and released books such as "Pointers in C", "Let us C" which sold like hot cakes.
The exciting world of Windows came into existence with WINDOWS 3.1. Clever move from Microsoft.
The following were revolutionized
a. People learnt to click, drag, copy and paste
b. The need of mouse arose and sold like hot cakes.
c. True multi-tasking with the capability to run multiple programs simultneously.
Several applications were developed using Windows SDK on Windows 3.1
But the adoption was not rapid. People still continued to use MS DOS 3.3.
Windows 3.1 needed MS DOS 3.3 and hence people were confused to whether to adopt Windows 3.1or stay with MS DOS.
This challenged Microsoft to completely move to GUI-based OS...........so they started working on it more vigorously. They hardly had 12-18 months of time to break this ambiguity.
1995 Windows 95 was born!
The news spread like wild fire with people pre-booking their copies. Windows 95 replaced Windows 3.1 in a jiffy. It not only replaced it on the machine but also inside people's minds. With that, there came a whole big revolution in the software industry for the common man.
Most noticeable ones were
-> Microsoft Office
-> Visual C++
-> Media Player or MPlayer
-> Paint Brush or MSPaint
->Notepad and Wordpad
However, the 'START BUTTON', "WINDOWS TASK BAR' and 'EXPLORER' became the integral part of Operating System. The word 'Directory' got renamed to 'Folder' and slowly the DOS command prompt began to disaappear although Microsoft preferred to ship it with all its versions till Windows 7. That's something that I would like to ask the experts.
However, the concept of PC-Networking was still alien to Microsoft although I believe the company was secretly working on internal networking project Like Microsoft File Sharing and the NetBIOS Protocol. Novell continued to dominate the PC-Networking world. The most admiring thing that caught everybody's attention were the screen savers and wall papers. For the first time in the history of personal computing, one could customize the desktop with flashy wall papers. I believe this is a truely a revolutionary concept which made Windows and PC inseparable.
1996 thru 1998 Windows 95 to Windows 98
Millions of home users and enterprise desktops adopted Windows 95. When I joined Novell in 1997, they gave me a Windows 95 desktop which I saw for the first time in my life. With Windows 95 filling every desktop space, there was no looking back for Micosoft. It became the highly acclaimed company with enormous trust with its share holders giving them deep pockets.
Microsoft was unstoppable. Bill Gates's reputation shot leaps and bounds and he probably became a virtual member of a few American families.
I think the concept of Multimedia became prevalent during this generation with Windows Media Player (MPalyer) playing wav and VCD files. MPEGs were probably unheard in those days.
The advent of ithe Internet with Netscape Navigator became ubiqutous and took the PC to the next level. With limited network bandwidth, for the first time in the history of computing, the internet (till them only accessible to NASA, Military and Scientific research) became accessible to the common man. The PC User was able to access the World Wide Web and enter into the information super highway. I would say, this is probably the greatest revolution in the history of mankind.
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