Twenty five years of the IBM PC

[Domski]

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4780963.stm

Where would we all be without the little things?

 

[Andrew Fergus]

An interesting question.....I suspect some posters have never known life without a PC. Some of us remember the days of manual ledgers and huge pieces of paper that resembled spreadsheets......I don't particularly want to dwell on such things but I do remember spending hours poring over huge spreadsheet-looking pieces of paper trying to work out why the sum of the columns didn't equal the sum of the rows. I wouldn't want to go back there.....

Andrew

 

[riaz]

You don't look that old to me, Andrew.

I remember doing the same thing, spreading A3 ruled sheets glued together on the board room table and going thru each row and column with my adding machine. Luckily, we had just then graduated to "digital" desktop calculators from the old enter number/pull handle/print adding machines, so it wasn't too bad. For my sins, I had, once, as an articled clerk, had to add up pages of the phone book as I had nothing to do, so I learned to "touch type" on an adding machine.

The first PC I had (actually, the company had) was the IBM pictured in the article. It had 512k or RAM (upgraded from 256k because my boss would only buy the machine if it ran Flight Simulator - go figure). One floppy drive, on 10 mb hard disk, Lotus 123 included, and joy of joys, an epson WIDE CARRIAGE dot matrix printer. Once I discovered Sideways (gone, all are gone, the old familiar faces), there was no stopping my printouts, and no gluing either.

Those were the days....

Riaz

 

[Greg Truby]

Where would we all be without the little things?
-Domski

We'd all be using Macs. True, it has been 25 years, so my memory is a little fuzzy about who came out first, but I programmed on Apples (and Tandy's and Commodores) before I ever saw an IBM.

 

[RichardS]

Hi Greg,

According to this article, the Apple came out in '76, 5 years before IBM. Which is better, VHS or Beta?

http://www.theage.com.au/news/laptops--desktops/the-pc-turns-25/2006/08/10/1154803021680.html

Cheers

Richard

 

[Cbrine]

I find that the VHS makes a better door stop then the Beta, since it's larger.

We have started using DVD's at my house.

Cal

 

[riaz]

But VHS tapes are lighter and don't hold spring loaded doors open. We use two beta tapes glued together.

DVDs just slide under the doors so not very efficient as doorstops.

Soon we will be able to use VHS machines.

Riaz