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Walking around the office today, it’s been a quite normal day… I made a few copies, zoomed through my collection of blackberry emails and phone calls, and even did some real work on my laptop.
I mean my Vaio.
I mean my PC, wait, make that Personal Computer.
Here we are 25 years after the advent of the personal computer, first brought to us by IBM. Today, there’s really no such thing as a personal computer - EVERYTHING is a personal computer, right down to your ipod, TIVO, XBox, Playstations, satellite radio, thermostat, and your car. We have ThinkPads, iMacs, Mac Minis, PowerBooks, Palm Pilots, and OnStar auto navigation We have Windows, WindowsME, Leopard, Linux, Unix, Apache, iTunes, and Opera (thank god for a little culture around here)
One could make a strong argument that all these personal computers have made life better and made us more productive as a society.
But that sure is a lot of stuff - is this a good thing?
Absolutely - quit being a grump and enjoy your personal computer gadgets. Show a little love.
Gotta get back to playing Asteroids…
August 9th, 2006 at 9:22 pm
If I may present a bit of a heterodox viewpoint, for me the coming of the IBM PC was like the disastrous coming of a kudzu vine to a highly diverse ecosystem which had already been well-established and thriving for almost 10 years.
The business standard for PCs at the time, the S-100 hardware bus and the CP/M operating system, comprised a model of elegant simplicity which was a joy for programmers. The IBM PC ran right over that, undoubtedly on purpose, introducing lots of unneccesary arbitrary changes, incompatibility, and messy, oafish hardware and OS paradigms.
In the hobby sphere, check out http://oldcomputers.net. You can see there were about 50 different PCs preceding the IBM PC. Names like Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080, Exidy Sorcerer, Rockwell AIM 65, North Star Horizon, and TRS-80 (”TRASH-80″) will remind some of the days when software and hardware were bought at swap meets or out of the back of Byte Magazine and arrived on cassette tape in ziplock bags with photocopied labels and instructions bearing crude drawings of hobbits and unicorns.
The infamous Kevin Mitnick did some of his best “work” (if you can call it that) from TRS-80 demo models in Radio Shack showrooms while the clerks thought he was playing games.
My personal favorite was the Ohio Scientific Superboard (http://oldcomputers.net/osi-600.html), a bareboard with a keyboard. It was the cheapest computer with a real keyboard, and had a bus socket so you could connect the bus to a breadboard and wire up any kind of ill-advised circuit to it. The ground plane was enormous, so much so that many times I dropped jumper wires and once even a screwdriver right onto the bare board while it was running, and the worst that ever happened was that it rebooted itself.