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  1. Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Posts
    431
    #1
    Happy 25th Birthday to the PC by Chris Null (Excerpt from Yahoo Tech)

    August 12, 1981. If you were ready to plunk down about $1,600, you could have owned a piece of history: The original IBM 5150 PC, generally considered to be the "first" PC.

    At 25 years old, it's fun to look back on how far we've come. At 21 pounds (without drives), the 5150 wasn't much fatter than the PCs of today. Under the hood, things looked a bit different: 40KB of read-only memory and 16KB of RAM (upgradable to 256KB). You could configure the machine with one or two 160KB floppy drives, but a jack for a cassette player was included. Users certainly loved the "power-on automatic self-test of system components" and "built-in speaker for musical programming." And the keyboard (included) weighed six pounds. The 11.5-inch monochrome monitor, capable of displaying 25 lines of text, weighed in at 17 lbs. and supported both upper- and lowercase characters. Whoa.

    Mock it if you must, but remember that the 5150 was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. The Apple II, released a few years earlier, came close, but it was more of a hacker toy and game-playing machine than something that would be at home in a business. The 5150 had built-in BASIC and Pascal support for writing programs, and it included a ton of business software: VisiCalc, Peachtree accounting software, and the EasyWriter word processor. And yes, Microsoft Adventure, a text-based adventure game, was available for diversions.

    So that was 25 years ago. Looking ahead 25 years is almost impossible (and the further we get from the birth of the PC, the harder and harder it gets), but let's imagine. Magnetic storage will still be around, and your average hard drive will hold something in the vicinity of 30 terabytes (30,000GB) and cost $50 or less. CPU architecture will be vastly different. If we're still using silicon wafers, you could have a 32-core CPU with dedicated encryption and graphics components. In 25 years, graphics will have evolved to the point where Toy Story will seem quaint. You'll be able to compose a production like that in real time, and it'll look perfect on your wall-sized display. And dare we dream of something in true 3-D? Memo to Silicon Valley: Better get busy!
    ...belated hape beday to the ancestor of our PC's...

    :bdayparty:

  2. Join Date
    Oct 2002
    Posts
    1,271
    #2
    not true, pc was developed more than 25 years ago...if you are referring to ibm pc, then you are right.

    see this debate here:

    http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/re...ssage=19561865

  3. Join Date
    Jan 2006
    Posts
    12,347
    #3
    Happy Birthday IBM PC

    Hmmmmm. It's been that long already? Time to sit back and ponder all the pc's I've owned and used......

    1984 TRS-80
    1985 Commodore 128
    1987 Amiga 1000
    1988 Tandy 1000SX and Amiga 500
    1989 Amiga 2000HD
    1990 Mac IIcx
    1991 Leading Edge 80386SX-20
    1992 DIY AMD 386DX-40 (my first DIY)
    1993 Amiga 1200
    1994 DIY 486DX2-66
    1995 DIY P-150
    1996 DIY P-200MMX (also the year I got my first 3d card: 3DFX Voodoo for Christmas)
    1997 DIY P2-266 (ASUS P2L97 mobo with LX chipset)
    1998 DIY Celeron 400 (Gigabyte mobo with BX chipet) - still in use
    1999 DIY P3-733 (MSI mobo with Via Apollo Pro 133 chipet) - still have it here
    2001 DIY AMD Athlon XP 1700+ (ASUS A7M266 mobo with AMD 760 chipset)
    2002 Sager P4-1.8ghz laptop (wife's)
    2003 Apple (G3) iBook 800 and HP Pavilion P4-2.4ghz ze5270 laptops
    2004 Mac Mini
    2005 DIY AMD Athlon X2 4200+ (just over a year old today)

    May many more pc's come.......
    Last edited by Jun aka Pekto; August 13th, 2006 at 11:14 PM.

  4. Join Date
    Dec 2005
    Posts
    39,162
    #4
    And to think that IBM projected only to sell a few of these PCs because they were originally intended to work only with their mainframes?

    Hehehe,- so much so for the original design/intent.....

Happy 25th B-Day to the PC