Computer Related > The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old Miscellaneous
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New Sat 13 Aug 11 11:55 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - Zero
...Yesterday Happy birthday!

www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/pdf/pcpress.pdf

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New Sat 13 Aug 11 12:26 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - RattleandSmoke
Is pretty amazing really, I reckon they have another ten years left too, although the need for a PC is dying out.
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New Sat 13 Aug 11 12:49 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - R.P.
My first PC was an IBM PS1 - running DOS 5. I was trying to figure out when, but I struggle, I think it must have been around 1989ish, it had a 45Mb Hard Disc, a 3.5, I eventually managed to upgrade it to Windows 3.1.....
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New Sat 13 Aug 11 14:59 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - RattleandSmoke
Don't think Does 5.1 came out until around 1991. I had a IBM PS/1 386 2121, got ripped off badly by Dixons.

It had DOS 4.0 and Windows 3.0, but I upgraded it to Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.1, however I used it mainly as a DOS machine as 2MB of RAM wasn't enough to run even 3.1 well and a 2MB upgrade would have cost more than £120 because it was a unique module for the PS/1 range.

Nasty horrible machines the PS/1 but they where extremely well built. I sold mine for £270 in 1997 with a printer, it looked brand new and still had some warranty remaining.

Wish I had kept it because it would have been a classic now, however I no longer used the built in ROM software (it had DOS 4.1 in the ROM but if you upgraded DOS it would then boot from the hard drive instead).
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New Sat 13 Aug 11 17:33 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - Stuartli
I wondered why the damn thing was so slow...:-))
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New Sat 13 Aug 11 21:21 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - Focusless
>> www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/pdf/pcpress.pdf

16k standard memory - I'd forgotten it was as little as that. By the following year we had the 16k Spectrum.
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New Sat 13 Aug 11 21:51 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - RattleandSmoke
I think 64 and 128k was far more common, but at that time the price of DRAM was falling by more than a half every six months.
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New Mon 15 Aug 11 04:34 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - Falkirk Bairn

>> 16k standard memory - I'd forgotten it was as little as that. By the following
>> year we had the 16k Spectrum.
>>

16K memory +160K 5.25" disk, DOS 1.0 (no £ sign) was US Spec machine made in Boca Raton.

UK (Greenock) machines were 64K motherboards, 160/320 disk drive, DOS 1.1 (£ sign included). From memory (excuse pun) list price for 64K was £64.50 +VAT but you had to buy an expansion card as original motherboard took only 64K, about 2 yrs later on it could take 256K.
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New Sat 13 Aug 11 23:53 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - Kevin
IBM Hursley have a museum of old computing kit. It's open to Joe Public by prior arrangement.

I was talking to Terry, the curator, a few weeks ago and he told me that someone called Nicole was trying to donate something from the 1950s called a "Zero".

She said that it had a very limited instruction set and was getting difficult to bootstrap.

;-)
Last edited by: Kevin on Sat 13 Aug 11 at 23:56
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New Sun 14 Aug 11 21:48 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - Zero
>> IBM Hursley have a museum of old computing kit. It's open to Joe Public by
>> prior arrangement.
>>
>> I was talking to Terry, the curator, a few weeks ago and he told me
>> that someone called Nicole was trying to donate something from the 1950s called a "Zero".
>>
>> She said that it had a very limited instruction set and was getting difficult to
>> bootstrap.
>>
>> ;-)

I know Terry down at Hursley, spent so much time in the IBM club house bar down there he cant tell his ones from his zeros!

Actually the guy who runs the computer museum at Bletchley keeps trying to get me up there to help catalogue all the stuff they have stashed in a hut.
Last edited by: Zero on Sun 14 Aug 11 at 21:50
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New Mon 15 Aug 11 14:25 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - Bagpuss
First proper PC I remember using was an IBM machine with 2 floppy disk drives and no hard drive. I think one drive was for the operating system and the other for application software. I seem to remember it having an Ethernet connection and running some sort of MS DOS. I was using it with Spreadsheet software called Lotus 123. This would have been around 1985.

First time I encountered Windows was Windows 2.0 around 1989. It seemed a real backwards step compared to the GEM I was used to using on the Atari ST.
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New Mon 15 Aug 11 14:49 
 The PC, as we know it it today, is 30 years old - RattleandSmoke
Would have been unusual but amazing it was developed in the 1970's!
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