An historic anniversary!

[Preacherman]

25 years ago, the IBM PC made its debut.  Of course, there were a few PC's before that - the Apple, Altair, etc. - but the "standard architecture" computers that we use today date from 1981.

The BBC has a short video report on it at http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/avdb/news_web/video/9012da68004cf50/nb/09012da68004d1f6_16x9_nb.asx (uses Windows Media Player).

So when did you begin to use a PC?  I was into mainframes and minicomputers as a career from the mid-1970's, so initially I regarded the PC as an insignificant toy.  I began to use them in 1983 on a more serious basis.  I can still remember when IBM introduced the PC-AT in 1984, with a 6 MHz 80286 processor, a 20MB hard drive, and 640KB of memory.  The headlines read "Blinding Speed!  Amazing Storage!"

I still have, somewhere, the copy of PC Magazine from 1984 with that review . . .

[Nightfall]

Started using PCs in the late 80's as a little kid. DOS, 5¼" disks containing such gems as Pac-Man, Ghostbusters, Dungeons & Dragons, and no mouse. I remember how blown away I was when my parents got a 486 machine. Windows 3.1! WOW!

Now 1 gigabyte of DDR is starting to be the low end if you wanna game, and graphics cards alone have hundreds of megabytes of memory. One day I'll be complaining about my machine only having a terabyte of memory, and how my display is only 540000i.

[Sylvilagus Aquaticus]

I learned Bell Labs UNIX on a Digital Equipment PDP-7 back in the Dark Ages of the 70's. 64k of RAM and a 10mb Winchester drive the size of a trash can lid.

I bought an Altair, an Osborne, a KayPro, a TI-99-4A, and so on. Dad had an early PC-XT almost from the day they came out. Started with 384kb of RAM but bumped it up to 640K as soon as it became available with an expansion card. Soon thereafter he bought a PC-AT and used it exclusively up until 1996, when we convinced him it was past time to upgrade.

His old Pentium is in my brother's garage now. I don't know how it ran as long as it did, as he was a heavy smoker and kept one going in the ashtray next to the tower all day long.

On the 20th anniversary of the PC rollout, there was some fanfare at IBM, but since my group was RISC oriented, it was pretty much ho-hum for us. It's not been mentioned in the past week at work, but that, again, isn't surprising. We're still not PC oriented, except for the nice Lenovo ThinkCenter desktops and ThinkPads (stinkpads) we use daily.

Myself, I'm still sort of surprised that IBM sold off the PC arm of the company. Of course, there's always this to show what good laptops Lenovo builds:

http://www.lenovo-tapes.com/

I still have all my old PC clones stuck in a warehouse, along with a couple of old Compaq suitcase 'portable' models.  My brother ran across a deal on them in the early 90's and picked up a bunch for about $50 along with HP Think Jet tractor feed printers. I've got a set of 5 1/4 floppes with the full distro of MSDOS 2.0 on it along with all the documentaion somewhere around here. It's kind of fun to remind people what the goal of DOS 2.0 was to make it more UNIX-like.

Regards,
Rabbitl

[280plus]

The first computer I "ran" filled a whole room. It ran on "FORTRAN D" and used punch cards. First you punched the card in a special machine, a "keypunch" IIRC. That was in 1975.  First PC I used was an Apple in "Comptuer 101" and we ran a program called "Teraipin logo" where a little "turtle" could be told what to do to draw a picture. Then we moved up to the IBM where I met my first spreadsheet, word processing and data base. I'd say that was around 1987. And yes we was rebootin' back then too. The IBM spreadsheet trial program I had for some reason would go wild occasionaly when you made an entry causing the column where the totals were calculated to count rapidly like a millisecond digital clock. The only way to get it to stop was to reboot. Mine was the ONLY program that did that out of a class of about 30.

I'd say it was a sign of things to come.

[mtnbkr]

My first exposure to "desktop" computing (Apple II series) was in the early 80s while in elementary school.  I was lucky enough to attend a school in Middle Tenn that had the funds for a few computers and let some of their students use them.  I learned BASIC programming and go to play games and run educational programs.

I didn't use my first actual "PC" until I went to college in the early 90s.  Those were old IBM PCs running some flavor of DOS.  

Chris

[brimic]

First PC I used was an Apple in "Comptuer 101" and we ran a program called "Teraipin logo" where a little "turtle" could be told what to do to draw a picture.

That came out when I was in about 6th grade.  Before the school got that Apple machine there was some sort of Commodore machine IIRC, in the school's library. We were taught how to write short little programs on it in BASIC.

[280plus]

Yup, I recall BASIC was the up and coming language after FORTRAN D. Never learned any BASIC...

And those IBMs I was talking about used DOS

[Old Fud]

There was life before the IBM PC.
I was running WordStar on a Xerox PC with  CP/M operating system.  It had 64Kb RAM.   The operating system was 5K, Wordstar was 32K, which left almost 25K for my maximum file size.   My personal style was to keep the operating system and the program files on one 8" floppy and my created files on the 2nd.   They had 100k storage each at first, but there was a later version that went double-density.

I learned to be suspicious of Bill Gates the day IBM PC came out.
He (and IBM) played a very simple devious and murderous trick on us.  
The IBM Keyboard eliminated the Right-Hand Control key.
Wordstar, (THE word processor package of the time), created a virtual joystick using the LH keys of the keyboard so you could walk your cursor around your page and do the things that ultimately became mousy stuff --- you needed the RH control key so your LH was free to operate the "joystick".
    They killed Wordstar.    
    Now that we were looking for a word processing program that MIGHT work on the IBM, there was Mr. Gates and his "Word" program.    Amazing, what?

Oh, yeah, Anything over $500 was considered a "Capital Investment" in the workplace.  You had to justify it, and you had to show how it would provide useful payback over the standard 7 year amortization lifetime.
    The computer nerds kept arguing the useful life of a computer would only be about 3 years (tops), but that was blatant nonsense.   No accountant would buy a notion like that.  
    Besides, who would ever need more than an 8-bit processor that was blazing along at 3.5mhz.   And it was no time before we discovered that all those clones and not-quite-authentic operating systems seemed to have funny little bugs in them so our programs wouldn't work if you went non-standard anyway.

I still contend CP/M was better.

Fud

[Iain]

My father spent a lot of money to buy an IBM PC around 1987 or 88. We held on to that until the Pentium 120 turned up. Fond memories of being shouted at by an IT teacher on my first day at a new school aged 14 (1995) because I had never seen a graphical OS before and he thought I was messing him about.

[Stickjockey]

First desktop computer I used was a Commodore 64. THe first home computer I used was an Atari 2600 with a BASIC cartridge.

[Moondoggie]

I was trained to program UNIVAC 1500's in Level I COBOL circa 1971 at NTC SDiego.  Flowcharting by hand, keypunching program code on 88 column cards, mag tape, and input by teletype that would only accept about 35 wpm.   Monitor?   Nope.  60* in the computer room.

In typical fashion, the Navy reneged on it's promise to provide the computers to the Marines, so I was out of a job and was assigned another MOS.  It was a relief, because I hated computer programming.  I could do it, but it didn't float the boat of a young 18 yr old hard charger who signed up to kill commies.

We bought our first dual floppy PC for home use in 1987, about the same time my unit in the Marines got the same type of machine for word processing.  Cost about $800, IIRC.

[wmenorr67]

What about the Trash-80's that Radio Shack sold in the mid-80's.  Did a lot of work on them in high school.

[M67]

An acquaintance studied theology in the early '80s, when the student body was devided between the XT-ists and the AT-ists. The pronunciation makes it funnier in Norwegian, but any English-speaking preacherperson with a sufficiently warped sense of humour should catch it...

[280plus]

any English-speaking preacherperson with a sufficiently warped sense of humour

Yea, I think we got one of those around here...

[El Tejon]

So, Al Gore invented the Internet before he invented the PC?

[lee n. field]

A college cource in Fortran and PL/C back in the dark ages (1975).

PeeCees I started in or around 1985,   Been making a living, of sorts (I do not "make the big bucks" doing this.  We survive.) in the field since 1991.

Command line skills picked up back then are an edge now.

Other things I have, back in the day, used include TRS-80 and Atari ST (and not to forget the NeXT cube I had an account on), and much more recently MacIntosh.  I am, you could say, much more aware than most that Windows ain't the only thing out there.