Posted on 08/11/2011 11:04:47 PM PDT by Seizethecarp
PCs are going the way of typewriters, vinyl records and vacuum tubes, one of the engineers who worked on the original machine has said.
The claim was made in a blog post commemorating 30 years since the launch of the first IBM personal computer.
No longer, said Dr Mark Dean, are PCs the leading edge of computing.
No single device has taken the PC's place, he said, instead it has been replaced by the socially-mediated innovation it has fostered.
While IBM was not the first to produce a personal computer, the launch of the 5150 on 12 August 1981 established standards and a design around which many desktop machines have since been built.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Oy. I’m planning on getting up to speed on apps and android and all of that. Culturally, I have no need for it. I use the dumbest ten dollar phone I could find, and I can’t see why I would want a tablet versus a laptop. But I am doing business online, so I must roll with the punches. It’s a drag. I hope laptops and PCs hang on for a while, so I can get acclimated to the new order.
I still have my PC-1.
Got it with 64kB of memory, cassette basic, Monochrome adapter and monitor and a CGA adapter... Spent a couple of grand on it...
I later got a couple of 320k double sided floppy drives...
A big improvement was an internal board with a real time clock and battery so you didn’t have to enter the date and time every time it was powered up...
And the real prize was a 20 MB hard drive...
Those original IBM keyboards had a really nice feel.
Brings back the memories. It also made a $4,000 dent in my wallet fully configured!
There was a local service available for the dial-up PC in Miami called Prodigy which was an online content site for local and world news, restaurant locations and reviews, movie schedules...in other words the beginning of the end for the need for a newspaper!
By 1985 when my daughter was age 2, there was already a video game available with Disney characters for her to play.
Until they come up with smallifiers for humans, people are still going to like large screens and large keyboards and either a mouse, pen, or trackball wherever they can be practically accommodated. Some people like fingering all over a lilliputian screen and a micro-chiclet tab, but to me it looks icky. Some new promising materials and technologies probably will make it feasible that these screens and keyboards can eventually be rolled and unrolled as needed, like Japanese folding fans, or form a virtual surface on something like a desk top. But like the car will be replaced with the car, the PC will be replaced with the PC. So what if the works will now fit in a domino, people want comfortable interfaces.
Bull - nothing against I what-evers, but lets see a user try to edit a 2 hour hi-def video on an IPad, assemble a concerto on a pod or use Photoshop CS5 on a phone. Granted, all the pods & pads make real cool toys & have a place in the cyber toolbox, but high power applications still need a lot more horsepower under the hood & that means the so-called “Grandpa Box”.
I would argue that if you want leading edge computing you're looking at a box with several hundred Cuda cores running something like Python - almost si-fi power sitting in an “old-fashioned” desktop form-factor.
Desktops are dead, no doubt, but laptops and net books are going to be around for a while. PADS are overrated, and phones are the realm of the low end user.
Accounting for inflation, that $4000 in 1983 is probably equal to $20,000 or more now. Just think of how much computing power you could buy with that!
The desktop still is @$$-kicking king when it comes to gaming. Too much sweat for the laptop.
Agree there, my 15 year old wants an AlienWare machine (I tell him there a lot of lawns to mow) but for the average user, desktops are going away.
If you've got the storage space I would suggest you hang on to them, they might be of interest to a computer historian or collector. Only problem is you might sit on ‘em for years before you find that buyer, but...
The big breakthrough for me in accounting and finance on the IBC PC was Visicalc! That was a work of genius and a gigantic productivity improvement, along with word processing, of course. No more big green paper spreadsheets that had to be filled out in pencil and manually cross-footed on an adding machine running a tape!
You can’t readily use a laptop on a parkbench or riding the bus or if you’re sitting in your car someplace for a few minutes. It would be far more convenient to use a slate then to unfold a laptop and try and type something out.
My only criticism of slates is that computer makers may be tempted to make them too powerful and complicated.
If the slate is supposed to allow you to be productive, where it’s difficult to use a laptop, then you really don’t need full versions of office suites. An app, imo, should be simplified programs, where you can quickly do small things.
For a long time after Windows first came out, there was still no faster machine for word processing than the 5150. Oh the days of MSDos Word and the Epson dot matrix printer.
I think this article was posted earlier — let me repost some comments I made either here or on Slashdot:
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The article didn’t really explain what the author meant, but no matter what definition of PC is used, I disagree that it is “going the way of typewriters”.
Example 1: Pixar. Even if we buy into the fantasy that the cloud will support high-end graphics design as a network application, are graphics designers going to be willing to give up their 30” monitors for a hand-held screen? [Here’s where I wish I could see how the author defines PC. If I have a CPU that I can attach monitor, keyboard, and mouse to, that is a PC in my opinion even if the CPU is the size of a small book].
Example 2: Software developers. Lots of people talk about iphone/android/whatever apps. But software developers don’t use the iphone to develop iphone apps — they use desktop computers.
Example 3: Computers in the workplace. Desktop computers are ubiquitous for business use including developing presentations, updating spreadsheets, preparing reports, entering accounting information, accessing databases and CRM systems, .... Even if we accept the fantasy that every bit of processing and storage will move out of the office, can someone explain to me why someone who is at work on the computer will give up a nice monitor/mouse/keyboard for something tiny?
Example 4: Enthusiasts. Just as there is a sizeable market for car customization, there is a sizeable market for people to build their own computer, to “peek under the hood”, to install Linux, ... I include in this group people who will spend $5000 just to play LatestGame3.0 with SpecialEffects15.0 enabled.
Concluding point: Vacuum tubes were replaced with transistors. Transistors could do everything vacuum tubes could do (for computing), but they used less power, were much smaller, more reliable, ... A genuine, unambiguous improvement. Typewriters were replaced by word processors. Word processors can do everything a typewriter could do, and a lot more. A genuine, unambiguous improvement. Vinyl records were replaced by CDs. CDs are more durable and reliable, are harder to scratch, can easily skip around songs, ... But some people claim vinyl records sound better. And vinyl records are still readily available.
Contrast: Tablets have some advantages, but they are not genuine, unambiguous improvement over PCs. A desktop PC has more computing power, more graphics power, more storage space, a larger monitor and keyboard, more options for expansion, .... the list goes on and on. Some things that used to require a desktop computer can now be done on a smartphone, which means people (possibly a large number) who bought a computer to use email will be able to replace it with a tablet. But there are many applications which desktop computers are better at, and that will remain true until we have a pocket-sized 30” monitor.
I’m unsure what they mean by ‘the PC’. If they mean the desktop computer going away, they’re wrong. There will always be ‘the big computer’ at home, even if it’s not sitting on the desktop.
VisiCalc was a great invention. I mostly used Lotus 123.
For me the PC-1 essentially replaced my HP-41C programmable calculator to solve engineering problems.
Excellent Post!
There was a forth book, “Technical Reference 6025005”. It has a listing of the BIOS (in assembly) and schematics.
I’ve got all four behind me in a bookcase...
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