20th Anniversary Of The PC

cmowire writes "I didn't realize this till I was debugging a stock database and saw the PR piece, but today is the twentieth aniversary of the IBM PC. IBM has a tribute page."

Back in my day...

[Rimbo]

...we didn't have no fancy-shmancy 32-bit computers with "true" color and multi-tasking multi-threaded GUI operating systems! We had EIGHT bits, and if you wanted any more than that you had to wait three days for a calculation! We had DOS and 640KB limits! We had four colors with our CGA graphics, including black and white!

And we LIKED it! We LOVED IT!

We didn't have any stinking free operating systems. We had to pay $100 for shitty old DOS, and we loved it! We thought it was great!

We didn't have DOOM, or Quake, or Unreal. We didn't have texture-mapped anti-aliased vertex-shaded full-color video games! We had ZORK with its text-only interface! And we liked it! We loved it!

We didn't have any "internet" back in those days, not in our homes. There was no World Wide Web or DSL/cablemodem connections to your home. We didn't even have 56k modems! If you wanted to share things with your buddies you had to copy it onto a 300K floppy, and boy, we didn't know WHAT we'd do with all that disk space! And if you wanted to connect to other computers you had to use a THREE HUNDRED BAUD MODEM!

And we liked it! We loved it!

I'm a grumpy old man, and I don't like the way things are today...things were a lot better with disk-swapping 80-column text wait an eternity to download forty K of files that would take up a large share of a floppy disk that would go bad in three months, with games that would take three or four minutes to load that were rarely worth the cost of the disks they were printed on and a stinking 640KB limit! And we loved those days!

Re:Happy Birthday

[rchatterjee]

Yeah, that'll be great, we'll go out for drinks, the PC will finally be old enough to have to have one. Though i shudder to think what a drunk PC will do. I hope it doesn't do something stupid like install Windows ME on itself while in a drunken Stupor.

Re:Perspective

[DreamSynthesis]

"I remember being the coolest kid in the school 'cause my modem could be pushed to 450 baud instead of the usual 300!"


Man, at my high school I just got beat up by football players whenever I mentioned the words "modem", "cpu", or "code"... I did score a few dates tho (I guess they went in for the geeky type). heh heh heh.

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[ClipDude]

Yeah, he was in a group interview/session to commemorate the anniversary along with Bill Gates, among others. David Bradley said that while he chose the keys, Bill is the guy who made them famous.

Then he said "When you used it for NT logon. That's what I meant."

Reminds me of a Dilbert...

[myov]

I don't remember it exactly...

Someone says that their first computer was an XT.
Dilbert then says that his computer was so old that he needed to use 1's and 0's to use it.
Wally finally says that he needed to use magnets, and he didn't even have 0's.

Re:Reminds me of a Dilbert...

[kfg]

Bah! I just use Othello chips and manually set the bits to either black or white.

Of course my frame rate in Quake is a bit slow, but it scales almost infinately.

KFG

Re:Interview with the Ctrl-Alt-Delete Guy

[nettdata]

Yeah, he was in a group interview/session to commemorate the anniversary along with Bill Gates, among others. David Bradley said that while he chose the keys, Bill is the guy who made them famous.

It was pretty funny... especially the look on Bill's face. :)

Re:Aww

[Trollificus]

More like, "3 years of CmdrTaco - A Tribute Too Myself"

Happy Birthday

[linzeal]

Anyone else thinking about making this a holiday next year ?

Aww

[Bodero]

Aww, how sweet that IBM would take the time to set up a tribute page to their very own system that started a revolution.

Maybe Malda can set up a "3 years of CmdrTaco - A Tribute To Myself" page on Slashdot to honor the anniversary of Slashdot and everything great that has became of it. ;)

Re:Where we were. Where we will be...

[Auckerman]

"It interesting to think that it took 20 years to get this far. How far will we be with computing in the next 20? Staggers the imagination."

Let's take a look...

1. Operating systems will ship with virii to save us the trouble of getting ourselves.

2. You will need 20 Ghz just to create a text document, and people will think nothing is abnormal about this.

3. You will need at least a gigabit ethernet line just to get a receipe from the internet. People will think nothing is abnormal about this.

4. You'll need to sign your soul to your OS vender just to swap your graphics card.

5. You'll pay a tax that goes directly to Music/Movie companies to pay for the pirating. The pirating will still be illegal. (yes I know this is true now, to an extent)

6. Despite the faster lines world wide, downloading a text document will still take a few seconds.

7. Your OS vender will disable your OS when you don't make your monthly payment. After 2 months your account will be canceled and your files deleted.