Fifteen Years of Technology Reporting

jeffdsimpson writes "PC World NZ is 15 years old this month and they've written a story looking back at some of the statements made in the magazine over the years. Some gems include 'The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated' from July 1989 and 'The Internet Connection Company of New Zealand (ICONZ) offers full internet access and charges $50 a megabyte for email, and $10 a megabyte for all other information sent or received' from April 1994"

it's getting very close to a slashdotting

[Anonymous Coward]

(what is it with humor stories? everyone jumps on them)
PC World at 15
It was 5475 days ago today, or thereabouts, that your favourite computer magazine first hit newsstands. PC World lifer Chris Keall looks back on the laughter, the tears and the $24,000 386.

Chris Keall
Monday, 28 June, 2004

Since it first appeared as a standalone magazine in 1989 (having done time in the trenches as a Computerworld supplement), PC World has chronicled the highs, the lows and the sometimes keyboard-pounding agony that is the personal computer industry. As you follow me on our highlights tour of articles past (in our own - cringe - unedited words), you'll find three themes emerge:

1. Star Trek references intrude with troubling frequency.
2. People always underestimate how quickly hardware will evolve.
3. People are constantly thumping said keyboards as promised usability breakthroughs never quite happen. Software developers just about get a handle on one trend and ... then we're off to the next. We're living in beta, babies. Enjoy the ride.

June 1989
PS/2 luggable gains positive reception
"The PS/2 Model P70 is a high-functionality, 20MHz 386 portable ($16,425) that weighs in at 9kg (the lightest notebooks today are 1.2kg - CK). PC professionals are saying the VGA monitor and the 4MB of memory (expandable to 8MB), make it a powerful luggable."

July 1989
IBM's 486 steals show
"The past 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in clock rates, from just under 5MHz for the original IBM PC to 33MHz for the latest 386 systems. This more than six-fold increase will not be repeated."

Dec 1989/Jan 1990
Easy DOS it
"Processing speeds are now fast enough to satisfy all but the most exacting user."

PC World Awards
Best desktop PC: Apple Macintosh IIcx
Best laptop: Compaq SLT/286
Best word processor: WordPerfect 5 for DOS

March 1990
WordPerfect 5.1
"With 11 5.25-inch floppy discs, installation may seem daunting, but there are many new features, with added commands including {FOR} and {WHILE} loops."

May 1990
Could 1990 be the year of the LAN?
"The philosophical dividing line between the eras of standalone and networked PCs will be drawn in 1990. ... Despite the power of Microsoft's OS/2 LAN Manager, it's still a NetWare world. Novell's 1989 introduction of its NetWare 386 network operating system more or less guaranteed that much of the world will stick with Netware."

Word processors: Nine packages point for point
"Of these products, three - Samna Ami Professional, NBI Legend and Microsoft Word for Windows - exploit the new graphical tools provided for Windows-compatible products. The remaining six - IBM DisplayWrite, Lotus Manuscript, Microsoft Word for DOS, Aston-Tate's Multimate, WordPerfect for DOS and WordStar - offer various levels of text-based word processing."

June 1990
Has OS/2 version 2.1 got the right stuff?
"When Microsoft and IBM jointly announced OS/2 almost three years ago, many thought it would become the predominant operating system. That obviously hasn't happened yet ... last year, DOS accounted for 70% of operating system units sold worldwide."

July 1990
Return to the clone zone
"In this issue's comparison of 33MHz 386 machines, we look at five well-known international brands with prices ranging from $17,000 to $24,000. But when we researched local assemblers like PC Direct, TL Systems and Ultra, we found equivalent machines for less than half that. Companies such as ALR, Compaq and HP will find it difficult to justify these differences in the face of cut-price clone competition."

August 1990
At last, a true rival to DOS?
"Windows 3 is more than an update. In many respects it's an entirely new environment ... To really take advantage of Windows, you'll want either a fast 286 or a 386 machine, preferably with at least 2MB of RAM. Enhanced mode allows you to run multiple DOS applications

Re:Why?!

[sporty]

The same reason the NT boot discs (to boot strap the cd boot process) was 3 floppies. Drivers drivers drivers.

Also, let's not forget a modern monitor supports 1024x768 x 32bit colour easily. Keeping your wallpaper in memory costs at least 2 megs of ram. No I didn't calculate that. I think it comes to ~3 megs. Windows has more support + services to support the support than you can shake a stick at.

I'ms ure if you went with a fine tooth combe though, you can get it to work on lower end machines.

What does this teach us about the future?

[mt-biker]

CERN has a commitee by the name of PASTA which tracks computer technology, making predictions of future growth.

I remember reading the first such report in 1996, and finding predictions of 500GB disks in PCs for the year 2006 somewhat inconceivable. There were similar results for CPUs and memory.

I just had a quick look on the CERN website and found their latest report (2002) [home.cern.ch]. There's a lot of information in there, much of it quite technical, and I'm in a rush so let me leave the interested to read it, and I'll just make a few points:

- The predictions they've been making for the last 8 years have turned out to be much too conservative in some fields.
- KCHF and MCHF stand for kilo-swiss-francs (803 USD) and mega-swiss-francs (803,000 USD). Yes, the people there really think in these numbers. They're scientists. :)
- LHC is the next generation of CERN experiments, due to go online now in (I believe) 2007. As far as data aquisition goes: "A peak rate of 1000 MBytes/s is required, and capacity for 5000 TB per year. This is a rather minimal requirement in terms of drives. In practice, support for ~2.5 GBytes/s might be needed at LHC startup"

Slashdot Archives!

[jasno]

Lately I've started going back and viewing the slashdot headlines from 5 years ago. Its really hilarious to go back and see where we've been.

Here's a start:
1 Year [slashdot.org]
2 Years [slashdot.org]
5 Years [slashdot.org]

Modifying the URL to go to an arbitrary day is easy. Just modify the YYYYMMDD code in the URL:
http://slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=19990722

It would be nice to see the /. editors put together some slash-way-back stories to dig deeper into some of the more popular fads and see where they're at now.

Re:That's a lot of money

[jrumney]

The $50 was only for international traffic, traffic within NZ was charged at significantly lower rates (or not at all). The Universities got their traffic significantly cheaper, so what would usually happen was that Linux (and other useful free software) would get mirrored on one of the University ftp servers and everyone else would download from there. Binary newsgroups were also useful for more than just warez and porn in those days. The other tricks we used to use were to PASV FTP something onto the University web servers from overseas (without using our own bandwidth) then email the admin and ask them to put it the pub directory so you could download it, and to use FTP via email gateways (which usually took several days to get the file to you in chunks) to take advantage of the price differential. There's nothing like a financial incentive to make you learn how to use the old internet protocols to their fullest.