Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • Free Essays • My Term Papers • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Computers History of the PC History of the PC “If one thinks about it, it is truly remarkable how far the technology has advanced since the first digital computer was introduced in 1946. The ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was designed and built at the University of Pennsylvania. It weighed 30-tons and took up 1500 square feet of floor space. The first computer developed in Europe was the EDSAC (Electronic Delay-Storage Automatic Computer). This machine was built at Cambridge University in 1949. What characterized these earliest machines is that the switching and control functions were handled by vacuum tubes. This feature typifies what is termed the first-generation of computers. EDSAC had one feature that ENIAC lacked. Within the computer was stored the instructions to control the machine and the data to be operated upon. This was the first of the stored program computers. The first commercially available digital computer was the Sperry Rand UNIVAC I. This was sold to the Bureau of the Census and put in place in 1951. In the late 1950's the bulky and hot vacuum tubes were replaced in computer designs by smaller, more reliable solid state transistors. The use of transistors as the basic component of computer design characterizes what is known as the second generation of computers. 1963 brought about the start of third-generation computers. Solid-logic technology (SLT) enabled the development of the integrated circuit (IC). ICs allowed the placement of as many as 664 transistors, diodes and other associated components on silicon chip less than one eighth of an inch square. We are now in the midst of the fourth-generation of computers. Characterized by continued miniaturization of circuitry, such developments as large-scale integration (LSI) and very large-scale integration (VLSI) have enabled the current crop of machines to have a level of power and speed that was almost unimaginable 20 years ago. Now on to the history of the microcomputer. The first commercially available personal computer was the Scelbi-8H that went on sale in March 1974. The machine was designed around the Intel 8008 microprocessor, a less powerful 8-bit design than the later 8080. A machine in kit form with 1K of memory sold for $440.00. About 200 of these machines were sold in kit form and assembled. Half were the Scelbi-8H hobby machines, the rest were Scelbi-8B business computers, which were released in April 1975, having as much as 16K of memory. The first commercially successful microcomputer was the MITS Altair 8800 designed by Ed Roberts. It was introduced to the world as a cover story in the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. The Altair used the already mentioned Intel 8080 8-bit microprocessor. The most basic kit version was offered for sale at $397.00. A completely assembled and tested version sold for $498.00. However, what you got for your money was not a whole lot. What you did get was a blue and white box that housed a motherboard, a front panel with switches and lights indicating register contents, the power supply and 16 expansion slots. It came with no standard amount of memory or interfaces. The minimum usable configuration was an 8K system that MITS sold for $995.00. In addition to this you also needed a cassette interface and recorder, and a terminal. Therefore, a truly complete 8K system actually cost you about $1900.00. MITS sold thousands of Altairs. One of the features that made it a success and characterized most other successful future designs was its open architecture. Those 16 expansion slots made possible a wealth of alternatives that the designers of the machine could never have imagined. They allowed for growth and diversification of the machine spawned another complete industry of add-on board developers and manufacturers, and in so doing essentially guaranteed the success of the product. In addition to having the distinction of being the first commercially successful microcomputer, the Altair 8800 is also responsible for most of what we associate with microcomputers beyond the basic hardware itself. For example, the Altair User's Group was formed by MITS in 1975. That same year an Altair newsletter began publication. In March 1976, the MITS 1st World Altair Computer Convention (WACC) was held. The WACC holds the honor of being the first major microcomputer convention. The first retail computer outlets were set-up to sell Altairs. The open architecture enabled the rise of the add-on board industry. And finally, the high level computer language chosen by Ed Roberts to be used with the machine was none other than the version of BASIC developed by Paul Allen and Bill Gates from a new company called Microsoft. The next major development in the evolution of the microcomputer was the beginning of Apple Computer. In 1976, Steve Wozniak, a technician at Hewlett- Packard, attended Wescon (an electronics trade show) and purchased a few of the MOS Technology 6502 chips that were selling for $20.00 a piece. With this he wrote a BASIC language interpreter and then followed-up in the spring of 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club with the Apple I. The Apple I really wasn't a whole lot to write home about. It had no keyboard, no power supply and no case. It did however; impress Steve Jobs who was willing to form a company with Wozniak to sell the machines. It also impressed Paul Terrell who had in the previous year opened the first Byte Shop, a computer- related retail outlet, in Mountain View; CA. Terrell placed an order for 50 of the machines. Within the first few months of the venture, Wozniak and Jobs had managed to sell about 200 of the machines to retailers in the Bay Area at a price of $666.00 a piece. What really got the company off the ground was not the quality of the merchandise however, fine as it may have been, but the interest of A. C. 'Mike' Markkula. Markkula was an engineer who had also gotten a significant amount of business experience while working for Intel. Stock options with Intel had made him a millionaire and he retired at age 34. Markkula visited Wozniak and Jobs in their garage one day and was converted. After a few months, Markkula put up $91,000.00 of his own money and took an active role in the venture. He hired Mike Scott as president and within five years Apple was in the Fortune 500. The next major event in this chronicle occurred in 1977. It was in that year that three new microcomputer systems were introduced which started the industry in the direction we are now taking. At the first West Coast Computer Faire on April 15, the Commodore PET and the Apple II were presented, and on August 3 in New York the Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I was announced. By the fall of 1977, all three machines were shipping. Prior to the release of these machines, most people who purchased microcomputers bought them in kit form. Usually you could buy a kit for 25 to 30 percent less than the assembled version. With the arrival of these machines the emphasis went in the direction of the assembled systems. The Apple II, packaged in a molded plastic case, with BASIC in ROM, color graphics, an 8-bit 6502 processor and 4K of RAM cost $1298.00. The machine was equipped with eight expansion slots and became one of the most successful of microcomputers. The PET was designed by Chuck Peddle, formerly of MOS Technology, and like the Apple used the MOS 6502 microprocessor. The TRS-80 Model I was offered with 4K of memory, an uppercase only display capability, a limited version of BASIC and a cassette interface. It originally listed as an assembled machine for $399.00. 1978 saw the next major advance in microcomputer technology. In that year both Apple and Radio Shack introduced 5 1/4 inch disk drives. Anyone who has ever used cassette input/output (I/O), and I have, will know well what an improvement disk drives offered. This development also brought about the arrival of a multitude of software. Floppy drives made possible software that never could have existed without them. The next major development in the evolution of the microcomputer was the debut of the IBM PC in 1981. Big Blue did not break any new ground with its machine. In fact they followed very closely to the plan set by Apple. This included an open architecture. They provided five expansion slots to allow for extensive modification and customization of the basic machine. IBM also made available to developers a full set of electrical schematics for the computer and a printout and explanation of the ROM-based Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) which provides the hooks into the machine for hardware and software. IBM approached Bill Gates of Microsoft for a package of languages for their new machine. Being unfamiliar with the microcomputer industry, they also approached Gates for the rights to CP/M, the current industry standard operating system for microcomputers. Gates informed them that CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) was not his product, but that they should talk to Gary Kildall of Digital Research Corporation. Digital Research (formerly Intergalactic Digital Research) refused to sign IBM's nondisclosure agreement and so they went back to Microsoft to see if they could develop an operating system for them. Well, they did and the result was the ubiquitous PC-DOS (MS-DOS in the generic form marketed by Microsoft). When the original IBM PC was introduced in August 1981 it came equipped with a 8/16-bit Intel 8088 microprocessor operating at a clock speed of 4.77 MHz, 16K of RAM and a cassette interface and sold for $1265.00, $1565.00 with a Color/Graphics display adapter (CGA). A serious system configured to compete with an Apple II+ came with 48K RAM, one 160K floppy disk drive, PC-DOS and a CGA board. This would set you back $2630.00, slightly less than a 48K Apple II+. The impact of the IBM PC on the microcomputer industry was unprecedented. This machine and its so-called clones, all utilizing the MS-DOS operating system and some variation on the Intel 8086/88 family of microprocessors, have thoroughly dominated the business market. IBM compatibility became almost essential for a machine to have any success as a business system. In addition, hundreds of manufacturers of add-on boards, IBM specific software and clones owe their very existence to the revolution that this essentially mediocre machine started. On January 24, 1984, the next major element in the evolution of the microcomputer was introduced: the Apple Macintosh. This diminutive computer didn't resemble anything currently considered normal in the world of personal computers. The Mac, as it soon became called, was certainly an innovation. Just about everything about it was different from the norm. The machine had a nine inch high-resolution, black and white, no color, monitor; 128K of RAM that was not expandable; a single 400K 3 ½ inch micro floppy disk drive; no expansion slots; a keyboard with no function keys, numeric keypad or cursor control keys; a 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 microprocessor operating at a clock speed of 7.8336 MHz; a mouse used as a cursor control device; and a user-interface designed for 'the rest of us.' The initial list price for this 'toaster' of personal computers was $2495.00. The most prominent feature of this system, however, was the user-interface and the mouse. The Mac employed an interface that has come to be known as a desktop environment. This typically employs overlapping windows, smaller sections of a screen containing output from parts of an application; icons, small graphic symbols representing various computer functions; and the mouse input device. The Macintosh was not the first to employ this type of interface. For that you must go back to 1981 and the Xerox 8010 Star Information System, and to some extent even earlier to the experimental Xerox Alto computer in the late 1970s. This type of interface was later adopted by Niklaus Wirth in his Lilith project, and then released by Apple one year before the Macintosh with the Lisa. The Macintosh however, was the first machine to popularize this type of user interface. The Mac, while being somewhat of a technological breakthrough, was not without its shortcomings. First, 128K of memory was nowhere near enough memory for significant business applications. 128K itself was actually a deceptive figure. With the amount of system overhead required to support the user interface, far less free memory was really available to the user. Another commonly cited fault was its lack of expansion capability. With no internal expansion slots and no provision for a second internal floppy disk drive the machine was short on flexibility. The lack of color display capability was another oft cited failing. Finally, the inability of the Macintosh to run MS-DOS kept the machine out of the mainstream of business application software. Well, since 1984 the Mac has evolved quite a bit from the original 128K machine. The machine progressed over the years to the Fat Mac, Mac Plus, Macintosh SE, Macintosh II, various Power Macs and the latest incarnation, the iMac. Through this advancement all of the previously mentioned deficiencies have been redressed. 1984 saw the introduction of another major new machine as well, this time from IBM. By the fall of the year the IBM PC AT (for Advanced Technology) had hit the market. While not as technologically innovative as the Macintosh, the AT offered significant advancement of the standard IBM had established three years before. The salient features of the AT included a true 16-bit Intel 80286 microprocessor operating at 6 MHz, a 1.2Mb high-density floppy disk drive, 256K of memory that was expandable to 3Mb and eight expansion slots. The basic machine listed for $3995.00. The AT offered greater performance while still maintaining software compatibility with the existing MS-DOS software base. It also provided a platform for the next generation of software operating under OS/2. In 1987 IBM released its PS/2 line of personal computers. To a large extent these differed quite a bit from the PC/XT/AT line of machines that preceded them. The Personal System/2 computers sported 3½ - inch micro floppy drives, onboard graphics support and a modular assembly design. With the exception of the low-end Model 30, these machines boasted a new hardware bus called the Micro Channel, which, while not compatible with the older AT bus, offered instead high-speed data and I/O transfers, sharing resources and multi-processing support. The Model 80 was the first IBM machine to make use of the 16MHz Intel 80386 32-bit microprocessor. This remained IBM's high-end machine until the 25 MHz Model 70 was introduced in 1988. In addition to design differences from the PC/XT/AT line, IBM had decided to reduce some of the openness that had been associated with that line as well. For example, the ROM BIOS listing was not published, only the entry points were made available. As well, IBM, while documenting the electrical signals to the Micro Channel bus, patented the design. The next chapter in this story brings back one of the pioneers in the field, Steve Jobs, formerly of Apple Computer. Jobs had been ousted as Chairman of Apple in 1985 as a result of a power struggle with his hand-picked choice for president, John Sculley, formerly of Pepsi. Upon his departure he took with him some of the best talent at Apple and set up a new company called NeXT, Inc. After three years of work, seven million dollars of his own money and 20 million dollars in backing from H. Ross Perot, Jobs unveiled with great fanfare on October 12, 1988, the fruit of his labors, 'the cube.' Received with mixed reviews by the industry, the machine was nonetheless certainly of technological significance. Termed 'the machine for the nineties' by Jobs, the stark, matte-black one foot cube packed quite a punch. For $6500.00 you got a machine powered by a Motorola 68030 32-bit microprocessor running at 25 MHz, a 68882 math coprocessor, and 8Mb of RAM standard. The cube was connected to a 17-inch very high resolution monochrome monitor providing an excellent display. Mass storage on the machine was handled by a magneto-optical drive. The drive accepted 3 ½ - inch removable cartridges that hold 256Mb each. These drives operated on the same principal as compact disks utilizing laser technology. As well, the cube had a digital signal processing (DSP) chip enabling the machine to produce compact disk quality music in addition to sending and receiving voice mail. NeXT ran a version of UNIX called Mach as the operating system. UNIX, a multi-user, multitasking operating system, was originally developed at Bell Labs in the early 1970s to run on large time-sharing systems. The rather user-unfriendly command syntax of UNIX was hidden by NeXT's windowing user interface called the Workspace Manager. The Workspace interface used a desktop metaphor like that on the Macintosh; however its implementation was not at all similar to the Mac. There was also quite a bit of software bundled with NeXT's cube. In addition to the Mach operating system, the machine came with a C compiler, a text database, electronic mail, a word processor, a file manager, plus Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations and the complete works of Shakespeare. Despite its innovations, the NeXT cube never took-off. NeXT got out of the hardware business and the software side of the business was bought by Apple in the mid-90s. Through most of the nineties, hardware continued to make significant advances with the IBM PC-compatibles effectively owning the business market. The graphical user interface offered by the Macintosh was emulated by the Microsoft Windows operating system. This basically eliminated any advantage that the Mac had over the IBM PC world. While the hardware advances were certainly impressive, with the current crop of PCs capable of running at a screaming 450 MHz, the real story of the ‘90s was Microsoft Windows. While the first version of the Microsoft Windows operating environment was released back in 1985, the first truly useable version entered the scene in May of 1990. Released as version 3.0, this was the first successful attempt on the part of the Microsoft/Intel side of the computer world to really challenge the Macintosh head-on. Version 3.0 was a tremendous step-up from previous iterations and leaps and bounds beyond the c:* of DOS. Nonetheless, it still couldn’t compare to the tightly integrated graphical environment offered by the Macs. But Microsoft kept on trying. A couple of years later, in 1992, they submitted Windows version 3.1 which was a big improvement over version 3.0. Then in August of 1995, Microsoft finally rolled-out their long-anticipated new release, Windows 95. This was by far the most mature and effective version to date. And it actually gave the Mac folks a run for their money. The latest version of the operating system is called Windows 98. Released in June of 1998, this version added some polish to Windows 95, and integrated the operating system very tightly with the Internet. Microsoft also developed a more business oriented line of operating systems (OS) in parallel with those listed above. Known as Windows NT (for New Technology), this OS is primarily designed for computers linked together in a network environment. The most current version of NT, as of this writing, is the soon to be released Microsoft Windows NT 5.0. Apple Computer was founded as a garage start-up by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. The company launched the personal computer revolution in 1978 with the first all-purpose PC, the Apple II. Then came the Macintosh computer in 1984, that was so easy to use, made desk-top-publishing a reality, and had a ten-year jump on the industry. But then something went very wrong at Apple and soon the company that brought about the personal computer revolution and a computer that was "insanely great" today tentatively clings to a mere 3.7 percent share of the market that it helped to create. Jim Carlton has written the most detailed study to date of the past decade of Apple's history. He portrays a company that designed computers for "the rest of us," ad what might of been and what really happened to the computer company that changed the world. It all began with two young men, one a born salesman and one a born engineer. Together they made magic with the Apple II, but when IBM entered the PC market Apple had completion. After a trip to Xerox PARC Jobs and company came back to Apple with a new computing system. At first the system failed because the Lisa, as it was called, was way over-priced. but Apple got it right when the first Macintosh was introduced and was an astounding success. At that time a bitter internal struggle between the ones that backed the Apple II and the ones who backed the Macintosh started to pull the company apart. Then internal debates within management set Apple on a devastating course of lost opportunities. Unable to license out the Macintosh Operating System, unable to offer lower priced Macs, unable to reward people for the work they had done, unable to reign in cost, and unable to keep a permanent CEO first starting with Steve Jobs, then John Sculley, to Michael Spindler, and now back to Steve Jobs. After the failure to support the clone makers, providing PCs', unable to keep up with demand, and unable to compete with Bill Gates has left Apple in a vulnerable state. What is the future of Apple? In this book Jim Carlton captures the culture of Apple and of Silicon Valley and how it all went wrong. A fascinating and troubling account of a company that had so much promise and threw it all away Microsoft is the dominate software company by owning the operating systems and basic applications programs that run on the majority of the world's computers. Much of the success is owed to the unquestioned genius and vision of Bill Gates, but created is also due to the hard work of the employees of Microsoft and their dedication. the authors, eminent scientists, have spent two years of on site observation at Microsoft headquarters to uncover the strategies that characterize exactly how Microsoft competes and operates. Microsoft follows a strategy of finding the smartest people who know the technology and the business, from the CEO to the managers to the employees. In companies where technology is central to their business, it is necessary to manage creative people with technical skills and empower people in their specialties. Microsoft also follows the strategy of entering evolving mass markets with products, push volume sales and exclusive contracts to ensure that Microsoft products become and remain industry standards. Then incrementally improve new products to make old products obsolete. Define products and development processes that supports its competitive strategy. Microsoft tries to work quickly and deliver lots of products and features at low prices to a broad variety of customers. Through continuous self-critiquing, feedback, and sharing Microsoft learns from past and present projects and products to improve the company and future projects. And finally: Attack the future. Study how products, markets, and technologies seem to be evolving and integrate products so that to use one product others products must be used also. Microsoft Secrets tell how Microsoft and its leader organizes, competes, and wins, and will continue to do so. What makes Intel and Andy Grove tick? In many ways the same thing. Intel Corporation was created in 1968 by two founders that were middle-aged, prosperous, and leading figures in the computer industry. Robert Noyce, aged forty, had been the general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor and was one of the creators of the integrated circuit. He was also a boy scout and received his Ph.D. from M.I.T.. Gordon Moore was the head of research and development of Fairchild, the winner of numerous important patents and received his Ph.D. from Caltech. Before starting Intel they had been part of start-ups Shockley Laboratories and then Fairchild, but decided to start their own computer company. After founding the company Moore and Noyce hired Andy Grove as Director of Operations. Born in Hungry in 1936 as Andras Graf he came to the United States in 1956, by 1963 he had received his Ph.D., got a job at Fairchild Semiconductor in the R&D department and lectured at UC Berkeley. The ultimate details guy, Grove was perfect to propel Intel to the successes it would achieve. Intel rose to dominance through technological innovation, aggressive marketing, tough business tactics, and the liberal use of legal firepower. Intel uses the threat of lawsuits and a team of private investigators against their employees to keep them from going astray as well as to head off outside attempts to discover its secrets. as evidenced by Intel's seven year battle with AMD, a rival chip manufacturer, that at one point threatened to divide the entire computer industry. This book is also the story of Andrew Grove whose unpopular and controversial decisions have kept Intel at the top of the chip market. A good, behind-the-scenes look at the computer industry and its effect on peoples' lives. This is the behind-the-scenes, blow-by-blow drama of a company's initial public offering, or IPO. "Going public" is the pivotal moment when a company makes its first public sell of stock. Part of the magic are hot start-up firms catapulted into the headlines with stories of share holding staff members reaping millions, and executives becoming business legends overnight. The company is MIPS Computer Systems, Inc., one of Silicon Valley's most innovative firms and the first technology company to go public in the nineties. The story of individuals putting in one-hundred-hour work weeks and constantly forcing down risk with entrepreneurs battling to keep the company going while running the gauntlet of investors, stock analysts, underwriters, and the SEC. The story of a young electronics firm attempting to develop a pioneering technology and to achieve capital investment necessary for future growth. Given full access to the company's records and staff, and personalities of such people as MIPS's veteran CEO, Robert Miller, it quick-thinking attorney, Bob Latta, to Connie Nga Dang, an immigrant assembly-line worker who dreams of rescuing her husband from Vietnam. A look at a company that is trying to fulfill the new American Dream in this age of high-tech companies. Lawrence Joseph Ellison was born on August 17, 1944, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His mother was nineteen years old and unmarried, his father was nowhere to be found. When Larry was nine months old he got pneumonia and almost died. Unable to take care of the baby, Larry was sent to live with his aunt and uncle Lillian and Louis Ellison who adopted him and gave him their name, at age twelve Larry learned that he was adopted. Larry grew up in the affluent North Side of Chicago and after graduating from high school he enrolled in the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, but left the university in his sophomore year. He later enrolled in the University of Chicago which went nowhere and in the summer of 1966 he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and go a job as a programmer. Over the next few years he did computer related work for a series of big corporations as a systems programmer. In 1973 Larry Ellison began working at Ampex, an audio and video equipment company that was working on a way to store a terabit of data using videotape. There Larry met Bob Miner and began a collaboration that would become the longest-lasting and the most lucrative in the history of Silicon Valley. In 1977 with Bob Minor and Ed Oates, the three programmers found a software contracting company. Called System Development Corporation it started with a twelve hundred dollar investment that doubled its sales in eleven of its first twelve years. SDC filled a niche for companies that needed software that was compatible with all their computers. A success, SDC got a new name, Relational Software Inc., and then Oracle. Oracle software is everywhere from ATMs to airline reservations to data bases and government agencies. Although unsuccessful in his bid for Apple computer, he is now on Apple's board, his next vision is the network computer. A look at a man who fermented the computer revolution in the office who sees no end for his successes. A fascinating look at a man who is out to change the world, and make money at it! The personal computer (PC) has revolutionized business and personal activities and even the way people talk and think; however, its development has been less of a revolution than an evolution and convergence of three critical elements - thought, hardware, and software. Although the PC traces its lineage to the mainframe and minicomputers of the 1950s and 1960s, the conventional thought that was prevalent during the first thirty years of the computer age saw no value in a small computer that could be used by individuals. A PC is a microcomputer, so named because it is smaller than a minicomputer, which in turn is smaller than a mainframe computer. While early mainframes and their peripheral devices often took up the floor space of a house, minicomputers are about the size of a refrigerator and stove. The microcomputer, whose modern development traces back to the early 1970s, and fits on a desk. From the start, the creation of the computer was centered around the concept that a single unit would be used to perform complex calculations with greater speed and accuracy than humans could achieve. On December 23, 1947, one of the most far-reaching technologies of the 20th Century was developed at Bell Laboratories by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley - the transistor. But the transistor wasn't available to U.S. manufacturers until 1956, when a seven year-old antitrust law suit against AT&T, the owners of Bell Labs, was settled. The judgment required that AT&T give away licenses to manufacture the transistor to American companies. Following this decision, the transistor was used to replace thousands of vacuum tubes in computers and began the miniaturization of electronics. Because it drastically reduced the size and heat considerations of the large vacuum tubes, the transistor enabled the computer to become a viable tool for business and government. From the beginning, computers baffled the populous with their capability. In corporate and government offices and on university campuses, information processing departments sprouted up to serve the computer. The IBM 701, which was introduced in 1952 as a business computer, was comprised of several units that could be shipped and connected at a customer's location, rather than the earlier massive units that had to be assembled on site. In 1953, IBM began shipping the first mass-produced computer, the IBM 650. IBM introduced the first solid-state (transistorized) computer in 1959, the IBM 7090. Then in 1964, IBM culminated over $1 billion in research when it brought out the System/360 series of computers. Unlike other mainframes, the System/360 computers were compatible with each other. By 1960, the computer was king. Companies hired armies of technicians and programmers to write its operating programs and software, fix it, and allocate the precious computer time. The capability of the machines was more than a mere mortal could fathom, but gathering raw data and "keying" it in so the computer could "crunch the numbers" was a complicated and time-consuming task. Frustrations abounded, computer errors were called "glitches," and the phrases "garbage in/garbage out," "It's a computer mistake," and "Sorry, the computer's down and we can't do anything," were introduced into the lexicon. On college campuses in the 1960s, students carried bundles of computer cards to and from class, hoping that their share of the valuable computer time would not be bumped or allocated to someone else. The term, "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate," was coined so people wouldn't disable the process of feeding the punched computer cards into punch card readers, where the intricate patterns of holes were decoded. The computer mystique was reinforced in people every time they heard of some new accomplishment. In 1961, a computer calculated the value of pi to 100,000 decimal places. A computer could play checkers, and in 1967 a chess playing computer program was made an honorary member of the United States Chess Federation. Banks began printing checks with magnetic ink so they could be processed by the computers. Until 1971, nobody even thought of a computer as anything but a big, fast, electronic brain that resided in a climate-controlled room and consumed data and electricity in massive quantities. In 1971, an Intel 4004 chip containing 4004 transistors was programmed to perform complex mathematical calculations; the hand-held calculator was born. Suddenly, scientists and engineers could carry the computational power of a computer with them to job sites, classrooms, and laboratories; but the hand-held calculator, like the ENIAC before it, was not yet a computer. The microprocessor was developed by Robert Noyce, the founder of Intel and one of the inventors of the integrated circuit, and brought with it a change in the way people worked. Small, hand-held calculators had provided an idea, or at least a "what if," to some people. Still, in the early 1970s, computers were used for number crunching and printing out long streams of green and white paper. IBM Selectric typewriters were the top of the line "word processors" and Xerox copiers churned out photocopies. Most people never imagined that a computer could process data in real time, be used to write letters, In 1972, Intel brought out its 8008 chip, capable of processing 8-bits of data, enough to convey numbers and letters of the alphabet. In that same year, Xerox began working on a personal computer at their Palo Alto Research Center. For the next several years, a team of Xerox scientists worked on the "Alto," a small computer that would have become the first PC if only the development team had been able to convince someone of Likewise, in 1972 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a minicomputer manufacturing company headed by Kenneth Olsen, had a group of product engineers developing the DEC Datacenter. This PC incorporated not only the computer hardware but the desk as well. The DEC Datacenter could have put tremendous computing capability in the home or at work, but management saw no value to the product and halted its In the end, none of the giant companies whose names had been synonymous with computers would introduce the PC to the world. There seemed to be no future in an inexpensive product that would replace the million dollar "Big Iron" that they were selling as fast as they could make them. The people who eventually introduced the PC were rebels. Many had spent time in the bowels of the big companies and were frustrated by the lack of vision they encountered. They retreated into their own garages and attended meetings with other "computer nuts" who saw a much different future than the one laid out over the previous 30 years by the giants of the computer industry. In 1975, Rubik's Cube was put on store shelves and proved to many that the human brain was incapable of complex problem solving. But a ray of hope also appeared; the first PC was introduced. Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems, Inc. (MITS) sold a kit for the MITS Altair 8800 that enabled computer hobbyists to assemble their own computers. It had no monitor, no keyboard, no printer, and couldn't store data, but the demand for it, like Rubik's Cube, was overwhelming. The Altair proved that a PC was both possible and popular, but only with those people who would spend hours in their basements with soldering irons and wire strippers. The Altair, which looked like a control panel for a sprinkler system, didn't last, but it helped launch one of the largest companies in the computer world and gave a couple of young software programmers a start. In 1974, Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair and started a company called Microsoft Corporation. In 1976, another computer kit was sold to hobbyists - the Apple I. Stephen Wozniak sold his Volkswagen and Steve Jobs sold his programmable calculator to get enough money to start Apple. In 1977, they introduced the Apple II, a pre-assembled PC with a color monitor, sound, and graphics. It was popular, but everyone knew that a serious computer didn't need any of this. The kits were just a hobby and the Apple II was seen as a toy. Even the Apple name wasn't a serious, corporate sounding name like IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, or Control Data. But 1977 also brought competition. The Zilog Z-80 microprocessor, which had been introduced in 1975, was used in the Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80, affectionately called the "Trash 80." Apple, Commodore, and Tandy dominated the PC marketplace. The Apple II had 16K bytes of RAM and 16K bytes of ROM; Commodore Business Machines' Personal Electronic Transactor (PET) included 4K RAM and 14K ROM; and the TRS-80 Also in 1977, the Central Program for Microprocessors (CP/M) operating system was developed by Digital Research and Gary Kildall. From its introduction until 1980, CP/M was used in most PCs, but even that did not guarantee that a program or document could be written on one machine and read on another because each manufacturer used different floppy disk drives. Apple introduced the floppy disk drive in 1978, allowing Apple II users to store data on something other than the cumbersome and unreliable tape cassettes that had been used up to that point. But despite the popularity of the three PCs, non-computer people still saw little reason to buy an expensive calculator when there were other ways to do the same things. In 1979, that all changed. When VisiCalc was introduced for the Apple II, non-computer people suddenly saw a reason to buy a computer. VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program created by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, allowed people to change one number in a budget and watch the effect it had on the entire budget. It was something new and valuable that could only be done with a computer. For thousands of people, the toy, the computer few could find a use for, had been transformed into a device that could actually do something worthwhile. Microprocessors and high-tech gadgets were gradually worming their way into people's lives. In 1978, Sony introduced the Beta format video cassette recorder, and a year later the VHS video recorder and the Sony Walkman. And to remind everyone of how far we had to go, Star Trek: The Motion Picture came to theaters in 1979. The Sinclair ZX-80 PC, which hit the market in 1980, used the same Z-80 chip as Commodore's PET and the Tandy TRS-80. The ZX-80 had 1K RAM and 4K ROM. Developed by British entrepreneur Clive Sinclair, the ZX-80 meant that people could enter the computer revolution for under $200. Its small size and price attracted people who had never thought about owning a PC. The Commodore VIC-20, also introduced in 1980, had a color monitor and would eventually become the first PC to sell more than one million Even with all of the success the early PC manufacturers had in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the advances in microprocessor speeds, and the creation of software, the PC was still not seen as a serious business tool. Unknown to everyone in the computer industry; however, a huge oak tree was about to drop an acorn that would fall close to the tree and change In 1971, Dr. Ted Hoff puts together all the elements of a computer processor on a single silicon chip slightly larger than one square inch. The result of his efforts is the Intel 4004, the world's first commercially available microprocessor. The chip is a 4-bit computer containing 2,300 transistors (invented in 1948) that can perform 60,000 instructions per second. Designed for use in a calculator, it sells for $200. Intel sells more than 100,000 calculators based on the 4004 chip. Almost overnight, the chip finds thousands of applications, paving the way for today's computer-oriented world, and for the mass production of computer chips now containing millions of transistors. The first commercially available microcomputer, the Altair 880, is the first machine to be called a "personal computer." It has 64 KB of memory and an open 100-line bus structure. Selling for about $400, the Altair 880 comes in a kit to be assembled by the user. Two young college students, Paul Allen and Bill Gates, unveil the BASIC language interpreter for the Altair computer. During summer vacation, the pair form a company called Microsoft, which eventually grows into the largest software company in the world. At Bell Labs, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie develop the C programming language, which quickly becomes the most popular professional application development language. Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs build the Apple I computer. It is less powerful than the Altair, but also less expensive and less complicated. Users must connect their own keyboard and video display, and have the option of mounting the computer's motherboard in any container they choose whether a metal case, a wooden box, or a briefcase. Jobs and Wozniak form the Apple Computer Company together on April Fool's Day, naming it after their favorite snack food. The Apple II computer is unveiled. It comes already assembled in a case, with a built-in keyboard. Users must plug in their own TVs for monitors. Fully assembled microcomputers hit the general market, with Radio Shack, Commodore, and Apple all selling models. Sales are slow because neither businesses nor the general public know exactly what to do with these new machines. Datapoint Corporation announces Attached Resource Computing Network (ARCnet), the first commercial LAN technology intended for use with microcomputer applications. Intel releases the 8086 microprocessor, a 16-bit chip that sets a new standard for power, capacity, and speed in microprocessors. Epson announces the MX-80 dot-matrix printer, coupling high performance with a relatively low price. (Epson from Japan sets up operations in the U.S. in 1975 as Epson America, Inc., and becomes one of the first of many foreign companies to contribute to the growth of the PC industry. Up until this point, it has been U.S. companies only. According to Epson, they gain 60 percent of the dot printer market with the MX-80.) Intel introduces the 8088 microprocessor, featuring 16-bit internal architecture and an 8-bit external bus. Motorola introduces the 68000 chip, used in early Macintosh computers. Software Arts, Inc. releases VisiCalc, the first commercial spreadsheet program for personal computers. VisiCalc is generally credited as being the program that paved the way for the personal computer in the business world. Bob Metcalf, the developer of Ethernet, forms 3Com Corp. to develop Ethernet-based networking products. Ethernet eventually evolves into the world's most widely used network system. MicroPro International introduces WordStar, the first commercially successful word processing program for IBM-compatible microcomputers. IBM chooses Microsoft (co-founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen) to provide the operating system for its upcoming PC. Microsoft purchases a program developed by Seattle Computer Products called Q-DOS (for Quick and Dirty Operating System), and modifies it to run on IBM hardware. Bell Laboratories invents the Bellmac-32, the first single-chip microprocessor with 32-bit internal architecture and a 32-bit data bus. Lotus Development Corporation unveils the Lotus 1-2-3 integrated spreadsheet program, combining spreadsheet, graphics, and database features in one package. IBM introduces the IBM-PC, with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 CPU, 16 KB of memory, a keyboard, a monitor, one or two 5.25-inch floppy drives, and a price tag of $2,495. Hayes Microcomputer Products, Inc., introduces the SmartModem 300, which quickly becomes the industry standard. Xerox unveils the Xerox Star computer. Its high price eventually dooms the computer to commercial failure, but its features inspire a whole new direction in computer design. Its little box on wheels (the first mouse) can execute commands on screen (the first graphical user interface). Intel releases the 80286, a 16-bit microprocessor. AutoCAD, a program for designing 2-D and 3-D objects, is released. AutoCAD will go on to revolutionize the architecture and engineering industries. Work begins on the development of TCP/IP. The term Internet is used for the first time to describe the worldwide network of networks that is emerging from the ARPANET. Time magazine features the computer as the 1982 "Machine of the Year," acknowledging the computer's new role in society. Apple introduces the Lisa, the first commercial computer with a purely graphical operating system and a mouse. The industry is excited, but Lisa's $10,000 price tag discourages buyers. IBM unveils the IBM-PC XT, essentially a PC with a hard disk and more memory. The XT can store programs and data on its built-in 10MB hard disk. The first version of C++ programming language is developed, allowing programs to be written in reusable independent pieces, called objects. The Compaq Portable is released, the first successful 100 percent PC-compatible clone. Despite its hefty 28 pounds, it becomes one of the first computers to be lugged through airports. Adobe Systems releases its PostScript system, allowing printers to produce crisp print in a number of typefaces, as well as elaborate graphic images. Apple introduces the "user-friendly" Macintosh microcomputer. IBM ships the IBM-PC AT, a 6 MHz computer using the Intel 80286 processor, which sets the standard for personal computers running DOS. IBM introduces its Token Ring networking system. Reliable and redundant, it can send packets at 4 Mbps; several years later it speeds up to16 Mbps. Satellite Software International introduces the WordPerfect word processing program. Intel releases the 80386 processor (also called the 386), a 32-bit processor that can address more than 4 billion bytes of memory and performs ten times faster than the 80286. Aldus releases PageMaker for the Macintosh, the first desktop publishing software for microcomputers. Coupled with Apple's LaserWriter printer and Adobe's PostScript system, PageMaker ushers in the era of desktop publishing.Microsoft announces the Windows 1.0 operating environment, featuring the first graphical user interface for PCs. Hewlett-Packard introduces the Laser Jet laser printer, featuring 300 dpi resolution. IBM delivers the PC convertible, IBM's first laptop computer and the first Intel-based computer with a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. Microsoft sells its first public stock for $21 per share, raising $61 million in the initial public offering. The First International Conference on CD-ROM technology is held in Seattle, hosted by Microsoft. Compact disks are seen as the storage medium of the future for computer users. IBM unveils the new PS/2 line of computers, featuring a 20-MHz 80386 processor at its top end. This product line includes the MicroChannel bus, but is not a great success because consumers do not want to replace industry standard peripherals. To compete with IBM's MicroChannel architecture, a group of other computer makers introduces the EISA (Extended Industry Standard Architecture) bus. IBM introduces its Video Graphics Array (VGA) monitor offering 256 colors at 320 x 200 resolution, and 16 colors at 640 x 480. The Macintosh II computer, aimed at the desktop publishing market, is introduced by Apple Computer. It features an SVGA monitor. Apple Computer introduced HyperCard, a programming language for the Macintosh, which uses the metaphor of a stack of index cards to represent a program—a kind of visual programming language. Motorola unveils its 68030 microprocessor. Novell introduces its network operating system, called NetWare. IBM and Microsoft ship OS/2 1.0, the first multitasking desktop operating system. High price, a steep learning curve, and incompatibility with existing PCs contribute to its lack of market share. Apple Computer files the single biggest lawsuit in the computer industry against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, claiming copyright infringement of its operating system and graphical user interface. Ashton-Tate sues Fox Software and The Santa Cruz Operation, alleging copyright infringement of dBase. Hewlett-Packard introduces the first popular ink jet printer, the HP Deskjet. Steve Jobs' new company, NeXT, Inc., unveils the NeXT computer, featuring a 25-MHz Motorola 68030 processor. The NeXT is the first computer to use object-oriented programming in its operating system and an optical drive rather than a floppy drive. Apple introduces the Apple CD SC, a CD-ROM storage device allowing access to up to 650 MB of data. A virus called the "Internet Worm" is released on the Internet, disabling about ten percent of all Internet host computers. Intel releases the 80486 chip (also called the 486), the world's first one-million-transistor microprocessor. The 486 integrates a 386 CPU and math coprocessor onto the same chip. Tim Berners-Lee develops software around the hypertext concept, enabling users to click on a word or phrase in a document and jump either to another location within the document or to another file. This software provides the foundation for the development of the World Wide Web, and is the basis for the first Web browsers. The World Wide Web is created at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland for use by scientific researchers. Microsoft's Word for Windows introduction begins the "Microsoft Office" suite adoption by millions of users. Previously, Word for DOS had been the second-highest-selling word processing package behind Word Perfect. Microsoft releases Windows 3.0, shipping 1 million copies in four months. A multimedia PC specification setting the minimum hardware requirements for sound and graphics components of a PC is announced at the Microsoft Multimedia Developers' Conference. The National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET) replaces ARPANET as the backbone of the Internet. Motorola announces its 32-bit microprocessor, the 68040, incorporating 1.2 million transistors. Apple Computer launches the PowerBook series of battery-powered portable computers. Apple, IBM, and Motorola sign a cooperative agreement to design and produce RISC-based chips, integrate the Mac OS into IBM's enterprise systems, produce a new object-oriented operating system, and develop common multimedia standards. The result is the PowerPC microprocessor. With an estimated 25 million users, the Internet becomes the world's largest electronic mail network. In Apple Computer's five-year copyright infringement lawsuit, Judge Vaughn Walker rules in favor of defendants Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, finding that the graphical user interface in dispute is not covered under Apple's copyrights. Microsoft ships the Windows 3.1 operating environment, including improved memory management and TrueType fonts. IBM introduces its ThinkPad laptop computer. Mosaic, a point-and-click graphical Web browser, is developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), making the Internet accessible to those outside the scientific community. Intel, mixing elements of its 486 design with new processes, features, and technology, delivers the long-awaited Pentium processor. It offers a 64-bit data path and more than 3.1 million transistors. Apple Computer expands its entire product line, adding the Macintosh Color Classic, Macintosh LC III, Macintosh Centris 610 and 650, Macintosh Quadra 800, and the Powerbooks 165c and 180c. Apple introduces the Newton MessagePad at the Macworld convention, selling 50,000 units in the first ten weeks. Microsoft ships the Windows NT operating system. IBM ships its first RISC-based RS/6000 workstation, featuring the PowerPC 601 chip developed jointly by Motorola, Apple, and IBM. 1994 Apple introduces the Power Macintosh line of microcomputers based on the PowerPC chip. This line introduces RISC to the desktop market. RISC was previously available only on high-end workstations. Netscape Communications releases the Netscape Navigator program, a World Wide Web browser based on the Mosaic standard, but with more advanced features. Online service providers CompuServe, America Online, and Prodigy add Internet access to their services. After two million Pentium-based PCs have hit the market, a flaw in the chip's floating-point unit is found by Dr. Thomas Nicely. His report is made public on CompuServe. Linus Torvalds releases Linux, a freeware version of UNIX created by a worldwide collaboration of programmers who shared their work over the Internet. Intel releases the Pentium Pro microprocessor. Motorola releases the PowerPC 604 chip, developed jointly with Apple and IBM. Microsoft releases its Windows 95 operating system with a massive marketing campaign, including prime-time TV commercials. Seven million copies are sold the first month, with sales reaching 26 million by year's end. Netscape Communications captures more than 80 percent of the World Wide Web browser market, going from a start-up company to a $2.9 billion company in one year. A group of developers at Sun Microsystems create the Java development language. Because it enables programmers to develop applications that will run on any platform, Java is seen as the future of operating systems, applications, and the World Wide Web. Power Computing ships the first-ever Macintosh clones, the Power 100 series with a PowerPC 601 processor. Intel announces the 200 MHz Pentium processor. U.S. Robotics releases the PalmPilot, a personal digital assistant that quickly gains enormous popularity because of its rich features and ease of use. Microsoft adds Internet connection capability to its Windows 95 operating system. Several vendors introduce Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) authoring tools that provide simple interfaces and drag-and-drop editing features to create three-dimensional worlds with color, texture, motion video, and sound on the Web. The U.S. Congress enacts the Communications Decency Act as part of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. The act mandates fines of up to $100,000 and prison terms for transmission of any "comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image or other communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent" over the Internet. The day the law is passed, millions of Web page backgrounds turn black in protest. The law is immediately challenged on Constitutional grounds, ultimately deemed unconstitutional, and repealed. Intel announces MMX technology, which increases the multimedia capabilities of a micro-processor. Also, Intel announces the Pentium II microprocessor. It has speeds of up to 333 MHz and introduces a new design in packaging, the Single Edge Contact (SEC) cartridge. It has more than 7.5 million transistors. AMD and Cyrix step up efforts to compete with Intel for the $1000-and-less PC market. Their competing processors are used by PC makers such as Dell, Compaq, Gateway, and even IBM. The U.S. Justice Department charges Microsoft with an antitrust lawsuit, claiming Microsoft was practicing anticompetitive behavior by forcing PC makers to bundle its Internet Explorer Web browser with Windows 95. Netscape Communications and Microsoft release new versions of their Web browser. Netscape's Communicator 4 and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4 provide a full suite of Internet tools, including Web browser, newsreader, HTML editor, conferencing program, and e-mail application. Digital Video/Versatile Disk (DVD) technology is introduced. Capable of storing computer, audio, and video data, a single DVD disk can hold an entire movie. DVD is seen as the storage technology for the future, ultimately replacing standard CD-ROM technology in PC and home entertainment systems. Microsoft releases the Windows 98 operating system. Seen mainly as an upgrade to Windows 95, Windows 98 is more reliable and less susceptible to crashes. It also offers improved Internet-related features, including a built-in copy of the Internet Explorer Web browser. The Department of Justice expands its actions against Microsoft, attempting to block the release of Windows 98 unless Microsoft agrees to remove the Internet Explorer browser from the operating system. Microsoft fights back and a lengthy trial begins in federal court, as the government attempts to prove that Microsoft is trying to hold back competitors such as Netscape. Intel releases two new versions of its popular Pentium II chip. The Pentium II Celeron offers slower performance than the standard PII, but is aimed at the $1,000-and-less PC market, which quickly embraces this chip. At the high end, the Pentium II Xeon is designed for use in high-performance workstations and server systems, and it is priced accordingly. Both chips boost Intel's market share, reaching deeper into more vertical markets. Apple Computer releases the colorful iMac, an all-in-one system geared to a youthful market. The small, lightweight system features the new G3 processor, which outperforms Pentium II-based PCs in many respects. The iMac uses only USB connections, forcing many users to purchase adapters for system peripherals, and the computer does not include a floppy disk drive. Intel unveils the Pentium III processor, which features 9.5 million transistors. Although the Pentium III's performance is not vastly superior to the Pentium II, it features enhancements that take greater advantage of graphically rich applications and Web sites. A more powerful version of the chip (named Xeon) is also released, for use in higher-end workstations and network server systems. With its Athlon microprocessor, Advanced Micro Devices finally releases a Pentium-class chip that outperforms the Pentium III processor. The advance is seen as a boon for the lower-price computer market, which relies heavily on chips from Intel's competitors. Apple Computer introduces updated versions of its popular iMac computer, including a laptop version, as well as the new G4 system, with performance rated at 1 gigaflop, meaning the system can perform more than one billion floating point operations per second. The world braces for January 1, 2000, as fears of the "Millennium Bug" come to a head. As airlines, government agencies, financial institutions, utilities, and PC owners scramble to make their systems "Y2K-compliant," some people panic, afraid that basic services will cease operation when the year changes from 1999 to 2000. Shortly after the New Year, computer experts and government officials around the world announce that no major damage resulted from the "millennium date change," when computer clocks rolled over from 1999 to 2000. Immediately, a global debate begins to rage: had the entire "Y2K bug" been a hoax created by the computer industry, as a way to reap huge profits from people's fears? Industry leaders defend their approach to the Y2K issue, stating that years of planning and preventive measures had helped the world avoid a global computer-driven catastrophe that could have brought the planet's economy to a stand-still. Microsoft introduces Windows 2000 on Feb. 17. It is the biggest commercial software project ever attempted and one of the largest engineering projects of the century, involving 5345 full-time participants, over half of them engineers. The final product includes almost 30 million lines of code. On March 6, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announces the shipment of a 1GHz version of the Athlon processor, which will be used in PCs manufactured by Compaq and Gateway. It is the first 1GHz processor to be commercially available to the consumer PC market. Within days, Intel Corp. announces the release of a 1GHz version of the Pentium III processor. In April, U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson rules that Microsoft is guilty of taking advantage of its monopoly in operating systems to hurt competitors and leverage better deals with its business partners. Soon after the finding, the Department of Justice recommends that the judge break Microsoft into two separate companies: one focused solely on operating systems, the other focused solely on application development. Microsoft quickly counters by offering to change a number of its business practices. The judge rules to divide the software giant into two companies. As of this writing, Microsoft is appealing the ruling. Steven Wozniak and Steven Jobs had been friends in high school. They had both been interested in electronics, and both had been perceived as outsiders. They kept in touch after graduation, and both ended up dropping out of school and getting jobs working for companies in Silicon Valley. (Woz for Hewlett-Packard, Jobs for Atari) Wozniak had been dabbling in computer-design for some time when, in 1976, he designed what would become the Apple I. Jobs, who had an eye for the future, insisted that he and Wozniak try to sell the machine, and on April 1, 1976, Apple Computer was born. Hobbyists did not take the Apple I very seriously, and Apple did not begin to take off until 1977, when the Apple II debuted at a local computer trade show. The first personal computer to come in a plastic case and include color graphics, the Apple II was an impressive machine. Orders for Apple machines were multiplied by several times after its introduction. And with the introduction in early '78 of the Apple Disk II, the most inexpensive, easy to use floppy drive ever (at the time), Apple sales further increased. With the increase in sales, however, came an increase in company size, and by 1980, when the Apple III was released, Apple had several thousand employees, and was beginning to sell computers abroad. Apple had taken on a number of more experienced mid-level managers and, more importantly, several new investors, who opted to take seats on the board of directors. Older, more conservative men, the new directors made sure that Apple became a "real company," much to the dismay of many of its original employees. In 1981, things got a bit more difficult. A saturated market made it more difficult to sell computers, and in February. Apple was forced to lay off 40 employees. Wozniak was injured in a plane crash. He took a leave of absence and returned only briefly. Jobs became chairman of Apple computer in March. Following the historic visit to Xerox PARC in 1979, Jobs and several other engineers began to develop the Lisa, which would redefine personal computing. Jobs, however, proved to be a poor project manager, and was taken off the Lisa by Mike Markkula, then president of Apple, and one of the major stockholders. Jobs, who owned only 11% of Apple, decided to take over someone else's project, and began working with the Macintosh--which had started as a $500 personal computer. Jobs made sure it was much more. In 1981, IBM released its first PC. With the power of Big Blue behind it, the PC quickly began to dominate the playing field. Jobs' team would have to work very quickly if they hoped to compete with IBM in the personal computer market. Jobs began to realize that Apple would have to become a "grown-up" company, and realized he was not the man for the job. In early 1983, Jobs began to court John Sculley, then president of Pepsi-Cola. In April, he was successful, and Sculley became president and CEO of Apple. Jobs believed Sculley would help Apple "grow up," but had no idea how right he would turn out to be. Eventually, it cost him his job. Although a successful businessman, it soon became clear that Sculley did not know much about the computer industry. He and Jobs were at odds almost immediately. As the announcement of the Macintosh drew closer, Jobs went into hyperdrive. He worked hard to get developers to write programs for the upcoming machine--Jobs had realized that the Mac would ultimately be made or broken by the software industry. On January 22nd, 1984, during the third quarter of the Super Bowl, Apple aired its infamous 60 second commercial (13.4 MB) introducing the Macintosh. Directed by Ridley Scott, the Orwellian scene depicted the IBM world being shattered by a new machine. Initially, the Mac sold very well, but by Christmas of 1984, people were becoming fed up with its small amount of RAM, and lack of hard drive connectivity. It was around the beginning of 1985 that Jobs and Sculley began to argue. Sculley believed Jobs was dangerous and out of control; Jobs believed that Sculley knew nothing about the computer industry, and was making a poor effort to learn. In May of 1985 Jobs decided to make a play for control of the company. He enticed Sculley to schedule a meeting in China, and planned to stage a boardroom coup while Sculley was gone. At the last minute someone leaked the information to Sculley, and he decided to confront Jobs. After a heated argument between the two, the board took a vote, and sided unanimously with Sculley. Jobs resigned that day, leaving Sculley as the head of Apple. Sculley became the de facto head of Apple in May 1985. Over the next few months, Apple was forced to lay off a fifth of its work force, some 1,200 employees. The company also posted its first quarterly loss. All this, and the resignation of Jobs, served to erode confidence in Sculley's abilities as CEO of Apple. At the same time, Sculley became locked in a battle with Microsoft's Bill Gates over the introduction of Windows 1.0, which had many similarities to the Mac GUI. Gates finally agreed to sign a statement to the effect that Microsoft would not use Mac technology in Windows 1.0--it said nothing of future versions of Windows, and Gates' lawyers made sure it was airtight. Apple had effectively lost exclusive rights to its interface design. This would prove to be an important document in future lawsuits between Apple and Microsoft, involving the Windows interface. What brought Mac out of the hole were the twin introductions of the LaserWriter, the first affordable PostScript laser printer for the Mac, and PageMaker, one of the first Desktop Publishing programs ever. These two in tandem made the Mac an ideal solution for inexpensive publishing, and the Mac became an overnight success, again. In 1987, Apple introduced the Mac II. Built with expandablity in mind, the Mac II made the Macintosh line a viable, powerful family of computers. Apple was a "Wall Street darling" again, (Rolling Stone) shipping 50,000 Macs a month. It seemed in 1989 that Windows would be a flop, and the Mac would be riding high for the next decade. It didn't. By 1990 the market was saturated with PC-clones of every conceivable configuration, and Apple was the only company selling Macs. In late May, Microsoft rolled out Windows 3.0, which could run on virtually all of the PC-clones in the world. Apple was in trouble. Apple's top idea for a solution was to license the Mac OS. While many believed it would erode the quality of the Mac, or that it would create even more competition, it was becoming clear that Apple could not provide both the hardware and the software to drive an industry. There was also talk of porting the OS to run on Intel-based machines. It was Michael Spindler, Apple's new COO, who nixed the idea, saying that it was "too late to license." In late 1991, Apple released its first generation of PowerBooks, which were an instant success. Work was being done on a new type of computer, the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA), which Apple called the Newton. Sculley took an immediate interest in the Newton, and drove the Newton to completion in August 1993. The first generation of Newtons had extremely poor hand-writing recognition (2.1 MB), and did not sell particularly well. Sculley began to lose interest in the day to day operations of Apple. Eventually the Apple Board of Directors decided they'd had enough. In June of 1993, They relieved Sculley of his position as CEO, putting Spindler in the big chair. Sculley remained with the company as chairman for several months and then resigned. Spindler, by all accounts, was the wrong man for the job. A fairly impersonal man, Spindler's office was nearly impossible to get into. However, in his two and a half years as CEO, Spindler oversaw several accomplishments. In 1994 Apple announced the PowerMac family, the first Macs to be based on the PowerPC chip, an extremely fast processor co-developed with IBM and Motorola. The PowerPC processor allowed Macs to compete with, and in many cases surpass, the speed of Intel's newer processors. Spindler also managed to license the Mac OS to several companies, including Power Computing, one of the more successful Mac-clone makers. But many believe the Apple was too restrictive in its licensing agreements, and only a handful of companies ever licensed the Mac OS. But Apple's worst problem wasn't selling computers--it was building them. By June 1995 Apple had $1 billion dollars in backorders--and did not have the parts to build them. Apple's problems were added to by the late-summer release of Windows '95, which mimicked the Mac GUI better than ever. Apple took its worst plunge ever in the winter of 1995-96. Misjudging the market, Apple pushed low-cost Performas over mid-range PowerMacs, and failed to make a profit at all. Apple posted a $68 million loss for that quarter. In January 1996, Spindler was asked to resign as CEO and was replaced by Gil Amelio, the former president of National Semiconductor. Amelio made a strong effort to bring Apple back to profitability, but his efforts would prove to be largely unsuccessful. Following his first 100 days as CEO, Amelio announced broad changes in the corporate structure of the company. The company was to be split into 7 separate divisions, each responsible for its own profit or loss. He has also made an effort to keep developers and customers better informed about the day-to-day affairs of the company. Although the company announced a staggering $740 million loss for Q1 1996, they brought that loss down to $33 million for Q2, beating all estimates by the best financial experts. In Q3 Apple profited nearly $30 million, again astounding financial experts, who had predicted a loss of as much. (Apple lost considerably more in Q4.) In late december 1996, Apple made an industry-shattering announcement that it would be acquiring NeXT, and that Steven Jobs would be returning to the fold. The merger was brought about in order to acquire NeXTstep, which was to become the basis for Apple's next-generation OS, Rhapsody, which was slated for a 1998 release. The Newton department was spun off into a wholly-owned subsidy, Newton, Inc. In early July 1997, Apple announced the resignation of Gil Amelio, following another multi-million dollar quarterly loss. This came as a surprise to nearly everyone, and at this time a new CEO has yet to be announced. The Executive Board reportedly felt that Amelio had done all he could for Apple, and that while he had been responsible for a number of improvements at Apple, he could do no more. In the meantime Fred Anderson, Apple's CFO, has been put in charge of day-to-day operation, and Steve Jobs was given an "expanded role" at Apple for the interim. Jobs' presence was known almost as quickly as NeXT was acquired. The degree of Jobs' "expanded role" soon became quite clear. With no CEO and Apple Stock lower than it had been in 5 years, there were many decisions to be made, and not much time to make them. Jobs began to make striking changes in the structure of Apple, including the canceling of the Newton spin-off. (The Newton was discontinued several months later.) The time and place for the most ground breaking announcements, however, would be MacWorld Boston in August 1997. Jobs, who by now was being referred to as "interim CEO," made the keynote speech, and spoke of the company's upcoming aggressive advertising campaign, upcoming new Macs, and Rhapsody. He also announced an almost entirely new Board of Directors, including Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle. But he saved the best for last. In a ground breaking decision, Jobs announced an alliance with Microsoft. In exchange for $150 million in Apple Stock, Microsoft and Apple would have a 5-year patent cross-license and, more importantly, a final settlement in the ongoing GUI argument. Microsoft agreed to pay an unreleased sum of additional funds to quiet the allegations that it had stolen Apple's intellectual property in designing its Windows OS. Microsoft also announced that Office '98, its popular office package, would be available for the Mac by years end. These announcements gave Apple new life, but Jobs was not finished. There was one more big obstacle to tackle: Clones. Jobs felt that Clone Vendors such as Power Computing were cutting into Apple's high-end market, where they traditionally made the most profit. Clones had failed to effectively expand the MacOS market, instead taking customers away from Apple. Jobs remedied this apparent failure of the Clone experiment by all but pulling its plug. In early Fall 1997, Apple announced its intention to buy out Power Computing's MacOS license, and much of its engineering staff. Power went out of business several months later, with Apple taking over its product support. Apple also bought out its MacOS licences from Motorola and IBM. Umax was allowed to stay in the game, but with the tacit understanding that it would fill the low-end market, with machines selling for under $1000. Umax sold its remaining inventory of Macs, and is now selling "Wintel" boxes. On November 10, 1997, Apple held another press conference, in which Jobs announced further changes to Apple's corporate strategy. Apple would now sell computers direct, both over the web and the phone, as Power Computing had done so well in the past. Jobs also announced two new Apple machines: the PowerMac G3, and the PowerBook G3. The Apple Store was a runaway success, and within a week was the third-largest eCommerce site on the web. At MacWorld San Francisco in January, Jobs announced that Apple had, for the first time in more than a year, had a profitable First Quarter--to the tune of $44 Million. This far eclipsed analysts' projections, and sent Apple's stock back into the 20s. In April 1998, Jobs announced another profitable quarter ($57 Million), which came as a big surprise to nearly everyone. Jobs kept momentum moving, and in early May announced a new PowerBook G3, an Educational Apple Store, and an entirely new Mac design--the iMac. The iMac would be Apple's answer to the low-end consumer question, with more than enough computing power for most people, at an affordable price. Later that month, in his keynote at the WWDC, Jobs announced a dramatic shift in Apple's OS direction. Mac OS X would merge OS 8 and Rhapsody--Apple's upcoming version of NeXTStep--into one robust OS, with all the features of a modern OS and backward compatibility with most OS 8 applications. In July 1998, Jobs announced that Apple had profited for the 3rd consecutive quarter--to the tune of $101 million. This helped to push Apple's stock to several 52-week highs in just a few days. The iMac was the best-selling computer in the nation for most of the fall, and it drove Apple sales well beyond most predictions. In the fall, Jobs announced another profitable quarter, making a full year of profitability. In January 1999, Jobs announced a 5th consecutive profitable quarter, with year-over-year growth, and a sleek new PowerMac G3. In July 1999, Steve Jobs filled the final quadrant in the "Apple Product Matrix"--The consumer portable--when he introduced the iBook. Based on the same principles that had made iMac such a hot sell a year earlier, the iBook brought style to the low-end portable market. Several months later, Jobs announced the PowerMac G4, a significant new professional desktop machine. Apple's stock had risen all summer, and by mid-September was trading at an all-time high, in the high 70s. In a dramatic Keynote at MacWorld Expo SF in January 2000, Jobs unveiled Apple's new Internet strategy: a suite of mac-only internet-based applications called "iTools" and an exclusive partnership with Earthlink as Apple's recommended ISP. Jobs also announced that he would be dropping the "interim" from his title, becoming the permanent CEO of Apple. Apple's sales continued to rise, as did the stock price, which had climbed to 130 by early March. In July 2000, Apple announced a slew of new machines, including the PowerMac G4 Cube, which added a fifth category to Apple's four-corner product strategy. The Cube was Apple's answer to those who wanted an iMac without a monitor, as well as challenge to the computing industry to continue to minimize the size of computers while increasing their visual appeal. The Cube was the biggest gamble Jobs had made since the release of the iMac. It would turn out to be a resounding failure. The second half of 2000 was rocky for Apple. Slower sales (both for Apple and the industry as a whole), combined with a misunderstanding of the consumer market resulted in the first unprofitable quarter in three years. One factor in this decline was the G4 Cube, which sold poorly due primarily to its high price compared to Apple's other products. Another factor was Apple's decision to include DVD-ROM drives in their consumer and professional machines instead of CD-RW drives. As a result, Apple missed sales opportunities to customers who wanted to burn their own CDs. Apple began to rectify these problems in late 2000, when it cut prices on the entire PowerMac line. Apple took the next step in January of 2001, when it announced a new line of PowerMacs, with either CD-RW drives or a new "SuperDrive" which could read and write both CDs and DVDs. Apple also announced two new application: iDVD, a DVD-authoring program, and iTunes, which allowed users to encode and listen to MP3 songs, and then burn them to CDs. All this was part of Apple's new corporate strategy, developed in the face of a massive slow down in the Technology industry: Apple would take advantage of the explosion of personal electronic devices--CD-players, MP3 players, digital cameras, DVD-players, etc.--by building Mac-only applications that added value to those devices. Just as iMovie had added tremendous value to Digital Cameras, iDVD would add value to Digital Cameras and to DVD-players, and iTunes would add value to CD and MP3 players. It was Apple's hope that making the Mac the "Digital Hub" of the new "Digital Lifestyle" would revitalize Apple's sales and guarantee the long-term security of the company. In May 2001, Steve Jobs announced that Apple would be opening a number of retail stores across America, selling not only Apple computers, but various third-party "digital lifestyle" products, such as mp3 players, digital still and video cameras, and PDAs. Apple also announced a major update to the iBook line, a smaller and lighter design that borrowed heavily from the PowerBook G4. In July, Apple refreshed iMacs and G4, and "suspended production" of the G4 Cube, ending months of speculation as to how Apple would deal with the Cube's resounding failure in the marketplace. The Fall of 2001 brought new revisions to the PowerBook G4 and iBook lines, the latter of which had sold extremely well during the summer. In late October, Apple announced its first non-computer product in several years, the iPod. The iPod was a small hard-drive-based digital music player, and represented Apple's first hardware addition to its "digital hub" strategy. At $399, the iPod faced a similar challenge to the woeful G4 Cube: it favored style and form-factor over price. Apple was taking another gamble by charging a premium for the iPod's superior design and small size. Riding on the success of the PET, Commodore drove its engineers to make computers that anyone could afford. The 6502 based VIC-20, introduced in 1981, was the first color computer that cost under $300. It was also the first computer to sell one million units. VIC-20 production hit 9000 units per day - a rate that was absolutely phenomenal back then. While shortsighted critics kept asking what these machines were good for, Commodore was the first company to introduce millions of people to personal computing. The First Portable Computer - The Osborne 1 Adam Osborne sold Osborne Books to McGraw-Hill and started Osborne Computer. Its first product, the 24 pound Osborne 1 "portable", cost $1795. The Osborne 1 was easily identified by its tiny built-in screen. Osborne also started the practice of bundling software with the computer - the Osborne 1 came with nearly $1500 worth of programs! Unfortunately Osborne went bankrupt when it preannounced its next computer while still trying to sell the Osborne 1. In 1981, the landmark announcement of the IBM PC stunned the computing world. People had always thought of IBM as a high end mainframe player. Even the chairman of IBM is supposed to have looked at the original PC and said that it would never fly - that mainframes would dominate forever. Despite its weaknesses, IBM did get one critical thing right with the PC - it was based on an open architecture so that it could grow into the future. This strategy, combined with IBM's huge influence and the release of Lotus 1-2-3 a year later, made business people sit up and take notice. The PC and its descendants went on to dominate the computing industry. The original PC cost $3000, and came with 64 Kb of RAM, a floppy disk drive and monochrome graphics. It also came with DOS, an operating system based on CP/M. In an effort to save time so that it could catch the early personal computer market, IBM chose to license DOS from the then tiny Microsoft instead of writing its own operating system. For many years to come IBM would regret the decision not to write its own PC operating system. Eventually it did do so - OS/2. The IBM PC was based on Intel's 8088 processor, which was released in 1980. The 8088 was a 16-bit processor which had 8 registers, about 100 instructions, and an unusual (some would say brain damaged) segmented 20-bit memory architecture capable of addressing 1 Mb of memory. It ran at a clock speed of 4.77 MHz in the original IBM PC. The 8088 was actually the second x86 processor. Its predecessor, the 8086 (released in 1978), used 16-bit external busses, whereas the 8088 used 8-bit busses. This made the 8088 about 20% slower than the 8086, but 8-bit busses were critical to keeping down the total system cost. IBM's decision to use the x86 architecture was widely criticized, and lead to the PC and its descendants facing many problems that other machines didn't face, mainly because of the x86's segmented memory model. So why did IBM chose the 8086 series when alternatives such as the Motorola 68000 were so much better? Apparently IBM's own engineers wanted to use the 68000, but IBM had already obtained the rights to manufacture the 8086 (for use in its Displaywriter intelligent typewriter), in exchange for giving Intel the rights to its bubble memory technology. Another factor was that the 8088 could use existing low cost 8-bit components, whereas 68000 components were more expensive and not widely available at that time. In any case, thanks to the PC's open design, the Intel x86 architecture went on to completely dominate the computing industry - proof that technical superiority sometimes doesn't matter. Graphical User Interfaces Arrive - The Xerox Alto In the late 1970's and early 80's, the Xerox Alto started the graphical user interface revolution which would sweep through the computer industry over the following decade. The desk-sized Alto, and its commercialized descendant the Xerox Star, were the first GUI-based computers. Researchers at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) developed the basic ideas of a graphical user interface along with all the associated innovations - the mouse, the desktop metaphor, icons, windows, menus etc. Although the ideas in the Xerox Star were revolutionary, it was a huge failure commercially. This was due mainly to the price tag of $50,000. When Steve Jobs took a tour of Xerox PARC in 1979, he saw the Alto and realized it was the future of computing. He quickly began to work towards bringing the technology to market. Many of the ideas in the Alto showed up two years later in the Apple Lisa, and finally made it to market in the Apple Macintosh. Several Xerox researchers also left to join Apple. In 1982, a year after the huge success of the VIC-20, Commodore introduced the Commodore 64. This was the machine that brought computers to the masses. The Commodore 64 reached an altogether new level of popularity. A decade later it still held the record as the best-selling single computer model of all time. An estimated 22 million units were sold. That's almost as many as all the Macintosh models put together, and it dwarfs IBM's top-selling systems, the PC and the AT. For the first time ever, millions and millions of people all over the world went and bought a computer - a Commodore 64 - from their local department store! The Commodore 64 set a number of technical firsts too. It was the first cheap computer to have a whopping 64 Kb of RAM, it was the first personal computer with an audio synthesizer chip, and the portable version, the SX-64 (1983), was the first color portable. More than that, the Commodore 64 was a fun machine. Although it was only based on the MOS 6510 processor (a slightly modified version of the 6502 used to power the Apple II five years earlier), the 64 had fast color graphics with hardware sprites. Compared to the Apple II's slower color graphics and the IBM PC's monochrome display, it was way ahead. It had enough memory to make really good software, so the 64 software market boomed, especially the games market. And, as possibly its most important feature, the price was right - the Commodore 64 cost around $400. As with the Apple II, software for the 64 was distributed on audio tapes, or on floppy disks for those who bought the optional floppy disk drive (which cost almost as much as the machine itself). In rare cases plug-in cartridges were also used. Like the VIC-20, the 64 used a TV set as its display device (which is part of the reason it was able to be so cheap). For most of my generation, myself included, the Commodore 64 was the first computer they ever owned or used. VisiCalc on the Apple II may have sold Wall Street on the idea of electronic spreadsheets, but Lotus 1-2-3 was the spreadsheet that Wall Street adopted. When the IBM PC took over the business world in the early 1980's, Lotus 1-2-3's simple but elegant grid was without question the best spreadsheet available. It added simple chart style graphics and data retrieval functions to the paradigm established by VisiCalc. By the early 1990's, Lotus could brag that Lotus 1-2-3 was the best-selling application of all time. Lotus's period of dominance finally ended when Microsoft Excel came out with a graphical user interface for Microsoft Windows. Compaq's portable almost single handedly created the PC clone market. It weighed a ton (20 pounds), but it was the first successful PC clone. Columbia Data Products just preceded Compaq that year with the first true IBM PC clone, but they didn't survive for long. It was Compaq's quickly gained reputation for quality, and its essentially 100% IBM compatibility (reverse engineered), that created the clone market. Years before mainstream notebook computers, Radio Shack came out with a book sized portable with an unbeatable combination of features, battery life, weight, and price. The $800 TRS-80 Model 100 had an 8-row by 40-column reflective LCD screen, supplied ROM based applications including a text editor and a communications program, and it had a built-in modem, nonvolatile RAM, and a keyboard. Weighing under 4 lb, and with a battery life measured in weeks (it used four AA batteries), the TRS-80 Model 100 became the first popular laptop, especially among journalists. With its battery-backed RAM, the Model 100 was always in standby mode, ready to take notes, write a report, or go on-line. NEC's PC 8201 was essentially the same Kyocera-manufactured system. Wayne Ratliff's dBase was originally intended to manage a company football pool, but ended up being the first serious database system for personal computers. dBase II, running on DOS, was a massive success. It provided just the right combination of features for a small business database, plus it was relatively easy to learn, and it ran on cheap PC's. As a result, lots of small businesses which had previously been surviving without a database system decided dBase running on a PC was cheap enough and offered enough benefits to be worth buying. Ashton-Tate acquired dBase from Ratliff when dBase was at its peak (dBase III), but let their users down badly by releasing the bug-ridden dBase IV in 1988. dBase for Windows didn't arrive until 1994, by which time its market share was gone. In January 1984 the introduction of Apple's Macintosh computer, with its graphical user interface, generated even more excitement than the IBM PC had three years earlier. Apple's R&D people were inspired by the critical ideas developed at Xerox PARC (and practiced on the Apple Lisa) but Apple programmers also added many of their own ideas to create the final polished Macintosh product. It was this polished product that changed the way people used computers. The Macintosh (lovingly called simply the Mac) was introduced in the famous "1984" TV commercial broadcast during the SuperBowl. It featured a small built-in high resolution monochrome display, the wonderful Macintosh operating system with its graphical user interface, and a klunky looking single button mouse. It sold for $2495. With only 128 Kb of RAM, the Mac was memory starved at first, but later models quickly corrected this. Apple included several key applications that made the Macintosh immediately useful. MacPaint showed people what a mouse was good for, and MacWrite demonstrated that WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) word processing really worked. The Macintosh redefined what we meant when we said that a program was easy to use. The Mac also had a floppy disk drive that used 3.5" disks, which were physically smaller than their 5.25" PC counterparts, but were sturdier and could hold more data (400k). A couple of years later, Aldus PageMaker allowed high end desktop publishing to be performed on a Macintosh. PageMaker's paste-up metaphor made sense to people who had worked in traditional design and production departments. A Mac became the tool of choice on which to run a publishing business, and the combination of a Macintosh, PageMaker and the PostScript based Apple LaserWriter laser printer went on to dominate the desktop publishing industry. The Macintosh was powered by Motorola's 68000 processor, a powerful 32-bit processor which had been around since 1979. The 68000 contained about 60,000 transistors, and had 16 registers and a large instruction set which used 13 addressing modes. Future versions of the 68000 architecture would further extend this so that by the end of the 68000 line over a thousand different combinations of instructions and addressing modes were possible! In 1984, Satellite Software International introduced Word Perfect, a powerful new word processor for the IBM PC. Despite having a relatively bland and unfriendly character cell user interface, Word Perfect soon became the dominant word processor for the PC market, especially in the business/secretarial world. The ability to use Word Perfect became an essential skill for most secretaries, and remained so until the early 90's and the introduction of Microsoft Windows. A graphical user interface version of Word Perfect was introduced for Windows, along with versions for the Macintosh and the Amiga (and the Atari ST ?), but Microsoft Word managed to grab most of the GUI word processing market. Building on the strength of the PC (1981) and PC/XT (1983), the PC/AT was a major increase in performance and storage capacity. Although it looked like the original PC, Intel's fast 80286 processor running at 6 MHz, combined with 16-bit busses, made the AT several times faster than the original PC. AT systems also came with much more RAM, usually 512 or 640 Kb, and new high-density 1.2 Mb floppy disk drives. Hard disks of up to 20 Mb became available, and you could even install two if you wanted. New 16-bit expansion slots allowed for faster expansion cards but maintained backward compatibility with the old 8-bit cards. The hardware changes meant a new version of DOS (the dreaded 3.0). The price for an AT with 512 Kb of RAM, a serial/parallel adapter, a high-density floppy drive, and a 20 Mb hard disk was over $5000, but at the time this was less than everyone expected. In 1985 the Amiga introduced the world to multimedia. The talented engineers who designed the Amiga (and it wasn't Commodore) happened to hit on a basic configuration that all personal computers would eventually move towards. Unfortunately, the Amiga was so far ahead of its time that almost nobody - including Commodore - really understood what it was. Today it is obvious that the Amiga was the first multimedia computer, but in those days it was viewed largely as a games machine because few people grasped the importance of advanced graphics and sound combined with a multitasking operating system with a graphical user interface. Like the Macintosh, the Amiga was based on the Motorola 68000 processor. The initial model, the Amiga 1000, had 256 Kb of RAM. It was soon phased out by the lower cost Amiga 500 at the low end (shown in the picture), and the Amiga 2000 at the high end. Both offered 512 Kb of RAM standard, expandable to 1 Mb on the Amiga 500 and a whopping 8 Mb on the Amiga 2000. Unlike previous personal computers, the Amiga used three custom chips (Agnes, Denise & Paula) to do advanced graphics and sound. The graphics in particular was amazing by the standards of those days. At a time when PC users thought 16 color low resolution EGA was hot stuff, the Amiga could display 4096 colors, could reach the extremely high resolution of 640x400, and had custom chips such as a blitter for accelerated graphics. It even had built-in video outputs for TV's and VCR's (a decade later this was still a pricey extra cost option for most systems). The Amiga's audio system was also impressive. Building on the audio capabilities of the Commodore 64, the Amiga had four voice sampled stereo sound and was the first computer with built-in speech synthesis. Although it only cost $1200, the Amiga did graphics, sound, and video well enough that many broadcast professionals adopted it for special effects. With a small investment, even a home user could do reasonable quality desktop video production (I remember doing quite a few videos myself for high school and university presentations). The Amiga's operating system, designed by Carl Sassenrath, was just as amazing. From the outset it had preemptive multitasking, a graphical user interface, shared libraries, messaging, scripting, and multiple simultaneous command line consoles. Ten years later, PC and Macintosh users were still waiting for some of those features. Thanks to the custom chips and an efficient operating system, the Amiga even felt fast. The user interface was really quite snappy, much faster than a Macintosh. Five years later, Microsoft Windows running on a much faster 80386 based PC still felt slower. The Amiga was also the first platform to make major use of emulation of other operating systems. Emulators for the IBM PC and the Apple Macintosh became quite widely used, often in an attempt to make the Amiga more useful for business purposes (it didn't have a lot of business software). The technology of emulation went on to become very important in the next decade. The X Window System - UNIX gets a GUI The X Window System (known as just X, or sometimes [incorrectly] as X Windows), first appeared in the mid 1980's running on DEC VAX based UNIX workstations. X was developed at MIT (with support from Digital) as part of MIT's Project Athena distributed workstation environment. Many of the core ideas of X (as well as the X name) were derived from an earlier Stanford windowing system named W. Other ideas came from Sun's SunView environment which ran on the 68000 based Sun-3 workstations. The early versions of X were developed primarily by Robert Scheifler, Ron Newman and Jim Gettys. X went on to become the basic graphics system of all the RISC based UNIX workstations. Aside from providing UNIX with a graphical user interface, X's main contribution to the computing world was the idea of displaying an application remotely over a network (ie: running an application on one machine but displaying its user interface on another, much like telnet already provided for command line UNIX users). The implementation was a client-server approach, where an X window system server ran on the displaying machine, and the client programs communicated with it using a network protocol. The X server and its client programs could be running on the same machine, or on different machines, it didn't matter. X had an unusual career. In somewhat of an odd decision, its designers decided that X should only provide mechanism, not policy. So X did not provide any particular look an feel, but instead only provided the basic mechanisms on top of which several different user interface styles were later implemented. At least three major user interface look & feel styles were widely used on X - MIT's own Athena style, Sun and AT&T's OpenLook, and OSF's Motif (supported primarily by HP and IBM). Other less significant styles included Digital's DECwindows, Silicon Graphics' 4Sight and several public domain styles. None of the styles interacted particularly well with the others, and as a result X was plagued by inconsistencies between applications. Known primarily as a maker of games machines, the Atari ST was Atari's first major foray into the world of personal computing. Like the Macintosh and Amiga, the Atari ST was based on the Motorola 68000 processor. It offered medium resolution color graphics and high quality stereo sound, and its GEM operating system featured a graphical user interface. Unfortunately, for mainstream business uses the ST couldn't compete with the PC and Macintosh, and for graphics and games it couldn't compete with the Amiga. As a result, the ST struggled to find its place in the market. Eventually it managed to carve out a niche in the music and audio editing market, where many music professionals used it as an advanced sound mixing and sound effects machine. The MIPS R2000, introduced in June 1986, was [arguably] the first commercial RISC processor. It was a descendant of the Stanford MIPS project led by John Hennessy, one of the three pioneering RISC research projects of the early 1980's. In stark contrast to the complicated CISC architectures of the 1980's, the MIPS architecture only had about 50 instructions and was a load store architecture with just a single addressing mode. Instead of achieving high performance through complexity, the MIPS design had 64 registers (32 int + 32 fp) and used an efficient pipelined design to achieve almost one instruction per cycle. The original R2000 contained just 110,000 transistors (compared to almost 300,000 for the Intel 386), ran at 12 MHz and clocked in at an impressive 9 MIPS (six times the speed of the 386). It powered the first RISC based workstations - Digital's DECstations. MIPS stood for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline Stages. In somewhat of an irony, however, pipeline interlocks had to be added back into the architecture five years later (1991) for the third generation MIPS processor, the R4000 (actually, even the R2000 had interlocks for the HI/LO register pair used by the multi-cycle multiply and divide instructions). The Intel 80386 Processor - x86 goes 32-bit The 80386 heralded the beginning of a new age for the IBM PC. The 386 was the first 32-bit x86 processor. As such, it was capable of breaking the 640 Kb memory barrier and running software written for graphical user interfaces. The 386 introduced a 32-bit architecture while maintaining full backward compatibility with earlier x86 processors. This was accomplished by using two operating modes: "real" mode, which mirrored the segmented memory of the older x86's, and "protected" mode which took full advantage of the 386's 32-bit enhancements. The 386 began shipping in August 1986, but unfortunately it was several years before PC operating systems could make use of its 32-bit capabilities. IBM's OS/2 and Microsoft's Windows '95 were really the first 32-bit mainstream PC operating systems, and even on them most applications were still 16-bit! While IBM was busy developing its proprietary MicroChannel based PS/2 systems, clone vendors ALR and Compaq grabbed control of the x86 market by introducing the first 386-based PC's, the Access 386 and the Deskpro 386, just a couple of months after Intel began shipping the 80386 processor. This marked the end of IBM's dominance of the IBM PC market. Both 386 clone systems maintained backward compatibility with the 286-based PC/AT. Compaq's Deskpro 386 had a further performance innovation in its bus architecture - it split the x86 external bus into two separate buses: a fast local bus to support memory chips fast enough for a 16 MHz 386, and a slower I/O bus that supported existing expansion cards. In July 1987, Sun announced a RISC architecture called SPARC, which stood for Scalable Processor ARChitecture. Like MIPS, SPARC was the descendant of one of the three pioneering RISC projects, in this case the Berkeley RISC project led by David Patterson. Like MIPS, SPARC was a sleek pipelined design - a radical departure from the complex CISC architectures which held sway at the time. It had about 60 instructions and was a load store architecture with two addressing modes. The instruction set didn't even include integer multiply or divide! SPARC also had one interesting feature which even the MIPS architecture did not have - register windows - which allowed for up to a whopping 520 integer registers (the first implementation had 120), 32 of which were accessible at any given instant. There were also 32 floating point registers. From the beginning, SPARC was an open RISC architecture (ie: a specification to which anyone could build compatible chips). The idea was to make the architecture open to encourage multiple sourcing and lively competition which would hopefully spur performance and spread the SPARC standard far and wide. This strategy worked well, and by 1995 over a dozen different processors had been built implementing the SPARC architecture, outstripping even the x86 line in terms of the number of different implementations. Holding true to its name, the SPARC architecture scaled very well, ranging from low power notebooks and portables to huge million dollar Cray supercomputers. SPARC based systems went on to dominate the UNIX workstation and server markets. Rapid time to market was an important goal of the SPARC architecture, so Sun selected a gate-array technology for the first SPARC implementation. It was a 20,000 gate chip running at 16 MHz, with a performance of about 10 MIPS. Fujitsu delivered the first chips in April 1986, a year before the SPARC architecture was officially announced! Sun waited until July 1987 to announce the SPARC architecture so that it could announce the first complete SPARC systems at the same time - the Sun-4/200 family. Hewlett-Packard's Precision Architecture (PA-RISC) was another early commercial RISC. It was a relatively conservative design, with a load store architecture and 64 registers (32 int + 32 fp). PA-RISC had an unusually large instruction set for a RISC, partly because the initial design took place before the RISC philosophy was popular. Despite this, it was a simple design and the first implementation only had 115,000 transistors. PA-RISC processors were used in HP's UNIX workstations, which became quite popular and reached a 25% share of the workstation market. Back at AT&T Bell Labs, things hadn't stood still. Several new versions of UNIX had been written, and the C language had been undergoing ANSI standardization. But by far the most interesting thing to happen at Bell Labs in the late 1980's was the emergence of the C++ language as the refined, object oriented successor to C. Early versions of the C++ language, collectively known as C with Classes, had been in use within Bell Labs since as far back as 1980. The language was originally invented because its creator, Bjarne Stroustrup, wanted to write some event driven simulations for which the Simula language would have been ideal except for speed. So he wrote a front end preprocessor which allowed Simula style classes to be implemented efficiently in C. This was similar in concept to how RATFOR added structured programming to FORTAN, but in this case Stroustrup was adding object oriented features to C. Stroustrup's CFront preprocessor gradually evolved into the first C++ compiler. C++ was first used outside Stroustrup's research group in 1983, but at that time it lacked many of its final features. Between 1983 and 1991, the language acquired operator overloading, multiple inheritance, templates and exception handling (among other things). Most of these features were driven by experience, and resulted in an efficient and practical, down to earth object oriented language (unlike other OO languages which tended to be slow and were based on abstract methodologies rather than practical experience). Its efficiency, backward compatibility with C, and down to earth approach resulted in C++ gradually succeeding C as the dominant programming language of the computer industry. The name C++ came from the C increment syntax. Hence C++ was an incremented C (whereas C+ would have been a syntax error). A Color Mac - The Apple Macintosh II Although there had been several new Macintosh models since the original Macintosh, the Macintosh II, released in March 1987, was a real leap. It was the first color Macintosh computer. In the normal configuration the color was 8 bitplanes deep - able to display 256 colors at a time from a palette of 16 million! For the power graphics user there was even a 24-bit graphics card available as an expensive extra cost option. The awesome graphics capabilities of the Mac II inspired Adobe to produce a feature packed high end photo editing package called Photoshop, which went on to dominate the photo editing market. In moving to color Apple also did away with the built-in 9 inch screen, moving instead to a more conventional (and expandable) desktop chassis with a separate 14" color monitor. The screen resolution was increased to 640x480, and RAM was expandable up to a whopping 68 Mb. The only thing missing was a custom chip for graphics - the CPU still did all the drawing on the Mac II, which made the graphics a little slow. The processor was upgraded to a powerful Motorola 68020 with a 68881 FPU, and a new version of the Macintosh operating system was also released which incorporated color capabilities and cooperative multitasking. The Mac II was quite expensive, costing $5498 in a standard configuration with 1 Mb of RAM and a 40 Mb hard disk. Nevertheless, the verdict was unanimous. This was the ultimate Mac - a colorful, multitasking, all-singing, all-dancing high performance machine. Unfortunately, most applications still treated the machine as if it were black and white, at least for a while. The Archimedes (lovingly called the Arc) was the first RISC based personal computer. Introduced in 1987, the Archimedes was based on Acorn's ARM architecture (ARM stood for Advanced RISC Machine). The ARM was a simple RISC architecture with 16 registers and no floating point support. The initial ARM implementations concentrated on low cost by using a short 3-stage pipeline. A unique feature of the ARM was that every instruction had a set of condition codes which indicated under what conditions it should be executed. This enabled simple conditional execution, which eliminated many branches and improved performance. For a home computer, the Archimedes packed quite a punch. The original Archimedes A305 only had 512 Kb of RAM and monochrome graphics, but its 4 MIPS ARM2 processor offered much better performance than a 68020 based Macintosh II or an 80386 based PC. Later models used the even faster ARM3 processor and added fast Amiga-like color graphics, more memory (up to 4 Mb), and a floating point co-processor. The Archimedes' RISC-OS operating system featured multitasking and a graphical user interface. The Archimedes sold quite well in the British educational market, which had been Acorn's primary market for its earlier 6502 based BBC machines. Unfortunately, the Archimedes was not a success in the wider marketplace, due mainly to the lower price and larger software market of the Amiga (with which it directly competed), and the Microsoft Windows phenomenon of the early 1990's. In August 1987, an Apple engineer named Bill Atkinson (also the developer of MacPaint) introduced a new type of software development tool - HyperCard. HyperCard was unlike any previous software development tool in two key respects: it was interactive rather than language based, and it was geared towards the construction of user interfaces rather than the processing of data. As such, HyperCard made an ideal tool for rapid prototyping and the development of in-house applications. HyperCard was loosely based on the hypertext idea of links between pages (in this case screens called cards). Building HyperCard applications (called stacks) required almost no programming skills, so even end users could produce useful and interesting applications. A simple language called HyperTalk was available "behind the scenes" to build more complex stacks. HyperCard was a godsend to researchers in the field of Human Computer Interfaces, since it made experimentation with new user interface styles exceptionally quick and easy. Apple distributed HyperCard free of charge with every Macintosh sold (until 1992, when it became an extra cost product). Similar tools became available for other platforms over the following decade. The Sun SPARCstation 1 was the machine that brought RISC performance to the masses. It wasn't the first RISC workstation. It wasn't even the first SPARC based Sun system. But the SPARCstation 1 set a new standard for price/performance. It churned out a whopping 12.5 MIPS at a starting price of only $8995 - about the cost of a fully configured Macintosh. The SPARCstation 1 was introduced in 1989. It was based on a SPARC processor running at 20 MHz, and a typical configuration included 16 Mb of RAM, a couple of hundred Mb of hard disk, and a fast and extremely high resolution (1152x900) color graphics system displayed on a huge 19" color monitor. The SPARCstation 1 also had an optical mouse rather than a mechanical one, and built-in ethernet networking. The operating system was SunOS, Sun's version of BSD UNIX. This was later replaced with Solaris, Sun's version of SVR4 UNIX. Sun sold lots of SPARCstation systems and made the words SPARCstation and workstation synonymous in many people's minds. Engineers and scientists loved them and looked no further for a very long time. A whole range of bigger and better SPARCstation models, including clones, appeared on the market over the next few years, making SPARC the second major platform to use cloning to keep prices down (the IBM PC was the first, of course). Silicon Graphics IRIS - The Birth of 3D Graphics In 1989, Silicon Graphics introduced what was [arguably] the first 3D graphics workstation, the IRIS 4D Superworkstation. It was based on the MIPS RISC architecture, but its real innovation was its high end 3D graphics system, including a 24-bit double buffered extremely high resolution (1280x1024) display, with Z buffering and Gouraud shading in hardware! The high end GTX graphics system had 5 custom 3D geometry processors and 5 pixel rendering processors which ran in parallel. It could render over 100,000 3D shaded triangles per second, which made it fast enough for interactive 3D solid modeling. And all the 3D graphics hardware was at a programmers disposal through the IRIS's wonderful GL 3D graphics library. The only problem was the price - the IRIS 4D was really, really expensive! Responding to requests for a lower cost version, Silicon Graphics brought out a Personal IRIS which had cut-down features but was still capable of interactive 3D wireframe and limited solids modeling. The Personal IRIS still wasn't cheap, but for many graphics professionals it was reachable. The IRIS series and its descendants, together with the GL graphics library and its OpenGL descendant, went on to dominate the 3D graphics market. The NeXT was Steve Jobs' first major computer after leaving Apple. It was released in late 1989, and featured a Motorola 68040 processor (early NeXT's used a 68030), greyscale graphics (color was added later), 8 Mb of RAM, a built-in DSP (digital signal processor) and the first commercial magneto-optical drive (256 Mb capacity). Its NeXTstep operating system was a version of UNIX with a friendly and consistent GUI wrapped around it. The NeXT cost just under $10,000. Unfortunately, the NeXT had a few critical flaws. The primary programming style for the NeXT was correctly chosen to be object oriented, but the primary language chosen for the machine was Objective-C, a hybrid mix of C and SmallTalk. It should have been C++. Objective-C went on to become a dismal failure in terms of wide spread use, whereas C++ went on to supersede C as the dominant language for the entire computing industry. The NeXT was also based on the aging Motorola 68000 CISC architecture. It should have been based on a RISC architecture such as MIPS or SPARC. And finally, the user interface relied heavily on PostScript for its text rendering, which made it slow. These flaws, plus the fact that it was priced slightly too high, meant that the NeXT never really caught on. The NeXTstep operating system was eventually ported to other platforms including x86 and SPARC, but it still failed to capture any significant market share. Nevertheless, it served as an inspiration for future workstations. It took several years before mainstream UNIX workstations came with a decent GUI, for example.” Whew! As the Grateful Dead said, “What a long, strange trip it has been!” Bibliography: Word Count: 18939
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