Thursday, August 25, 2011

30 Years of IBM PC (Some Thoughts about Computer History)

Well, it turned out that I am almost 30 years old. Usually they say that it s a half of a distance. And you feel that you need to look back and try to remember significant things happened in your life and around it. Unless you are Tom Hanks, most noticeable things happen to be in some other people’s life and you watch them through the window of your routine.

Anyway check out interesting coincidence that came across me recently. Anniversary of first IBM PC!! And guess what? 30 years as well! It means that I am first and original PC generation representative. This is my destiny! )

Unikum, Computer History, Nostalgia

New age will come but nobody is going to be that pure original first man who have seen and tried to work in MS-DOS , who tuned up monochrome monitor, hardly understood principles of Windows file system and was stunned when tried PC with 20mb hard drive and 640 kb of memory. And all those games!!! It was awesome!!! How good were you in "Pong" and "Arkanoid"? But it’s a separate huge topic and we will look through it in some future posts.

The main point is that we were growing together like an old neighborhood bodies. He was teaching me how to write a school articles and print them, how to calculate simple math tasks, to record voice and to watch digital video, how to draw funny pictures for VHS tape stickers, how to wide my range of knowledge in any aspects of life (remember first MS Encarta? :-). But unfortunately I couldn’t teach PC anything, even to smoke cigarettes).

We were also developing physically. I was growing- PC was decreasing his shape. I became stronger - He became faster. I started to love abstractions, creation and fantasies – He received artificial intelligence….

And of course Internet! PC era should be divided on pre-internet and internet. It changed everything in PC, but it is also theme for another post.

And nowadays we are living in the word of amazing complexed multimegafunctional lightweight devices and gadgets, which should thank IBM PC. May be I have reached the same level of self development as PC as well? ) Considering that we are the same age?)

Anyway I feel happy to live side to side with my body PC and hope to feel the same in future when engineers will replace every part of my body with microchips. Does this mean that in that case we will become brothers? )

SEE ALSO:

Unikum, Bruce Lee, Enter The Dragon, Kung-fu, Nostalgia

Unikum, 8 Bit Retro Games, Space Invaders, Nostalgia

Unikum, Gifts, Design, Music, Movies, Nosstalgia

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