IBM PC

--Unknown

The IBM PC came out in 1981.

My first experience with one of these machines was in Summer 1993, when I was doing some Dbase II programming for a local businessman whom I had met at Radio Shack about a year earlier. The IBM PC I used had two floppy drives (but no hard drive--a 5 Mb hard drive cost over $1000 then) and only monochrome graphics. Pretty boring, huh? But the machine did legitimize the microcomputer to the business world.

Of course, as technology improved, issues such as graphics and sound improved as well. People used to say "Color? That's for games" and were more concerned about how to print spreadsheets sideways.

Graphics options included:

• Color Graphics Adapter (CGA): with a high-res 640x200 mode (black and white only) or a medium resolution 320x200 mode (with limited color choices--usually involving some ghastly combination of magenta and cyan, etc).
• Professional Graphics Adapter (PGA): 640 x 480 in 256 colors, but required a special monitor. Expensive and rare (the IBM AT's in the UCSB Engineering terminal room had these).
• Hercules video adapter: Monochrome, but had a very high resolution
• Extended Graphics Adapter (EGA): 16 colors on screen
• VGA: 256 colors on screen.

Over the next decade or so, the speed of these computers improved, as well as the graphics capabilities. I remember playing around with Qbasic on a 486/66 with an EGA monitor and getting totally blown away by the speed. Then along came the Pentiums: a 90-mHz Pentium was fast enough to emulate other computers!

Of course, except for a few holdouts, the world has gone IBM-PC compatable (although IBM itself is only a relatively small player in the PC market now).