Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

20 Years of the IBM PC
It's been all over the news of late that the original IBM PC is celebrating its 20th anniversary. I can actually remember the buzz this generated just over 20 years ago, as there was talk in the computing magazines of the times worried about the behemoth IBM simply taking over the PC industry. At the time computers of all sizes and types proliferated: Commodore PETs and VIC-20s, the Coleco Adam, the Apple II as well as a number of other quirky computers that came over from Britain (such as the Timex/Sinclair 1000, and other oddities). The late 70s and early 80s was the Cambrian era of computers -- many species proliferated, but in the end only a couple of branches of this evolutionary tree would survive to the present day.

The IBM PC certainly did "take over", but definitely not in the way that everyone expected -- nobody would have predicted back in 1981 the role that Microsoft would come to play, and the near complete collapse of IBM's fortunes not so many years later.

I remember being drawn to PCs way back when because they seemed to invite tinkering. The Macintoshes that came soon after were sealed affairs, hard to get into and almost actively seemed to resist the type of tinkering at the system level. They also seemed too easy for a wanna-be techie like myself. My first real long-term encounter with an IBM PC was during my last year of high school when I lived with a bunch of friends in Kensington. A room-mate had worked all summer and bought himself an IBM-PC with the proceeds. This was my introduction to the world of online communications and BBSes, and to such classic arcade games as Ultima which I played far too often into the wee hours. This was where I really learned about how to use computers.

It'd be easy to say that things have really changed a lot in the intervening 20 years -- and they have, but looking back (admittedly with 20/20 hindsight) it is interesting to note the gradual progression of emerging concepts and technologies, rather than huge leaps. I was using email (and realized its eventual popularity) in a closed LAN system at a government office years before the Internet was opened up, using gopher to do searches for online information a few years before the Web, grabbing files from BBSes long before the first instead of ftp sites, the black and white LCD screen on an ancient game console would morph over time to become the full-colour snappy-looking flat panel display on my desktop, etc etc etc. Despite all of this, I still feel like a neophyte in this world of computing -- so much still to know and learn about. But knowing where things came does help with work in the here and now -- I think... ;-)