History of The PC - How We've Progressed

Rogers Smith

A)2000 Win2K B)2001 Linux Don't worry this is my last Linux post for a while:-O BTW doesn't the name Hobart sound like a Dungeons and Dragons / Lord of the Rings town name? I always smile when I hear someone mention it when talking about Christian. In the land of Hobart there lived a young CP poster who has thousands of posts to his name... We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:

Lost User

What makes you so confident about Linux? It sure has come a long way and in many cases installs as easier as Windows (I say this from practical experience installing Linux Mandrake on Compaq and Dell machines), but where are the applications and development tools? More important, where are the developers and support staff? and finally, where are the users? -Thomas

Mike Burston

C-64, cassette drive for storage 2) SX-64, portable C-64 with 4 inch color screen (!!) and floppy drive built in 3) Amiga 500, 256K RAM 4) Amiga 2000, 2MB RAM, optional PC emulator board (running dos in a window on Amiga workbench screen!!) and 10mb hard drive 5) Kaypro 286 with green-screen, 2MB RAM 20mb hard drive 6) 80386 33 with $MB RAM, 200mb hard drive 7) 80486 50 laptop with docking station, 8MB RAM, 500mb hard drive, 15" color monitor 8) Pentium 133, 16 MB RAM, 1gb hard drive 9) Pentium 2/350, 32 MB RAM, 2 gb hard drive 10) Pentium 3/866, 256 MB RAM, 20gb hard drive And I read recently that INTEL have now mastered 0.2 micron processing for transistors, which they expect will offer 20gigahertz performance for CPUs by 2007!! So it ain't over yet! Reg : "Well, what Jesus blatantly fails to appreciate is that it's the meek who are the problem."

Christian Graus

From memory: 1/ Apple ][ clone, 48 k RAM 2/ Apple ][ e clone, 64 k RAM 3/ Another Apple ][ clone, which I blew up 4/ C64, tape and disk drives 5/ Amiga 500, 512k RAM 6/ Amiga 600, 1 M RAM and 20 Gig HDD 7/ 486 DX4/100 ( even then I was an AMD fan, without knowing it ), 4M RAM, 820M HDD From here I started building my own PC's, so I can't really go by system, as generally they change specs all the time. My processors have included a 686-200 ( or so ), a K6-3/500, and an Athlon 700. I did have a 586-100 notebook at one stage. I currently have 640 M RAM, dual monitors and 160 Gig of HDD space. Compare that to my first Apple ][ !!! I also rememeber paying $600 for an Amiga peripheral that grabbed video stills ( badly ). I had no use for it, it just had geek appeal. I have all my rock videos on my HDD so I can play them while I work, and I rip them at 30 fps with a card that cost me $99. Christian As I learn the innermost secrets of the around me, they reward me in many ways to keep quiet. Men with pierced ears are better prepared for marriage. They've experienced pain and bought Jewellery.

Rogers Smith

In the enterprise market linux is becoming very popular. IBM will eventually replace AIX with Linux. HP is making similar plans with it's UNIX. In the desktop market the future is not as certain for Linux though. Linux clusters are now showing up in the top500 So as you can see this is an exciting time for Linux in the Enterprise arena. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:

Lost User

Well, having read the thread I am embarassed to say I have only had 3 PC's at home in total. My current one is so old it's a joke, it has MMX in it's title. Luckily I get a decent laptop from work and I use that instead. Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone

Lost User

The problem is that "Linux replaces AIX" not "Linux competes with Win2K". AIX is used only by large enterprises, which were not on Microsoft platforms anyway. It is not a solution to the MS monopoly. None of the UNIX companies have proposed anything that significantly affects the Microsoft market, despite its 'flaws'. I saw a SUN announcement that said that it will enable IIS applications to run on iPlanet, but I am skeptical because what happens to ASP, ADO and COM, that will be the basis of the IIS applications. I do not know the details, but if Sun has managed that, then it is wonderful. - Thomas

Lost User

That is ok. Although I have used many computers from Atari in 1988 to PentiumIII now, I have owned only one computer in my life and that was a 486 and long back. Now I do not have computers at home and use them only at work. -Thomas

Rogers Smith

Actually MS does compete in the Enterprise market. I believe that DELL uses MS's Windows 2000 to run it's buisness/website. Ebay runs on MS Servers, or it may have at an earlier point if I recall correctly. Google uses a cluster of 10,000 linux based PC's, so you can see that Linux scales well. I read that linux will be able to support 32 processors within the next year or so. Currently I believe the maximum is 8. Once that happens, Linux will truly entrench the enterprise market. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:

Rogers Smith

Oh and one more company. Microsoft runs on MS Servers. And as you well know MS is a very large Enterprise. The only problem is that it gets hacked to frequently. :( That can be dangerous to those who will be using .NET and passport. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:

Rogers Smith

Isn't Windows programming supposed to be a profitable industry, or did MS take all your money by bundling important software into it's OS? Surely you must be able to afford more computers. The more the better. :) We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:

Lost User

MS *does compete* in the enterprise market. The offer that Sun has made today is not going to sway many people from Microsoft platforms immediately. The iPlanet Server + Chili ASP(supports ASP and ADO, but no COM) will cost 1500 dollars per server. Why would any small company who already has these installed on an MS Windows 2000 server not just apply IIS patches instead of buying a new server platform? The larger companies will not have purely script based sites. They will be on COM/COM+. I also assume that all the manpower these IIS deployed companies have, will be Windows developers and Windows trained support staff. I takes more than CodeRed and Nimda viruses to take away Microsoft market share. I do not expect Sun to gain much out of this exercise, but they certainly seem to be on the right track. Microsoft was never a player in the enterprise market. Windows 2k made them a player. If companies like IBM and Sun do not work hard and make their solutions cost-effective for smaller companies, they will be faced with Microsoft moving in with products that take over their market share in say 3 to 5 years. They should keep in mind that - Small companies grow to big and then huge - do not leave them to Microsoft. Also, small companies form the largest group in IT consumption. Taking on Microsoft is not as easy as supporting 32 processors. Dell does not use Windows because Linux does not have 32 processor support. Linux is good enough to run a web service NOW. But, Microsoft will have a market share and WILL build its market share, unless its competitors keep up the hard work and produce integrated solutions that are easy to manage and work with. For web services, Windows 2000 also scale well. No one has claimed that Linux does not scale well. It is marketing, ease of use, availability of trained manpower and a lot of other factors that will decide the future of Linux. Microsoft has proven skills in taking on leaders in a particular market segment and succeeding. Now they are trying a .NET alternative to J2EE and a PocketPC alternetive to Palm. They have a very good chance of succeeding. If Microsoft tries to leverage its desktop presence to make its server platform market grow, why does Sun and IBM etc refrain from leveraging its server capabilities to make a more wide desktop presence. Why does Oracle and Sun have fancies about thin clients and app servers for word processing? Who wants those? The network will always be slower than the local drive. I believe that these companies should shed fancy conc

Lost User

We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true But, that is the most profitable and most used operating system in the world. Probably, the world is also full of monkeys. In your preprocessor remove the line #define Windows_Programmer monkey It would certainly help to *appreciate* the efforts of Microsoft. The first step towards victory is to respect the intelligence and capabilities of your opponent. If you are anti-Microsoft, consider this: A startup with virtually no investment is the largest software company now. Its products are the most widly used in the computer industry. Respect that. Anyone who does not respect that will underestimate and will certainly lose. My advice: Learn to respect your competition. Or you are *Netscape*. -Thomas

Lost User

No, some of us have a family and a life outside of computers. With a single income and no government support (I'm too darn rich) money goes quickly. Fortunately for you Mrs Palmer and her Five Daughters can't get pregnant so this won't be a problem for you. :-D OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Michael Martin Pegasystems Pty Ltd Australia martm@pegasystems.com +61 413-004-018 "Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace" - Victor Stone

Chris Losinger

"Rosy Palm and her Five Sisters" is what we called it in my neighborhood. :) -c ------------------------------ Smaller Animals Software, Inc. http://www.smalleranimals.com

Rogers Smith

Your right. I forgot that some people are married :). Oh I guess this isn't in my bio, but I'm not married. We've all heard that 100 monkeys typing in Visual C++ could come up with Windows. - thanks to MS, we now know this is true May the Source be with you. :vegemite:

George

You do not seem to understand the nature of the Linux and Open Source development. Specifically: where are the applications and development tools Well, it all comes out of the box. You can also find a lot of applications on the Internet for free for for a very low price, many can do all that MS Office package does etc. I wonder where are the development tools for Windows, ah, right, you have to buy them separately! where are the developers and support staff Developers ARE a support staff, they can be easily found in various newsgroups and mailing lists. Typically you can get help within couple of hours if not minutes from some other developer. Not to mention that you have the source code most of the time so you can help yourself if nothing else. Now, tried Microsoft Support? It takes days, sometimes weeks to actually get some useful response. We often abandon the option of searching for support for Windows related problems because we can't afford the delay and we look for workarounds instead... where are the users All around the place, and many of them are also developers. In fact the real big money is using Unix'y systems very often as they need a serious tools for the job.

Paul Barrass

>>OK, who aside from the Aussies got the euphemism? Not me Michael! :confused: Care to elaborate? Cheers, Paul (a London dweller)

Claudius Mokler

About 1984: Jupiter ACE (4Mhz Z80 with a whopping 3KBytes of RAM. Forth interpreter in ROM, resulting 956 Bytes for program and data. Rubber keyboard with 40 keys. 1986: first activities of self-built 6809 system running FLEX (that was an operating system look-alike). Afterwards: the typical PC crap. About 1992 a 386-40 with 16 MBytes RAM, running the first pre-beta-release of Windows NT 3.1. Tried OS/2 2.0 then, but abandoned it due to the lack of development tools. NT user since then. Current: DELL I8K with UXGA screen and a pIII-600 with 256 MBytes RAM, running W2K (the best NT version up to now). An elderly pIII-600 system with 256 MBytes sits under my desk and is feeling heavily outdated. Test with a new Athlon-1400 system showed it's floating point performance to be thrice as fast as the pIII-600. Where will we be in, say, five years from now? p6-7.5 with 8 GBytes or TriAthlon-10G with 16 GBytes? Massive SMP machines even for the home user? (Currently, I'm swarming for Tyan's Bi-Athlon mainboard) Microsoft Word EBTTLRNWICH? (even better than the last release, now with integrated cup holder) Will Microsoft's licencing policy survive? Will there still be Linux? Would Mr. Gates be the next President of the United States? (not _that_ unlikely, they already had pathetically bad actors)

realJSOP

> Where will we be in, say, five years from now? Intel is claiming that we'll be at 20Ghz by 2006 (probably 4th quarter - :) ). I want to know when we'll be at the point of using optical circuits instead of that slow-ass copper stuff. To hell with those thin-skinned pillow-biters. - Me, 10/03/2001