Kokul’s World

I should have posted it yesterday, but I had a lot of events to go to yesterday, so I didn’t get a single chance to sit in front of my computer to update my blog.

Well excuses aside, yesterday is the 25th anniversary of those IBM PCs, those ugly beige boxes that could pull a couple of megahertz that kicked off the computing revolution that has changed our lives so much today. Who knew that crappy PC with it’s 6mhz processor, 20mb hard drive, monochrome monitor, and a 5.25 inch floppy drive would lead to our all powerful dual core processors clocking in at 3700mhz, 500 gb hard drives, 2gb of ram, 512mb graphics cards, 32bit sound cards, and so much more! That so called crappy PC is also what led to the World Wide Web, through which you are reading this blog!

25 years ago, at the IBM research labs, Don Estridge and a team of engineers introduced the IBM 5150, the first computer to be put together using off-the-shelf parts manufactured by various companies. This was a drastic departure from traditional computers which were huge, hulking mainframes that cost a lot, put together using custom parts made by a single company. The IBM 5150 changed that by introducing the average citizen to cheap and multipurpose computing.

If you head over to Engadget, you can read about all the writers there’s experiences with their first computers as well as dozens of reader comments about their first computers.

Now I’m going to bore you with my first computer. My first experience with a computer was that good old Macintosh II at school that we used to load games into with that huge 5.25 inch floppy disk. The games were very simplistic, only having 16 colours, but it brought us into awe nevertheless. My first experience with a PC was my cousin’s IBM clone that ran at 100mhz which had a lot of rocking cool DOS games. My first experience with Windows was with my other cousin’s computer which ran at 88mhz running Windows 3.1, then later Windows 95. My first computer was a Pentium I running at 100mhz (lightning fast at the time, “OMG it’s 100 mhz, wow 100 mhz, like 100mph, so fast!!!! WOW!”). It also had 32mb RAM, 2mb video graphics accelerator, CD-ROM drive (was pretty amazed by it), 1.44 inch floppy drive, and an 1.5gb hard drive (I thought this was all I was going to need in my life).

So to the IBM PC, I salute you!!!